Oh Yes, Please, Nominate Paul Ryan for VP, Please

Apparently there's an increasing pressure building from the right wing of the Republican Party for Mitt Romney to choose Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District as his Vice Presidential nominee. The thought of this makes me kind of giddy. Here's why.

First of all, Ryan offers essentially no geographic advantage for Romney. Nate Silver's calculus showed that, while a Rob Portmann or Bob McDonnell or Brian Sandoval pick could boost Romney's odds of winning the Electoral College by close to 2% by providing a home-state bonus, Ryan would only add 0.1% to Romney's victory odds. That is to say, more or less nothing. That's because Ryan is not that popular in Wisconsin as a whole, since after all he only represents one of its eight Districts; his statewide net positive rating is just +4.9%. That translates, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, into an additional +0.7% in the Wisconsin popular vote tally, which translates into an extra 2.5% chance of winning Wisconsin, which translates into an extra 0.25 expected electoral votes. Which translates into an extra 0.1% chance of winning the electoral college. So in terms of geographical math, a Paul Ryan pick accomplishes nothing. So far, so good.



That means that any impact Ryan would have on the race would come from altering the campaign dynamic somehow. One possibility for how he could do that would be to increase the enthusiasm of the Republican base. Since he's pretty much a darling of mainstream movement conservativism, you'd think this would be a pretty natural goal of nominating him. But I'm not convinced it would help much. Ryan's entire persona is crafted to appeal to the Washington press corp. It's very insider-y and wonk-ish (though Ryan himself is no wonk, he plays one on TV). That doesn't shout "firing up the masses" to me. Moreover, Ryan comes not from the vote-rich social conservative wing of the party, but from the dollars- and influence-rich economic conservative wing. Which is also where Romney comes from. I'm pretty sure rich people are already plenty supportive of the Romney campaign, if only because they hate Obama so much. So my guess is, there's not a whole lot of energizing for Paul Ryan to do, and he wouldn't do much of it.

Well, how would his nomination change the debate of the campaign? The main thing it would do is signal an abandonment of Romney's strategy thus far, which has been to sit back, not say anything about what he wants to do, and just point out that the economy sucks and hope people vote for him by default. Picking Paul Ryan would indicate, and constitute, a shift to a broader ideological argument, pretty much against modern liberalism and in favor of the radical new conservative vision of the country. But there's a reason why Romney hasn't been making those arguments already, why he's been hoping to get votes-by-default from economic dissatisfaction. The new radical conservativism is unpopular. People do not like the Paul Ryan plan for the country. We've had test cases of this. Democrats like running on the fact that their opponents support the Ryan plan. And whereas Romney has made every effort to avoid giving any specifics about anything, so that no one could pin him down on his support of unpopular things (with mixed success), Ryan released a whole big long documented plan for what he'd like to do with the nation's public policy.

So if Romney chooses Paul Ryan, he'll be forced to mount an aggressive defense of a deeply unpopular set of policy proposals, against Obama's rather popular modest liberalism. He would have made it much harder for himself to benefit from the mechanistic "referendum on the unpopular incumbent" phenomenon. And all that for, in all likelihood, no geographic benefit and no meaningful increase in base enthusiasm. Sounds great to me!