• Paul Ryan,  Polling,  President 2012

    President 2012 Poll Watch: Republicans Have Significantly More Voter Engagement

    According to the latest Gallup Poll.

    Sixty-four percent of Americans say they have given quite a lot of thought to the 2012 presidential election, a slightly lower percentage than Gallup measured in July of 2004 and 2008. But Americans are much more engaged in the current election than in the 2000 election.

    But, Republicans are significantly MORE engaged and MORE likely to vote.

    Here is the chart:

    Gallup voter engagement poll by political party

    This is bad news for President Obama and the national Democratic Party.

    With the weekend selection of conservative, Tea Party favorite, Rep. Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential running mate, voter engagement will likely expand and remain high.

    The Paul Ryan selection unites the Republican Party and they WILL turn out to vote.

    Americans are not as engaged in the 2012 election as they were in the 2004 and 2008 elections at similar points in the campaign, but they do seem to pay more attention to election campaigns than to most news stories.

    Republicans currently are more highly engaged in the campaign than Democrats. If that persists, it suggests Republican turnout may be much stronger than Democratic turnout. However, Democrats may not have had as much reason to tune in to the campaign yet, given that most of the news has centered on the Republican nomination. Thought given to the election in September, after the party conventions are held, and in the final stretch of the campaign in October will give a better indication of potential turnout among party groups.

  • Barack Obama,  Electoral College,  Mitt Romney,  Paul Ryan,  President 2012

    Does Paul Ryan Help Mitt Romney in the Electoral College?

    This map is from the interactive site, 270towin.com

    Why, yes, the selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential running mate might just very well help the GOP recapture the White House.

    The Electoral College map above illustrates why – namely, Wisconsin and Iowa are moved to red, while Nevada moves to blue from my previous prognostication map which is below.

    2012 Electoral College Final Swing States Poll Watch: Obama 47% Vs. Romney 45%

    Mitt Romney has decided to employ an upper-Midwestern Electoral College vote strategy as opposed to a Hispanic-voter Western states Electoral College strategy. In other words, the key battleground states of Nevada and Colorado will be de-emphasized or even written off (although having just returned from Las Vegas a few days ago, the Romney campaign and Crossroads GPS television ads are omni-present and frequent).

    Most political pundits agree that Paul Ryan will help Romney in Wisconsin. With the failed recall of Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin might be ripe for a flip from Obama to Romney (polling there shows Romney/Ryan tied with Obama). And, who better to team up with Romney than a “Wisconsin favorite son” in Paul Ryan. Iowa is right next door to Wisconsin and will also be in play.

    Now, this punditry assumes that other key battleground states like Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Florida will also flip from Obama to Romney/Ryan. But, with the addition of Iowa and Wisconsin, Romney/Ryan could afford to lose Virginia and still reach the 270 Electoral College votes required for victory.

    The key battleground states are taking shape – add Iowa and Wisconsin to the mix.

    Tonight, the Electoral College numbers are looking a whole lot better for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

  • Mitt Romney,  Paul Ryan

    Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan Likely to Be Named VP Nominee by Romney

    Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin

    The news is all over Twitter and it is confirmed by the AP that Mitt Romney will make his announcement tomorrow morning in Norfolk, Virginia.

    It has previously been reported that a Romney campaign plane was seen in Paul Ryan’s hometown in Wisconsin today. Also, Romney’s announcement will be in front of the the USS Wisconsin.

    In all reality, it is a good assumption that Mitt Romney has chosen Rep. Paul Ryan as his Vice Presidenital running mate and the selection will be announced tomorrow morning.

    A good choice and it appears that Team Romney is going “all in” for the upper midwestern states, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan.

  • Marco Rubio,  Mitt Romney,  Paul Ryan,  Tim Pawlenty

    Has Mitt Romney Selected His Vice President?

    Matt Drudge is pushing this New York Times piece that says that Mitt Romney has selected his Vice Presidential running mate and that he may announce his decision this week.

    After a short-lived presidential bid of his own last year, Mr. Pawlenty is again being considered for the Republican ticket. His fate is in the hands of Mr. Romney, a rival-turned-friend, who is on the cusp of announcing his vice-presidential selection. Mr. Romney has reached a decision, his friends believe, and he may disclose it as soon as this week.

    Mitt would be making a BIG mistake if he chooses former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.

