Aug. 13: Polls Have Middling Reviews for Ryan.

[elleng]

Source: NYT

This is a another two-for-one column. We’ll give you our daily breakdown of the horse-race polls and economic data that came out on Monday. Then, we’ll take a quick look at overnight polls that took the temperature of Mitt Romney’s new running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin.

Monday’s Horse Race

In Missouri, a new SurveyUSA poll put Mr. Romney just one point ahead of President Obama, with 45 percent of the vote to 44 percent.

This is a fairly poor number for Mr. Romney — who had led in our Missouri forecast by six percentage points previously — but not quite as bad as it looks. . .

However, a few polls were released that were dedicated to Mr. Ryan specifically, and they offered mediocre numbers for the Republican ticket.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll, conducted after Mr. Romney’s announcement, found that 38 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Mr. Ryan, and 33 percent had an unfavorable one.

The good news for Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan is that those numbers were improved from polling that ABC News conducted just before the announcement, when 23 percent of adults had a favorable impression of Mr. Ryan and 33 percent an unfavorable one.

But that is countered by two pieces of bad news. First, Mr. Ryan’s numbers are middling to poor by the standard of other recent vice-presidential selections. And second, the period immediately after a vice-presidential announcement has often been a high-water mark for the new candidate. More often than not, the candidate’s unfavorable numbers increase more than his or her favorables from that point forward.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/aug-13-polls-have-middling-reviews-for-ryan/?hp


Read more: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/aug-13-polls-have-middling-reviews-for-ryan/?hp

[TomCADem]

1. The Corporate Media Attributes #s To Lack of Knowledge About Him...

...Or, that there is some race "to define him." I think Ryan's career does a more than adequate job of defining him as an extremist.

I think the reason why his poll numbers are low is that many people already have an opinion of him as one of the faces of the worst Congress ever who has dedicated his career to ending Medicare and Social Security. The only "defining" going on is an effort by Republicans and the mainstream media to make Romney/Ryan look moderate and to suggest that their ideas do not represent a massive cut in Medicare to pay for huge tax cuts to the very rich. If anything, the only way Ryan's numbers rise is if the media continues to portray him as anything less than the ideaolgue that his record demonstrates him to be.

[a kennedy]

2. and then there's Intrade's take....

President Obama @ 56.8%

Mittens @ 42.0%

from last Sunday's measure: President Obama was @ 58.9% and Mittens was @ 38.3% that's almost a 4% increase for mittens.