WI 2012 Republican ticket Ryan & Rubio

What if the Republican ticket for the 2012 Presidential election had been Paul Ryan for President and Marco Rubio for Vice President? How would that ticket have done against Obama/Biden and had they won what kind of President and Vice President would Ryan and Rubio be?
 
Well, Ryan getting the nomination would be tough, since he would need to abandon his House career. Like Romney, he would probably be hurt pretty bad in the primaries.
 
Actually, Ryan could win the primaries fairly easily, as he is a standard conservative on most issues and has enviable name-recognition from his budget proposal. Rubio is a terrible balance, though. The guy never held statewide or federal office before his Senate "career" (Speaker of the Florida House doesn't count, as he was only elected by Republican members of the House).

Fortunately for the President, Ryan/Rubio (2012 is apparently the year for alliterative Republican tickets) probably would have done 3-8% worse in the popular vote and lost North Carolina in the EC. Ryan would be hated by many swing voters for his budget, which the Democrats would demolish even more thoroughly than OTL, and Rubio adds almost nothing to the ticket.

I have no idea how they would govern, but I have several enjoyably ridiculous dystopian theories. :D
 
I think that Ryan would lose for Obama more badly than Romney. I don't know very well Ryan's politic ideology but he didn't assure me on VP debate. Him hasn't seemingly anything ideas what he would do.
 
A much bigger margin. The Romney campaign hid Ryan for the last 6 weeks for a reason--he was one of there greatest liabilities in a campaign that was filled to the brim with incompetence and liabilities.

Indeed, part of the reason for Romney's win in the first debate was his decision too throw the Ryan budget under the bus. Granted, Paul Ryan has had no problem sPinning complete bullshit for three voting public, but i don't think that even he could jettison a budget that he authors from his platform.
 
Agreed with the group here, with the impact potentially even larger than many suspect. Here's why:

1. Ryan has zero national infrastructure. The Romney campaign raised a ton of money, and that enabled them to play in the swing states such that there was a legitimate 1-in-3 chance of the Romney victory as late as October. Ryan will be more dependent on outside PACs (like Karl Rove's Crossroads USA) that didn't exactly cover themselves with distinction in OTL's 2012 campaign.

2. The single best "game changing" moment for Mitt Romney came during the first debate when substantively what Romney did was to jettison essentially his entire campaign to that point and run on a very centrist message. Unlike Romney, Ryan has an unambiguously far-right conservative record; that's great for winning the Republican primaries but makes it virtually impossible for Ryan to pivot in any sort of believable way to the center.

3. Ryan and Rubio both have incredibly thin resumes; Ryan, in particular, has never run a single race outside of his relatively insular R+1 district and its ~300,000 voters. It's not impossible to be a serious Presidential candidate with just the House of Representatives on your resume, but it's very, very difficult -- and subjectively, Ryan does not pass the gravitas test.

The obvious counter-argument from the Ryan apologists would be 'neither did Obama' -- and to that, I'd say yes, you're mostly right, with three caveats: (i) winning a Senate seat in a state with nearly 13 million people is more impressive than winning a single congressional district; (ii) Obama made moves to shore up his lack of gravitas in 2008, including most notably selecting Joe Biden as his VP; here, the OP has Ryan selecting a similarly under-qualified running mate in Rubio; and (iii) Obama probably loses in a neutral election environment (as opposed to a Democratic landslide environment like 2008).

4. Ryan was not an asset as a VP either on the campaign trail or in the vice-presidential debate. Feel free to argue why, but I don't think anyone can argue that he helped Romney down the stretch. Relatedly: Ryan looked terrible in interviews everywhere outside of friendly coverage on Fox News, and even managed to flub several high-profile gigs on Fox (including, most notably, the September interview with Chris Wallace).

5. The Ryan budget polls about as well as ebola.

There's a lot of post-mortems going on about the Romney campaign right now -- some of it deserved. From my perspective, I cannot understand why the Romney campaign declared in August that it was only going to compete in 9 battleground states (NH, IA, OH, FL, NC, WI, CO, NV, and VA). The major asset Romney had going for him was fundraising; why not at least go up with ads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Maine's 1st CD at minimum and maybe even a few long-shots like Oregon, Connecticut, and New Jersey? All it costs you is money, and maybe you move the needle some and force the Obama campaign to panic and overreact. As it was, Romney essentially gave Obama 237 EVs out of the box; that's generally not a winning strategy.

Anyway: my point is that while there is a lot to criticize the Romney campaign for, I think it's also easy to overlook that, in general, Romney was perceived as presidential; he (mostly) righted some seriously awful negatives both with the Republican right and with the electorate as a whole; he had a great first debate -- one of the all-time great performances, by the numbers; and so on. Ultimately, Romney put himself in a position where he had a 1-in-3 shot of being president (according to 538.com) as late as Octoboer, and my guess is that probably represents the ceiling of the Republican field in 2012 with the exception of Chris Christie.
 
