Six Things to Watch For in Biden-Ryan Debate

Representative Paul D. Ryan greeted supporters on his arrival in Lexington, Ky., Wednesday.

His budget is expected to play a role in the Thursday night debate.

 

Over three days last week, Representative Paul D. Ryan reserved an indoor tennis court at a Virginia resort — not to practice his backhand, but to hold mock debates. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been at his own debate camp in Delaware this week, overseen by President Obama’s top political strategist, David Axelrod.

After Mitt Romney’s momentum-shifting performance in the first presidential debate, the stakes were raised for the matchup between their chief surrogates.

The vice-presidential candidates have spent weeks going over their own and their opponent’s talking points for Thursday night’s debate in Danville, Ky. Here are six things to watch:

Biden Unbound

Mr. Biden gave the kind of scathing rebuttal to Mr. Romney at a rally the day after the presidential debate that many Democrats wished the president had made.

Expect Mr. Biden, who is able to deliver cutting sarcasm without seeming angry, to continue to make up for Mr. Obama’s passivity at the first debate by accusing Mr. Romney of dissembling about long-held policies.

Mr. Ryan is prepared to vigorously set the record straight when he thinks the vice president is distorting, such as the charge that Mr. Romney has proposed $5 trillion in tax cuts directed toward the wealthy. “He’ll be in full attack mode,” Mr. Ryan said of Mr. Biden in an interview last week with The Weekly Standard, “and I don’t think he’ll let any inconvenient facts get in his way.”

The Ryan Budget

Republicans and Democrats both rejoiced when Mr. Romney picked Mr. Ryan because the ticket was married to Mr. Ryan’s audacious House budgets with deep cuts in federal spending.

Although the budget, which Mr. Romney has largely endorsed, does not specify how programs will be cut, Mr. Biden will happily fill in the blanks by saying that an equal, across-the-board cut would mean eliminating 38,000 teachers and dropping 200,000 children from Head Start.

“The way the Ryan budget works is that it ultimately achieves balance by eliminating the entire federal government other than the Defense Department,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, who has stood in for Mr. Ryan in Mr. Biden’s mock debates.

Medicare Cuts

Will Mr. Ryan be tempted to repeat a staple of his and Mr. Romney’s stump speech, that the president has plundered $716 billion from Medicare to pay for “Obamacare?”

There is danger there. Mr. Ryan incorporated the same $716 billion savings into his House budget this spring, and he has now renounced that plan because Mr. Romney promises to “restore” the money to Medicare.

Mr. Biden would love to see Mr. Ryan, a self-described “numbers guy,” get lost in the weeds of budget baselines and other details that he sometimes uses to explain this discrepancy.

But the trap seems too easy. If there is one thing that Mr. Ryan has been working on in his debate rehearsals, aides said, it is condensing inside-the-Beltway arguments into crisp, two-minute answers.

Over the Fiscal Cliff?

The Romney-Ryan campaign is using the threat of a “fiscal cliff” — the combination of expiring Bush-era tax cuts and a $1.2 trillion automatic spending cut to begin in 2013 — to attack the White House for threatening to devastate the military.

But the issue is a double-edged sword. Mr. Ryan voted for the debt ceiling compromise in 2011 that created the automatic budget cuts. Look for Mr. Biden to also make hay of Mr. Ryan’s rejection of a bipartisan debt compromise plan last year.

Foreign Affairs

The subject of foreign affairs is sure to be a major focus, not least because the moderator, Martha Raddatz, is ABC News’s senior foreign affairs correspondent. Another reason: the recent intrusion of events in North Africa and the Middle East into the race.

The Romney-Ryan campaign senses an opening to undermine Mr. Obama’s image of strength after killing Osama bin Laden by questioning if the administration was alert to terrorist threats that led to the death of the American ambassador in Libya.

Mr. Biden will seek to expose Mr. Ryan’s lack of foreign policy experience and contrast his own eminence as a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“We’ll draw Ryan out on some of these issues he’s spent only a minute or so talking about in the past,” said an aide to Mr. Biden. “It’s hard to bluff your way through on a foreign policy question.”

Mr. Ryan has been studying for the debates under the tutelage of Dan Senor, an adviser to Mr. Romney on the Middle East.

