The static electorate
by David Atkins
Looks like the Paul Ryan VP pick isn’t giving Romney the usual bump:
Mitt Romney garnered virtually no increase in support in the initial days after announcing Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, according to the latest numbers from Gallup.
In the four days leading up to the announcement, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee had the support of about 46 percent of the registered voters. Over the following four days, that figure crept up only one tick to 47 percent. Obama, meanwhile, held steady at 45 percent in the Gallup polling.
In years past, presidential candidates have received more significant bumps after announcing their running mates: Al Gore lept up by 5 points in 2000, and Bob Dole by 9 in 1996, for instance. That trend didn’t hold in the last election cycle, however, with John McCain gaining a more modest two-point bump immediately after naming Sarah Palin as his running mate and Barack Obama actually seeing his support drop by 2 points after Joe Biden joined the Dem ticket
It’s possible that Romney may still see a delayed bump from the announcement, but the current response to Ryan’s addition to the ticket is overall pretty tepid, CBS News notes. Just 39 percent of Americans described the Wisconsin congressman as an “excellent” or “pretty good” choice, compared with 46 percent who said the same of Palin in 2008.
It could be that this has something to do with Ryan and the dynamics of this race. But it’s much more likely that the country has reached a point where number of undecideds is starting to be very small, even in August of a Presidential year.
That means that electoral polarization is basically baked into the cake already, and the only thing giving centrist undecideds any clout in Presidential races is the electoral college system. Otherwise elections at the Presidential level would be purely base turnout operations at this point.
I suppose purists might say that’s a good thing. But it’s hard to see why the vote of an uninformed undecided in Florida representing a vanishingly small electoral constituency should matter more than that of a much more typical engaged partisan in Oklahoma or Vermont. Let the people rule.
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