    Pawlenty is boring on the campaign trail, was Governor of a “Blue” state (with no hope to win in 2012) and, well, is not distinguishable in any sense of the word.

    Look at who is leading in the Drudge Report poll:

    Almost any of the candidates would be better than Tim Pawlenty.

    Florida Senator Marco Rubio would be my first choice with Rep.aul Ryan in second.

    What say you, Mitt?

    If you want to win the Presidency, select either Rubio or Ryan. Even, Condi Rice would be a better choice.

  • Paul Ryan,  Pinboard Links,  Polling,  Rick Perry,  The Morning Flap

    The Morning Flap: October 26, 2011

    Flap’s links for October 23rd through October 26th:

    • How Rick Perry’s Tax Plan Would Affect You– Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, today released some details on his flat tax proposal. The plan would give Americans the option of determining their taxes based on an alternate system that has one tax rate and fewer deductions.We asked the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, to help calculate how Mr. Perry’s proposal might affect different kinds of American families. Roberton Williams, a senior fellow there, kindly crunched some numbers using what’s known about the new proposal.

      The chart below shows a few different types of families — single, married with children, head of household with children, and retired — and what kind of tax liabilities they would face under current law and under Mr. Perry’s alternative system:

    • Pizza Magnate Leads GOP Presidential Pack In Ohio, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; Romney Stalled As Perry Vanishes– Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain has jumped to the front of the line among GOP presidential contenders with 28 percent support among Ohio Republicans. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is second with 23 percent, while Texas Gov. Rick Perry is almost at the bottom of the pile with 4 percent.Cain leads a three-man race with 40 percent, followed by Romney at 33 percent and Perry at 10 percent.

      President Barack Obama’s job approval rating and re-elect numbers remain underwater among Ohio voters, who disapprove 51 – 43 percent and say 49 – 44 percent the president does not deserve a second term, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds.

      Despite his negative scores, the president leads potential Republican challengers:

      47 – 39 percent over Cain;
      45 – 41 percent over Romney;
      47 – 36 percent over Perry.

     

     

    By Paul Ryan
    October 26, 2011 — The Heritage Foundation
    Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

    Thank you so much, Ed, for that kind introduction.

    We’re here today to explore the American Idea, and I can’t think of a better venue for this topic. The mission of the Heritage Foundation is to promote the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

    These are the principles that define the American Idea. And this mission has never been timelier, because these principles are very much under threat from policies here in Washington.

    The American Idea belongs to all of us – inherited from our nation’s Founders, preserved by the countless sacrifices of our veterans, and advanced by visionary leaders, past and present.

    What makes America exceptional — what gives life to the American Idea — is our dedication to the self-evident truth that we are all created equal, giving us equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that means opportunity.

    The perfection of our union, especially our commitment to equality of opportunity, has been a story of constant striving to live up to our Founding principles. This is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said, “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.”

    This commitment to liberty and equality is something we take for granted during times of prosperity, when a growing economic pie gives all Americans the opportunity to pursue their dreams, to provide brighter futures for their kids, or maybe just to meet their families’ needs.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    • t.co / Twitter – RT @RasmussenPoll: Obama: Strongly Approve: 18%… Strongly Disapprove 40%… Approval Index: -22… Total Approval: 44%… …

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    • SF ballot measures: will courts revisit pensions? – One of two competing pension measures on the San Francisco ballot next month is said by opponents to be an illegal assault on the “vested rights” of public employees, a cost-cutting plan certain to be overturned by the courts.

     

    The measure does not raise the issue that the Little Hoover Commission and others say urgently needs a new look by the courts: whether the pensions of current workers not yet earned by time on the job can be cut.

    But Measure D by Jeff Adachi, the city public defender, does raise the annual payments employees must make toward their pensions without bargaining or providing an offsetting benefit.

    “As written, D raises contribution rates on current employees, but fails to include offsetting reductions in good economic times when the city’s costs are reduced,” said a ballot pamphlet rebuttal written by Mayor Ed Lee and others. “D is not only unfair, legal experts say it’s unlawful and will be invalidated by the courts, leaving taxpayers with zero savings.”

    In a ballot pamphlet reply, Adachi urges voters not to let the opponents “scare” them: “Last year, a San Francisco Superior Court ruled that the city could change the contribution rates of its employees in order to protect the fiscal integrity of the system, which is what Prop D does.”