Gaffes, Anyone?

Republicans like to caricature Mr. Biden, 69, as gaffe-prone and a soft target — his recent ad-libbed remark that the middle class was “buried the last four years” confirmed those impressions.

But Mr. Ryan, 42, does not buy into the stereotype about a bumbling vice president. After watching Mr. Biden’s 2008 debate with Sarah Palin on tape, Mr. Ryan came away impressed with the vice president’s discipline.

Aides reviewed all 14 of Mr. Biden’s 2008 primary and vice-presidential debates; they realized that unlike speeches when he departs from written remarks and gets into trouble, he is focused and effective in the structured debate format. “I was stunned by the Palin performance. He was clearly very disciplined,” an aide said.

Voters Give Romney Better Grades for Leadership, Polls in 3 States Find

WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney is seen by more voters in three battleground states as a strong leader after his dominant debate performance last week, but perceptions that the economy is improving remain a buttress for President Obama as the 2012 campaign comes down to its final weeks.

The latest Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll, of likely voters in the three states, Colorado, Virginia and Wisconsin, found no sharp movement after the debate and the news last Friday that the unemployment rate in September had dropped below 8 percent for the first time since Mr. Obama took office.

But the poll suggested that Mr. Romney had gained strength in a number of ways since last month and that Mr. Obama’s best defense is the somewhat brighter economic outlook and the fact that voters continue to relate to him more than they do to his opponent.

Mr. Romney’s backers now support him more fervently than before. He is running stronger in particular among those who say they are paying especially close attention to the race. He retains his dominance on the issue of handling the federal budget deficit and seems to have stabilized his showing on handling of the economy.

About two-thirds of the voters in each state said Mr. Romney has strong leadership qualities, more than said the same of the president.

“The debate made me feel better about” Mr. Romney, one poll respondent, Paula Gregory, 37, a clerical manager for a construction firm who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colo., said in a follow-up interview. “I had more specific information from him and he had real rebuttals to accusations that had been made, most specifically about his tax plan.”

But Mr. Obama holds a slim advantage in Virginia and Wisconsin, and remains tied with Mr. Romney in Colorado, perhaps, in part, because voters are growing increasingly hopeful that the country’s economy is turning around. That conclusion follows last Friday’s report showing the unemployment rate falling to 7.8 percent, the first dip below 8 percent since January 2009. In Virginia, 42 percent of voters say the economy is getting better, up from 24 percent in July; in Colorado the figure is 37 percent, up 11 points in three months.

The positive economic news appears to have buffered the president in Virginia, Wisconsin and Colorado from the substantial improvement in Mr. Romney’s national poll numbers over the past week. The three battleground polls suggest that challenges remain for Mr. Romney in the next 26 days even as his supporters express new confidence about their candidate.

“It’s slow and steady, but the job market is growing,” Thomas Broderick, 50, a doctor from Madison, Wis., said in a follow-up interview. “Also, from what I see around my city, the housing market is better. People are able to sell their homes. Houses are being built. If the economy were in the tank, perhaps it would be harder to vote for Obama.”

In Virginia and Wisconsin, Mr. Obama maintains double-digit leads over his rival when voters are asked which candidate cares about their needs and who would do a better job for the middle class. The preference for Mr. Obama on those issues is smaller in Colorado, a state where the two candidates have been virtually tied for months.

The president’s support is built on strengths that have been evident for months. In the two states where he holds an advantage overall, Mr. Obama has consistently outperformed Mr. Romney on a series of issues, including international affairs, health care andMedicare.

And in those states, Mr. Obama’s months of advertising attacking Mr. Romney’s character appears to have worked. The president maintains significant leads over Mr. Romney on the issue of trust and honesty. Nearly 60 percent of voters in Virginia and Wisconsin say Mr. Obama is trustworthy and honest; just 47 percent say the same of Mr. Romney.

Suzanne DiLisi, 44, a restaurant worker from Marshall, Va., said Wednesday that she planned to vote for Mr. Obama because of concerns that Mr. Romney would not help lower-income people like herself.

“Financially speaking, I believe Romney will cut the debt,” Ms. DiLisi said. “But he will do it at the expense of people who are already suffering.” She pointed to Mr. Romney’s comment that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government.

