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August 14, 2012 07:15 PM UTC

Republicans Worry About Ryan Effect on House, Senate

  • 39 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

We’ve discussed at length the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s running mate. But there is another side to Ryan’s selection, and it has some Republicans concerned about the fallout. From The Hill:

Republicans strategists are worried that Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) addition to the presidential ticket will cost their party House and Senate seats this fall.

Their concern: Democrats will successfully demonize Ryan’s budget plan, which contains controversial spending cuts and changes to Medicare.

“There are a lot races that are close to the line we’re not going to win now because they’re going to battle out who’s going to kill grandma first, ObamaCare or Paul Ryan’s budget,” said one Republican strategist who works on congressional races. “It could put the Senate out of reach. In the House it puts a bunch of races in play that would have otherwise been safe. … It remains to be seen how much damage this causes, but my first blush is this is not good.”

Many Republicans in tough races this year, especially in the House, voted for Ryan’s proposal, which makes it hard for them to distance themselves from it.

Democratic challengers such as Joe Miklosi have already spent months trying to pin the Ryan budget on their opponents, and turning the national spotlight to the Wisconsin Representative only makes that effort easier.

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39 thoughts on “Republicans Worry About Ryan Effect on House, Senate”

  1. If they’d chosen some middle of the road milquetoast, the base would have stayed home in droves, jeopardizing down-ticket races.  This reinforces the diehards who’ve never loved Romney. If you lose your base you can’t win.

    1. I related this the other day, but it’s worth repeating. I have an acquaintance who is a full-fledged NRA supporter and member. He generally doesn’t like Republican policies but often votes that way over the issue of guns.

      Up until last week he had every intention of voting for Romney for that reason. But then Romney announced that Ryan is his running mate. BANG. Just like that, he is now voting for Obama.

      He could stomach the what-passes-for-centrist-in-today’s-GOP Mitt Romney, but not the let’s-destroy-medicare-and-Social-Security radical Paul Ryan.

      He’s just one example, but truly middle of the road voters are complicated. There may be some who were leaning Obama and are now leaning Romney because of Ryan, but outside of his relative youth, charm, and good looks it’s hard to see what appeal he has to undecided voters. (Palin had all three as well – okay, the charm part is up for debate but I think a certain segment of the population liked her. And keep in mind the “relative” qualifier…) The economy is still Issue Number One, and Ryan’s pet issues are ones on which he is vulnerable (he voted for Bush’s budgets like a good minion) and which are not necessarily related to the economy.

      I think the Dems and allied groups aren’t wasting any time trying to define Ryan as the radical that he is. That’s important because he’s not going to flub easy softball interviews like Palin.

      1. The base hates Obama enough to come out in droves anyway.  This race will be won  among indies and by enthusiasm of turn out.  As much as Ryan might attract some on the right who might otherwise have voted for the Bircher or someone else, he also energizes the anti turn out among Dems. If Ryan alienates more of the small undecided segment, he does more harm than good. This will not be a 2008 style wide margin win either way.

      2. As soon as we saw Ryan’s name as the VP, my wife and I seriously (for us at least; we’re not quite in the Koch Brothers’ league) upped our contributions to Obama and will do everything we can to get out the vote.

        We do not want someone who supports Personhood for fertilized eggs, who has wanted to scrap Social Security, who wants to eliminate Medicare as we know it (we’re under 55), and who supports denying abortions to women even if their lives are at stake, from being one heartbeat away from the Presidency.

        We didn’t like Romney to begin with, but his choosing Ryan has really energized us.  

    2. Conventional wisdom says you can turn out every die hard in the United States of Republicans and still fall 15% short of a needed majority.  What’s the chance that Republicans will put together a superior ground game that will outperform Democratic turn out at levels needed to win based on political xenophobia?

  2. As everyone should know, Ryan’s “budget” doesn’t actually achieve balance even in the next ten years. Optimistically it gets balanced in 40 years, assuming nobody in any future Congress ever does anything to change it. Of course, Congress is already changing things like the sequester that they agreed to six months ago.