    Whether voter approval of Measure D on Nov. 8 would result in a court ruling making a significant statewide change in case law is not clear.

    Many legal experts, but not all, believe that a series of past court rulings mean that pensions promised state and local government employees on the date of hire cannot be cut without providing other benefits of equal value.

     

     

     

    • Poll: In North Carolina, Obama Beats Cain by 80 With Black Voters – Oh, he’s losing overall, and I’m not trying to hide that with the headline, but the racial crosstab is what really jumps out to me from the new Civitas poll in North Carolina. Civitas polled 600 voters, of whom 126 were black. That’s a decent-sizes sample. Obama easily crushes Cain with those voters, carrying blacks 86 percent to 6 percent. (Only 8 black voters in this sample said they’d vote for Cain.) John McCain only got 5 percent of the black vote here in 2008 — Cain barely improves on it!
      What explains this? When I was writing this piece about Cain and Tea Partiers, I spent some time on black news sites, seeing what was being written about the surprise Republican frontrunner. It was overwhelmingly negative. If you were to get all of your info on Cain from black news sites, you’d mostly learn that the guy didn’t participate in the Civil Rights movement, wasn’t immediately offended by Rick Perry’s “Niggerhead” rock, and wanted the Secret Service to call him “cornbread.” Just yesterday, Toure spat out a remarkable amount of bile in a piece explaining why, as a black voter, he despises Cain.
      Cain is a clown. You see it in the way he constantly mollifies white audiences with self-effacing, racialized comedy that borders on minstrelsy (referring to himself as “black-walnut ice cream” or suggesting that the Secret Service call him “Cornbread”)… Cain is what I long imagined the first Black President would be like: a Republican who many Blacks find unctuous.
      Toure could have continued on with the central liberal complaint about black conservatives — that they are used to appeal to guilty-feeling whites, not to do anything for blacks.

     

     

    • Will Steve Jobs’ final vendetta haunt Google? – The depths of Jobs’ antipathy toward Google leaps out of Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Apple’s co-founder. The book goes on sale Monday, less than three weeks after Jobs’ long battle with pancreatic cancer culminated in his Oct. 5 death. The Associated Press obtained a copy Thursday.
      The biography drips with Jobs’ vitriol as he discusses his belief that Google stole from Apple’s iPhone to build many of the features in Google’s Android software for rival phones.
      It’s clear that the perceived theft represented an unforgiveable act of betrayal to Jobs, who had been a mentor to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and had welcomed Google’s CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, to be on Apple’s board.
      Jobs retaliated with a profane manifesto during a 2010 conversation with his chosen biographer. Isaacson wrote that he never saw Jobs angrier in any of their conversations, which covered a wide variety of emotional topics during a two-year period.
      After equating Android to “grand theft” of the iPhone, Jobs lobbed a series of grenades that may blow a hole in Google’s image as an innovative company on a crusade to make the world a better place.
      “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs told Isaacson. “I’m going to destroy Android because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death because they know they are guilty.”
      Jobs then used a crude word for defecation to describe Android and other products outside of search.
      Android now represents one of the chief threats to the iPhone. Although iPhones had a head start and still draw huge lines when new models go on sale, Android devices sold twice as well in the second quarter. According to Gartner, Android’s market share grew 2 1/2 times to 43 percent, compared with 17 percent a year earlier. The iPhone’s grew as well, but by a smaller margin — to 18 percent, from 14 percent.
      Both Google and Apple declined comment to The Associated Press when asked about Jobs’ remarks.
      Jobs’ attack is troubling for Google on several levels.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Mitch Daniels,  President 2012

    President 2012: Mitch Daniels Calls for a More Honest Debate

    Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels answers questions Thursday, May 19, 2011, at the Palais Royale ballroom during a breakfast speech in South Bend, Indiana

    I still wish Daniels would have run for the Presidency but now he is hawking his book that will be out tomorrow.

    Four months after he decided against jumping into the Republican presidential race, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana says that he has occasionally been frustrated by the discourse in the campaign and that the field could benefit from at least one more contender whose candidacy was rooted in a message of fiscal discipline.

    Mr. Daniels said his party’s candidates had a responsibility to conduct a “more candid and honest” conversation about the nation’s financial burdens, particularly Social Security and Medicare.