“Those remarks, they were awful,” she said. “As president, you literally have to work for the very poor to the very rich.”

The New York Times, in collaboration with Quinnipiac University and CBS News, is tracking the presidential race with recurring polls in six states. The current surveys, which have margins of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for each candidate, were conducted from Oct. 4 to Oct. 9, after the debate in Denver.

Officials with both campaigns expressed confidence about success in Virginia and Wisconsin. Mr. Romney’s campaign hopes that his selection of Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate will help him in a state that Mr. Obama won decisively in 2008. In Virginia, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have each fielded intensive on-the-ground operations and millions of dollars in ads.

Mr. Romney’s campaign is targeting the state’s traditionally Democratic coal country, its military-heavy communities of Virginia Beach and Newport News, and Asian population centers in Northern Virginia, officials at the campaign said.

“There’s no area of Virginia that’s off the table,” said Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, who won three years ago by earning support in those same parts of the state. “Overwhelmingly in Virginia, it’s jobs and spending. I think that Mitt Romney’s message works everywhere.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign strategists said the president was working hard to repeat his 2008 victory in the state. He has visited Virginia 44 times since becoming president, officials said.

“It was always going to be close,” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia. He said fund-raising and enthusiasm had actually picked up since Mr. Obama’s disappointing debate performance. “It helped Romney. But there’s a counter-reaction, too. And it’s not deflation. It’s a call to arms.”

The picture is a bit different in Colorado, where support for the two candidates is evenly divided across a broad series of issues. Mr. Romney fares better in Colorado among women than he does in the other two states.

“We are basically sitting at a statistical tie today,” said James Garcia, Mr. Romney’s state director in Colorado. But he said enthusiasm for Mr. Romney had surged since the debate, in Denver. “Volunteer enthusiasm is through the roof. ”

The new polling in Colorado backs that up. Six out of 10 Romney voters in the state now say they are strongly favoring him rather than offering lukewarm support or just opposing Mr. Obama. Earlier this summer, just over half of his voters said that.

Oct. 10: Is Romney Leading Right Now?

Polling since the debate in Denver last week has generally been very strong for Mitt Romney. But there have also been a couple of rays of hope for Democrats and President Obama.

One hypothesis is that Mr. Romney’s debate bounce was initially very strong, but has since faded some. There is a case to be made for this — but Wednesday’s polling made it weaker.

Although Mr. Romney’s standing declined by two points in the Gallup national tracking poll, he improved slightly in four other tracking surveys, from Rasmussen Reports, Ipsos, Investors’ Business Daily and the RAND Corporation. And the state polling data that came in on Wednesday wasgenerally consistent with about a three-and-a-half-point bounce for Mr. Romney, similar to previous days.

There is some spotty evidence that Mr. Romney’s bounce may have been as large as five or six points in polls conducted in the 48 hours after the debate, so perhaps the most recent data does reflect something of a comedown for him. But if his bounce started out at five or six points and has now settled in at three or four, that would still reflect an extremely profound swing in the race — consistent with the largest shifts produced by past presidential debates. We’ll see what happens once the news cycle turns over, such as afterThursday’s vice-presidential debate.

For the time being, however, Mr. Romney continues to rocket forward in our projections. The forecast model now gives him about a one-in-three chance of winning the Electoral College (more specifically, a 32.1 percent chance), his highest figure since Aug. 22 and more than double his chances from before the debate. Mr. Romney may have increased his chances of becoming president by 15 or 20 percent based on one night in Denver.
The more troubling sign for Mr. Romney, however, is that although he’s made gains, he does not seem to have taken the lead in very many state polls. That trend, if anything, has become more entrenched. Of the half-dozen or so polls of battleground states published on Wednesday, none showed Mr. Romney ahead; the best result he managed was a 48-48 tie in a Rasmussen Reports poll of New Hampshire.

(We ran the model on Wednesday before the latest polls from Marist College, The Philadelphia Inquirer, or The New York Times, Quinnipiac University and CBS News were published overnight, which were also suggestive of a narrow advantage for Mr. Obama in the majority of swing states.)

How to reconcile this against the fact that Mr. Romney is about tied — or perhaps even has a small lead — in the average of national polls right now?

