pollster.com sans Rasmussen and Gallup trackers.
Jamelle Bouie:
Ignoring, for a moment, the fact that Ryan doesn’t actually offer solutions to mass unemployment or budget sustainability, it’s worth focusing on the obvious: It’s never a good thing when your vice presidential pick makes it more likely you’ll lose.
Amy Goldstein:
“It can’t possibly hurt to have the vice president of the United States come from Janesville,” said state Sen. Tim Cullen, a moderate Democrat and long-respected local figure who has worked extensively with Ryan and likes him. But of Ryan’s pure faith in the private sector to meet social needs, Cullen said that in a town like Janesville, “it’s a mismatch.”
James C. Roumell (founder of Roumell Asset Management LLC.)
Today, I own a small business, an asset management firm with $300 million in assets. Last year we launched the Roumell Opportunistic Value Fund (RAMSX) and hired three more people. We’re growing and creating jobs. I suppose I could pound my chest and take credit for my journey from Detroit to Chevy Chase, from working class to professional. I could say I built it myself. But this wouldn’t be true.
David Firestone:
Among the many falsehoods in the Romney campaign’s new Medicare ad is this remarkable line pitched to the elderly: “The money you paid in for guaranteed health care is going into a massive new government program that’s not for you.”
Those three words “not for you,” encapsulate the Republican Party’s approach to that “massive” program, the Affordable Care Act, as a wedge issue. It’s not enough to say that President Obama took $716 billion out of Medicare, because Paul Ryan’s budget did the same thing. The point is that those billions are being spent on the wrong people, those unnamed others who inevitably lurk just outside of Republican ads.
Charles Blow:
If the repulsive strategy Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are using doesn’t motivate some voters who had been considering sitting out this election, nothing will.
Gail Collins:
Ryan is the one who spent his youth cooking hamburgers at McDonald’s. Romney is the one who used to enjoy dressing up as a police officer and playing fun pranks on his prep school friends. Neither one of them worked as a Wienermobile driver. Really, I don’t know where you get this stuff.
Ryan is the one who likes to catch catfish by sticking his fist into their burrows and dragging them out by the throat. Romney is the one who drove to Canada with his dog strapped to the car roof.
Bless, you, Gail. You're a national treasure.
Stuart Rothenberg:
I certainly am not suggesting that there is anything nefarious about weighting, nor do I question the professionalism of the organizations doing the polling. In fact, the transparency of the Quinnipiac/CBS News/New York Times survey results deserves to be noted and applauded.
But readers must understand the limitations of polling, and I find too few caveats by most reporters, television talking heads and, yes, pollsters when it comes to how samples and weighting are affecting the presidential ballot test.
For example, Rasmussen's use of fixed party ID that they determine rather than measure, and for another example, Gallup's underestimation of non-white voters. Factors like this make the trackers differ from the non-trackers this year.