    But my question is what happens in the first year? And when was the last time anyone’s ten-year plan survived even one year of Congressional changes?

    1. all because of the tax cuts. You can’t even make up an argument more ridiculous than that, but that is what Ryan’s ” budget ” assumes.

      The bar is so freaking low now.  It dosen’t even matter that this plan is so back of the napkin that Ryan still hasn’t specified what loopholes he will close, but look, he proposed a plan !  He’s a budgetary genius. Wow !

    2. The only way to balance the budget is to improve the economy. If the economy stays in neutral the interest on the debt grows and grows and we’re totally screwed.

      So each plan needs to be evaluated on what will occur over the next 4 years. And while Obama will keep us in neutral, the Republican plan will crater the economy. And that destroys every assumption in the Ryan plan.

      2. And why, David? Could it possibly be because of Paul Ryan and the House Republicans who won’t put his jobs bill up to a vote? What possible reason could they have for that?

        1. But another large part is Obama didn’t fight for it. Obama is not the first president to face a hostile Congress. And possibly an equally important part is Obama didn’t understand for a couple of years what was required to get the economy in gear.

          1. Obama had lots of DINOs telling him stupid things like, “I’m sure if you locked Ken Buck and Al Gore in a room together, they’d come up with a solution to global warming that was mutually acceptable to both parties” up through the 2010 election. I’ll bet anyone who said something like that must be feeling pretty dumb and not at all self-righteous right about now.  

          2. True, but ever one so intransigent?  Determined not to slow down a president, but to stop him at every moment?  Even if the president wants the same thing?

              1. opposing a president on one type of legislation.

                How exactly does that compare with an entire party making it their sworn objective to block the president at every turn, renouncing policies they only recently embraced if only it will keep the economy in the toilet and spoil the president’s chances at success or reelection?

                Answer: it doesn’t.

                2. I’d say that was one hell of a political brick wall. No it’s not identical, what is. But it was comparable.

                  You can also draw similarities with how the GOP took on Clinton, even to the extent of impeaching him in the House.

                  2. that Johnson managed to get passed when Eisenhower was president? David, there’s nothing about your analogy that stands up, except that it somehow involves Congress and, sort of, a president.  

                    1. Because you have totally bought in on the argument that what is going on today is more extreme than ever before (it isn’t). Maybe it’s because you want an excuse for Democratic ineptitude. Maybe it’s because you have low expectations for Democratic officeholders. But  I don’t think there’s any point in going further in this discussion.

            2. that the current crop of Publicans have gone out of their way to cut their own noses off of their faces.

              Remember when they pushed the US to the brink of being a failed country just to make Obama look bad?

              The “teh stupid tea” that Republicans drank back then was so stupid our national credit rating dropped.

              Even when Obama (who’s pretty much a DINO most of the time) was handing them the entire country in a pretty bag, they refused to take it.

  3. This was NOT said by a Republican.

    Paul Ryan’s budget doesn’t make any changes for anyone over 55. Period. For those under retirement age, changes must be made to protect the Medicare system. Republicans don’t want to destroy Medicare, we want to SAVE it.

    1. The Ryan claim that he won’t cut Medicare for me and my wife, if only we agree to destroy the program for our kids, is nothing more than a stupid, transparent, lie.  Once they have cut the political support from the programs by disenfranchising the next generations, you can guarantee they will come at us now on the program.  

       When you are an avid acolyte of right-wing Atheist Ayn Rand, as Ryan is, then those moochers on Medicare are simply evil and must be humbled at all costs.

        The key is that not one dime of the cuts Ryan would make in Medicare would go to cut the deficit, which would only rise.  All the cuts, and more, go to more tax cuts for the top 1 percent.  The greed of the Koch Brothers, and the likes of gambling Kingpin Sheldon, Adelson knows no bounds.