From a forecasting standpoint, this is the question that the whole election may turn upon. There are basically four ways to explain the difference.

1) This is a statistical quirk that will work its way out of the system.
2) Mr. Obama has some pronounced advantage in the Electoral College relative to his position in the popular vote.
3) The state polls systematically overestimate Mr. Obama and underestimate Mr. Romney.
4) The national polls systematically overestimate Mr. Romney and underestimate Mr. Obama.

Could State-National Differences Be a Statistical Fluke?

The first proposal — that this simply reflects statistical noise — may be part of the answer, but I don’t know that it’s a sufficient explanation on its own. Since the Denver debate, there have been on the order of 12,000 people surveyed in national polls, and a similar number in the battleground states. The theoretical margin of error on a 12,000-person sample is about 1.8 percent in reflecting the difference between the two candidates.

If it just so happens that the set of national polls have been a positive outlier for Mr. Romney and the state polls have been a negative outlier for him, then perhaps you can explain the whole of the discrepancy. But that explanation would be more compelling had these differences not also been apparent formost of the election cycle.

An Electoral College-Popular Vote Split?

The second answer is the most intuitively satisfying, and would make the boldest assertion: that in an election held today, Mr. Obama would be favored to win the Electoral College but would probably lose (or at best roughly tie) the popular vote. However, there are several powerful rebuttals to it.

First, splits between the Electoral College and the popular vote are historically very uncommon.

Second, the swing states are swing states for a reason: because they resemble (certainly collectively, if not also individually) the American electorate as a whole. There are a lot of voters in the nonbattleground states who are demographically similar to those in Ohio, Florida, Virginia or Colorado. (If Mr. Obama is performing well in Ohio, then it should figure that he’s also performing well with Ohio-like voters in noncompetitive neighboring states like Indiana or Kentucky, for example.) The set of swing states is also quite geographically diverse, covering almost literally the four corners of the country.

Third, the campaigns have been roughly equal in their advertising spending this year. If one campaign had an especially heavy resource advantage in the swing states (as Mr. Obama may have had in 2008), then perhaps this explanation would make more sense.

Fourth, this hypothesis depends implicitly on the idea that Mr. Obama, if he is overperforming in the swing states, must also be underperforming in the other states. Although there hasn’t been much polling outside the battleground states recently, the evidence from the polling before the debate was not very supportive of this idea. If anything, for example, Mr. Obama seemed to be performing comparatively well in deeply red states, seeing little drop-off from his 2008 results. Perhaps fresher evidence will lend more credibility to this hypothesis (one poll on Wednesday showed Mr. Obama’s margin falling substantially in California, for instance). But it hasn’t been that convincing up to this point in time.

None of this means that this case is completely without merit. Our forecast model does infer that Mr. Obama has a very slight Electoral College advantage. (As of Wednesday, it gave him a 67.9 percent chance of winning the Electoral College against a 66.7 percent chance of winning the popular vote.)

But some of our competitors are issuing forecasts suggestive of a very largedifference between the Electoral College and the popular vote — to a degree that is frankly not credible, in my view. (We’ll compare the FiveThirtyEight forecasts against some alternatives in a moment.)

Reasons to Prefer National Polls to State Polls

There are some reasons to prefer national polls to state polls. First, they probably come from slightly stronger polling firms on average and they often have larger sample sizes, although there are exceptions on either side.

Second, they’re more straightforward to interpret — especially if you want to derive an estimate of how the national popular vote will break down. The alternative requires you to “add up” the polls from individual states, as well to estimate what share of the national turnout each state will represent.

Reasons to Prefer State Polls to National Polls

Our research suggests, however, that when the state polls and the national polls seem to tell a different story about the state of the campaign, the state polls sometimes (not always, by any means) get it right.

One case in point: national polls on the eve of the 2000 election were consistent with about a three-point lead for George W. Bush. But the collective evidence from state polling was suggestive of a nearly tied race. In fact, the conventional wisdom at that time was that Mr. Bush might win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College — exactly the opposite of the outcome that occurred.

The state polling generally told the more accurate story, however, describing a tossup race, rather than one favoring Mr. Bush.