Ryan is running his own show and has more freedom. d Does anyone think he might publicly agree with Akin and or Mourdock.
 
Ryan is running his own show and has more freedom. d Does anyone think he might publicly agree with Akin and or Mourdock.

Mourdock, possibly; Akin, no, since you have to have failed middle school science to think Akin's got something even resembling a point.

Mourdock's opposition to abortion except to save the life of the mother is Ryan's postion as well, so an offhand remark, as suggested by Whanztastic is emphatically possible.
 
Mourdock, possibly; Akin, no, since you have to have failed middle school science to think Akin's got something even resembling a point.

Mourdock's opposition to abortion except to save the life of the mother is Ryan's postion as well, so an offhand remark, as suggested by Whanztastic is emphatically possible.

Akin and Ryan had somewhat of a working relationship in the House, one has to assume, cosponsoring a personhood bill together (along with a great number of GOP members).

The scenario I imagine is Ryan not catching the whole clip when asked about it saying something like, "I haven’t seen the quote in question but I know Representative Akin to be a good, Christian man who shares my views on the sanctity of life.”
 
Mourdock's opposition to abortion except to save the life of the mother is Ryan's postion as well, so an offhand remark, as suggested by Whanztastic is emphatically possible.

It isn't just that their positions are the same; what made the Mourdock "gaffe" so interesting is that it was a rehearsed answer that Mourdock has given probably hundreds of times in response to that question. Mourdock honestly thought he'd done well in response to the question; it's just that Mourdock -- like Ryan -- had never run a race outside of the bubble of a single, Republican-leading U.S. Congressional district and literally did not realize how ungodly awful what he was saying sounded to ~60% of the country.

I would say the odds of an ATL Presidential candidate Ryan saying something virtually identical to what Mourdock said approaches certainty.
 
I think the results are the same as my Santorium gets the nomination TL.
oObama 57 percent Ryan 40 percent protest votes 3 percent
i In the electoral college Obama wins all the 2008 states plus Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri, Montana and Arizona.

oObama 408
rRyan 130
 
A much bigger margin. The Romney campaign hid Ryan for the last 6 weeks for a reason--he was one of there greatest liabilities in a campaign that was filled to the brim with incompetence and liabilities.

They "hid" Ryan because they were running a hyper-cautious campaign and didn't know what to do with him.

In fact, Ryan was polling reasonably well in swing states, even in Florida. (See PPP poll here.)

I'm not saying Ryan would have beaten Obama. But there's no evidence that Ryan hurt Romney. What hurt Romney was, well, Romney. And, to some degree George W. Bush.
 
Ryan was not a strong running mate. He wasn't as bad as Palin, who actually excited a great deal of the base, but no one could say he effectively helped the Romney campaign. But generally, that's how we remember losing vice presidential candidates and it's why so many people turned Romney down - because they all would've been scapegoated for the loss.

I mean, who was the last losing running mate that came out ahead after the race ... Bentsen in '88? Maybe Kemp in '96 - who was at the end of his career? In '08, Palin was thrown under the bus for her misspeaks, rash behavior and apparent incompetence. In '04, Edwards, at least among Democratic circles, was hit hard on his lack of message, the fact he couldn't make any inroads in the south (especially his home state) and his relative non-factor on the campaign trail. In 2000, Lieberman got a lot of flack for bringing absolutely nothing to the ticket, being a mediocre campaigner and so on. Face it, if you're on the losing end, it's almost certain you're going to be shown in more negative light - used as an excuse for the campaign's struggles, than a Joe Biden, Dick Cheney and Al Gore - three guys who probably couldn't (or in Gore's case, didn't) run a successful presidential campaign, and yet are seen as to have brought something 'good' to the ticket.

That's the irony in all of this. Many vice presidential candidates would never make good national candidates, regardless if they win or lose ... and again, I go back to '88 and Bentsen as the last running mate who would've been better at the top of the ticket than the presidential candidate. You can't say that for Gore-Clinton or Cheney-Bush or Biden-Obama ... none of that would've worked ... those candidates would've lost.

This happens, I think, because candidates who generally win their nomination have done so because they've proven their worth - they don't need to pick a heavy hitter in order to win. Obama didn't need to select Hillary Clinton to be victorious in 2008 - Biden suited him just fine.

Ryan is not a national candidate. He would have lost worse than Romney. But we kind of expected that, right, when he was selected? I mean - he's the right's golden boy ... but there is no indication, never has been throughout his career, that this guy has 'it' and what I mean by 'it' is the bona fides to run a national campaign. Reagan had it. Clinton had it ... and certainly Obama had it. Ryan? Nah. But like I said, to be fair, neither does Biden and we don't ask whether he was a drag on the Obama ticket - he wasn't ... why? Because they won. It proves what many have been saying for a long time - running mates rarely change the dynamics of the race. In the end, it's about the two names at the top of the ticket. Ryan doesn't have what it takes to be a 'good' top name.
 
Top