      1. I’ve got a modest proposal: You’re not allowed to demand a “serious conversation” over Medicare unless you can answer these three questions:

        1) Mitt Romney says that “unlike the current president who has cut Medicare funding by $700 billion. We will preserve and protect Medicare.” What happens to those cuts in the Ryan budget?

        2) What is the growth rate of Medicare under the Ryan budget?

        3) What is the growth rate of Medicare under the Obama budget?

        The answers to these questions are, in order, “it keeps them,” “GDP+0.5%,” and “GDP+0.5%.

        Let’s be very clear on what that means: Ryan’s budget – which Romney has endorsed – keeps Obama’s cuts to Medicare, and both Ryan and Obama envision the same long-term spending path for Medicare. The difference between the two campaigns is not in how much they cut Medicare, but in how they cut Medicare.

        Obama’s Medicare reform plan isn’t that hard to find. It’s largely in Title III of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The basic strategy has three components: First, figure out what “quality” in health care is. Second, figure out how to pay for quality rather than paying for volume. Third, make it easier for Medicare to quickly update itself to reflect both advances in knowledge about what quality is and how to pay for it…

        As for Romney’s plan? Well, it’s 902 words long, and basically sketches a less-detailed version of the plan Ryan released in his 2013 budget proposal (which is, for the record, much more moderate than the plan in his 2012 budget)…

        These plans get at the basic disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on Medicare. Democrats believe the best way to reform Medicare is to leave the program intact but vastly strengthen its ability to pay for quality. Republicans believe the best way to reform Medicare is to fracture the system between private plans and traditional Medicare and let competition do its work.”

        http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

    2. SS, Medicaid, or Medicare?  Gimme a fucking break.  It is you hypocratic mouthbreathers that tried to stop these ideas, every step of the way.

      Since 1935, you’ve hated them.  You’ve tried to stop passage of the bills.  And suddenly, you give a fuck?

      Unfortunately, a lot of low information voters believe this lie.

    3. How do you think people who have been paying into the system for 35 years and are starting to look forward to retirement are going to feel about this?

      How do you think seniors who are happy with Medicare are going to feel about their kids not having it?

      I think you guys have not thought this through. Considering Republicans won elections in 2010 largely based on “We won’t cut Medicare*,” I can imagine you might have some difficulty when people realize the fine print says “*We’ll just abolish it.”

      2. Medicare will destroy itself unless something is done. Democrats made promises the nation’s checking account can’t keep. Even Boulder Liberal Mark Udall admits that. We just disagree on the solution, which conservatives don’t think should break the back of the American economy with job killing tax increases.

        1. start bringing in all that money that we haven’t for so many years.  Get the greedy freeriding assholes to pay their fair share into the pot and I am sure Medicare will do fine.

          And anybody who uses the phrase job killing tax increases dosen’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

        2. Look, I’ve already done “Republican joke account” to death here on the blog. Do you believe what you’re saying, or are you just trying to outdo me?  

    5. You remember, that tax and spend RINO Reagan’s budget director?

      Says Paul Ryan is full of it.

      Specifically, Stockman observes, Ryan’s “phony” budget plan:

      Maintains Defense spending that is nearly twice the $400 billion (adjusted for today’s dollars) that General Eisenhower spent in the 1950s

      Shreds the safety net provided by $100 billion in food stamps and $300 billion in Medicaid

      Does not cut one dime from Medicare or Social Security for another decade

      Includes no serious plan to create jobs

      Radically cuts taxes on the richest Americans while eliminating tax breaks that mostly help the middle class

      Fails to even consider a “value-added sales tax,” which is the only way the country can begin to climb out of its budget hole

      In short, Stockman says, Ryan’s plan is “devoid of credible math or hard policy choices.”

      Harsh words coming from a fellow Republican.

      1. David Stockman was the one who was responsible for all the deficit under Reagan. If Reagan had had his way and hadn’t been screwed over by this secret Democrat David Stockman, deficits wouldn’t have gone up at all.

        It’s really easy to play once you figure out the one and only rule. Someday when I don’t get tenure I’m going to go into this business.

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