One of the worst mistakes that the Republican US presidential candidate John McCain made in 2008 was to choose as his running mate a no-name politician from an electorally insignificant corner of the country. Sarah Palin may have subsequently become more popular with the Republican right-wing; and her treatment at the hands of the US media was patently unfair. Nevertheless, electorally speaking it was the worst choice that Senator McCain could have made.
The Republicans appear to have learned little from that debacle. On Saturday, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan, a Republican member of the US House of Representatives from Wisconsin as his Vice Presidential running mate. Ryan, a career politician, is young (only 42 years old) but has been a Washington insider for over two decades, serving as aides to a number of politicians before being elected to the US House of Representatives in 1999. He has made a name on domestic economic issues and heads the powerful House Budget Committee. But though a favourite of both the beltway Republicans and the ’Tea Party’, he is not particularly well known among the general voters. They will have a chance to get to know him over the next few months of the presidential campaign. It will give Ryan the profile he needs for his own run at the presidency sometime in the future but it will do little to improve Romney’s presidential campaign, which is struggling despite the very favourable political and economic climate for the challenger.
There are several reasons why Ryan is a bad choice. Romney is from Massachustetts, and a former Governor of the state. That would presumably ensure that he would win Massachusetts in November. Unfortunately, in the US presidential election calculus, which is fought state by state with electoral college members based on the population of each state, Massachusetts does not matter much because it has just eleven electoral college votes. Wisconsin, Ryan’s home state, matters even less with just ten votes. This of course, assumes that the Republicans would win Wisconsin, which is by no means clear. Ryan is not necessarily popular in the whole state: unlike Senators, who are elected by the entire state, he was elected from one Congressional district in the state. So his popularity even in his own state is unclear.
There is a small upside here, however. Both Massachusetts and Wisconsin voted for Obama by fairly wide margins in 2008. If the Republicans could wrest these away, that would mean something. However, it would not dramatically shift the electoral college count by much.
Romney had better choices from purely the electoral college count: he might have chosen Senator Rob Portman from Ohio, for example, which would have given him 18 electoral college votes, or Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida, which could have contributed 29 electoral college votes (again, assuming that states would vote for the ticket with a local politician). According to one
analysis, Ryan placed tenth among potential vice presidential picks purely in terms of electoral college calculation.
Of course, electoral college count is only one factor. But Ryan brings other weaknesses also to the ticket. One of the key calculations in vice presidential picks is balancing expertise and experience, or more often, the lack of them. Most presidential candidates pick a running mate who can compensate for their weakness in either economic or foreign policy. One of the biggest weaknesses that Romney has is his lack of foreign policy experience, and his recent excursion to Europe and Israel did not help very much. Previous presidential candidates who faced such drawbacks in foreign policy expertise have chosen running mates who had some foreign policy experience. Governor Ronald Reagan chose George Bush, a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for this reason; Bill Clinton, a domestic policy wonk, chose Al Gore to balance Clinton’s own lack of foreign policy experience; and most recently, Senator Barack Obama, another domestic policy wonk, chose Senator Joe Biden for the same reason. Unfortunately, Ryan’s expertise lies entirely on issues of domestic economics, not foreign policy. It will do nothing to shore up the ticket’s foreign policy weakness.
This is particularly problematic because the Republicans have been struggling to differentiate themselves from Obama’s foreign policy. Traditionally, Republicans have had it easy in the presidential election foreign policy debate because they could paint the Democrats as weak on national security, a charge that Democrats have gone to
comical extent to counter but without much success. But how do you paint Obama as weak after he took out Osama Bin Laden, as well as much of the Al Qaeda top ranks? Obama’s foreign policy has significant weaknesses but that requires making a complicated case about America’s global role and responsibilities that neither members of the Republican team has the capacity to make effectively. Saying he won’t apologize for America - as Romney has been doing - is not enough of a foreign policy plank in a presidential election.
Another factor in vice presidential picks is appealing to specific demographics. Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in 1984 on the Democratic ticket because he hoped to appeal to the female voters; both Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were both considered as Republican vice presidential candidates in 2008 at least in part because they were African-Americans, though both denied they were interested (and Powell endorsed Obama). Such calculations do not always work, and it clearly played no role in this selection. And Romney did have a choice: Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida, could have appealed to both Hiic-Americans and bid for Florida’s rich electoral college votes. Picking a mid-Western White Catholic to team up with a White Mormon New Englander appeals to no specific demographics and could potentially antagonize some.
One group Ryan will appeal to is the right-wing of the Republican party. Indeed, Romney has had some trouble with this group because he has not been seen to be conservative enough, and the Republican base is less than enthused about his candidacy. But the odd thing about Romney’s choice is the timing: candidates move towards the ideological extremes when running for the nomination because they are appealing to ideological partisans but move towards the center after the nomination fight is over because they now have to appeal to the undecided, ideologically neutral voter.
Romney has already won the nomination race. This is when he needed to move towards appealing to the undecided voters and may be a few disgruntled democrats and liberals. Picking Ryan is unlikely to help convince them.
One possibility is that Romney feels so insecure about his Republican base that even at this late stage, he felt the need to shore it up. If that is the case, Romney’s presidential campaign, and the Republican party in general, is in big trouble.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
PREV