    “Somebody else could still enter and have a competitive chance,” Mr. Daniels said in a weekend interview. “The candidate I could get instantly excited about is someone who is willing to level with the American people and assume they are prepared to listen to the mathematical facts and agree that whatever other disagreements we have aren’t as important.”

    Mr. Daniels, who is among the country’s most respected Republican governors, has not chosen a favorite candidate in the party’s nominating contest. He said the recent contentious exchanges over Social Security between the party’s leading candidates, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, had not advanced the debate.

    Please, please a team of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Rep. Paul Ryan. Either or both would be better than Romney and Perry.

    The observations from Mr. Daniels come as he prepares this week to release a book, “Keeping the Republic: Saving America by Trusting Americans.” In the book, to be released Tuesday, he calls for a new Reconstruction period in the United States and proposes major changes to entitlement programs to help control the deficit and avert “the most predictable crisis we’ll ever face.”

    He outlines in stark terms what he views as the nation’s precarious economic condition, suggesting that Democrats and Republicans alike have failed to adequately prepare for a new “Red menace” facing the United States.

    “It’s quite possible that some Republican could win next year by just being not the president, but then what?” Mr. Daniels said. “They should campaign to govern, not just win an election.”

  • Chris Christie,  Paul Ryan,  President 2012

    President 2012: Chris Christie Coming Into the Race?

    Jen Rubin hopes and in a way, so do I.

    Republicans are now confessing openly: The current field is weak, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry leaves them with substantial doubts. This conversation from the “Panel Plus” discussion of “Fox News Sunday” is illuminating…..

    There are several factors at play here.

    First, Perry has not yet coaxed the big donors off the sidelines.There is plenty of money for Christie to scoop up.

    Second, none of the candidates in the field has been able to put together all factions of the party. As Evan Bayh noted on Fox, Christie is someone who embodies the Tea Party spirit (feisty, anti-D.C. establishment) but is more than sophisticated enough to satisfy mainstream conservatives, business leaders and policy wonks.

    From what I gather, most Republicans will accept Rick Perry over Mitt Romney, but are really looking for somebody else. A team of Chris Christie and Paul Ryan would be awesomeness for grass roots and establishment Republicans.

    If not, then the fight (and it will be a media battle royale) will be in the GOP primary elections/caucuses on whether to go “do no harm” with Romney (a safe candidate) or “go long” with Rick Perry (grass roots conservative who shoots from the hip).

    Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels maintains there is room for another candidate in the race. I don’t think he means Sarah Palin.

  • Barack Obama,  Paul Ryan,  President 2012

    President 2012: Obama’s NOT So Secret Economic Plan = Blame Congress

    President Barack Obama greets people at DeWitt Dairy Treats, Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011, in DeWitt, Iowa, during his three-day economic bus tour

    Pretty weak, but then again, Obama has been an ineffectual President.

    President Obama has a secret plan. He told Iowans Monday his “very specific plan” would boost the economy, create jobs, and control the deficit. What are the details of this plan? Sorry, Obama has to travel to Martha’s Vineyard for a ten day vacation first.

    According to National Journal, Obama’s secret plan is part of a new White House strategy to counter the “growing perception that President Obama is a weak leader.” Apparently, the president’s senior advisers believe Libya, Egypt, and the debt hike debate “have done serious damage to his leadership image.” The polling backs this belief up. NJ reports: “In April 2009, Gallup found 73 percent of Americans who said that Obama was a “strong leader.” In May 2010, that had declined to 60 percent. In March 2011, Gallup had it down to 52 percent. There has been no more recent polling on that issue.” And that leadership fall all happened before Libya and the debt hike.

    Obama’s solution? Blame Congress. But how can Obama blame Congress for his own leadership failures? That is where the “very specific” secret plan comes in. Obama hopes to convince Americans that 1) he has a plan to cut the debt and create jobs, and 2) only “unreasonable” Republicans in Congress stand between America and success. Will it work? That depends on how compliant the press is.

    Obama has not submitted a specific plan to address the debt since he submitted his budget to Congress in February. That plan was rejected by the Senate 97-0. Obama has since given many speeches about the debt, but as Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf testified to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, “We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity then was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”

    And, I doubt Obama will submit anything that can be effectively scored by the Congressional Budget Office. So, here we go again, a set of speeches and NO specific proposal.

    Paul Ryan is going to have Obama for lunch.