Risk is Risky

As Nate Silver explained shortly after the pick was announced, there's a pretty good reason why Mitt Romney's pick of Paul Ryan makes at least a certain kind of sense: Romney is currently losing. He's been losing very steadily for months, and there's no particular reason to think that will change. That, therefore, makes it more sensible than it would otherwise be for him to do something risky, and picking Ryan is definitely risky. So, in a sense, good for Romney in recognizing that he needed not to just go with the boring ol' Senator from a swing state, hoping to gain some modest advantage in Ohio or Florida or wherever. (Although another way for Romney to take a risk would've been to pick a moderate(ish) Republican like Nevada's Brian Sandoval, which arguably would have been a better risk.)

But while one can recognize the need for Romney to do something risky and shake up the current "Obama narrowly but very clearly and very steadily in front" dynamic, that doesn't mean that the risk will pay off. And if it doesn't pay off, it's quite likely that it will not pay off in a big way. Specifically, I'm thinking that the odds of an Obama landslide, by at least as big a margin as last time around, is much bigger now than it was last Friday. I suppose it's possible that the new plan will work for Romney, although it doesn't look like it to me and the private despair of many Republican strategists has me feeling pretty confident about that. But it's at least as likely that the plan will go horribly wrong, that the decision to switch the election over to a grand ideological struggle in which you're clearly on the unpopular side will go about as well as it sounds like it should, and that Obama will rack up close to a double-digit margin of victory. Maybe win all his 2008 states, perhaps minus Indiana, and plus, say, Missouri and Arizona? Something satisfying, anyway.

A while ago I noticed that being re-elected with a smaller Electoral College margin of victory that your initial election is really rare. Madison did it in 1812, but that was before the popular-vote era. Woodrow Wilson did it in 1916, but his first election was a wacky three-way contest with Taft and Roosevelt that allowed him to rack up an electoral landslide despite getting 42% of the popular vote. So it's rare. Obviously, Presidents lose re-election all the time, but when they win they tend to extend their margins. For the past many months it's looked like Obama was going to win re-election but with a narrower margin than 2008. I'd say the Ryan pick has made the alternative much more likely.