Similarly, in 1996, most national polls showed Bill Clinton winning by double-digits, while battleground state polls seemed to suggest that he would win by a smaller amount. Mr. Clinton’s actual margin of victory was eight and a half percentage points, more in line with the state polling.

What advantages do state polls have? One is just that there are more of them. No, there aren’t more Virginia polls than there are national polls. But among Virginia and Ohio and Colorado and the other 47 states, there are quite a lot more. So even if the typical state poll is slightly less accurate the typical national poll, the collective sum of state polls may be more worthwhile than the collective sum of national polls.

Also, the state polls come from a more diverse set of polling firms, and may provide for a greater degree of independence.

What do I mean by “independence”? Here’s a dirty little secret: pollstersherd. Or to put it less politely: it’s probable that some polling firms, especially those that use less rigorous methodologies, cheat off the stronger ones — seeing what the consensus results are before weighing in on their own.

One piece of evidence for this comes from a paper by the political scientists Joshua Clinton and Steve Rogers, who analyzed polling in the Republican primaries this year. They found that when a low-quality pollster was the first one to poll a state, their results were quite poor. But they did as well as any others once there were high-quality polls already released in the state — possibly implying that the low-quality pollsters were tweaking their assumptions to match the better ones.

My own research is suggestive of a similar phenomenon. I’ve found that the more polls there are of a state, the narrower the spread between them — in a way that is inconsistent with normal statistical variance. Once there is a consensus established in a state, the pollsters may have an incentive to be in line with it. That may make the individual poll more accurate — but reduce the value of aggregating or averaging polls since the “wisdom of crowds” principle is strongest when individual members of the crowd are behaving independently. Otherwise, it becomes more likely that everyone will miss in the same direction.

Even high-quality polling firms sometimes feel compelled to change their methods if they are out-of-step with the consensus. Gallup announced a set of changes to its methodology on Wednesday, for example. Although the changes are defensible on a theoretical basis (and although it’s much better to disclose the changes than not to do so), it’s awfully late in the game to be doing that, and makes it harder to compare recent Gallup results to past ones.

(Whether you like the FiveThirtyEight forecast model or not, one advantage it has is that we don’t change the rules as we go along. The forecasts that you see today are from a program that we designed in the spring, before knowing how the election would play out.)

The potential advantage of state polls is that, to the extent that the pollsters herd, they’re herding relative to 50 state-by-state averages rather than just one national average. So you aren’t putting quite so many eggs into one basket.

Another advantage of relying more on state polls is that if you fail, you will tend to fail well. That is, if there really is a big difference between the Electoral College and the popular vote, the state polls will at least get the Electoral College winner right — and that’s what determines who occupies the White House.

A Comparison of State-by-State Forecasts

Still, the case is not a slam-dunk. So what the FiveThirtyEight forecasts do is to adjust the state polls in one direction, and the national polls in the opposite one, such that they match.

(The adjustment does not necessarily cause them to meet exactly in the middle. The degree to which the program weights national polls and state polls depends on the overall volume of polling in each realm. Right now, the state polls are abundant enough that they receive somewhat more weight over all.)

So if you compare our forecasts to those of our competitors, what you’ll generally find is that we are higher than the other methods on our estimate of Mr. Obama’s standing in the national popular vote, but lower than the others in the individual states.

In the chart below, I’ve compared the results from the FiveThirtyEight “now-cast” as of Wednesday night to those issued by three other polling sites: Real Clear Politics, HuffPost Pollster and Talking Points Memo’s PollTracker. The results cover the 11 battleground states that the campaigns have made a material amount of advertising expenditures in, along with each site’s estimate of the national popular vote.

On average among the 11 battleground states, we show Mr. Obama with a 2.3 percentage point lead, or 1.9 percentage points as weighted by each state’s turnout in 2008. Among the four methods, we have the worst figure for Mr. Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Wisconsin, and the highest in none. Our average result for Mr. Obama among the 11 states is also the lowest of the four systems, although tied with RealClearPolitics if weighted by turnout.

The flip-side is that our estimate of Mr. Obama’s national popular vote is the highest of the four systems: the “now-cast” shows him one and a half percentage points ahead nationally, while HuffPost Pollster shows a tie, and the other two methods have Mr. Romney slightly ahead.

Thus, we perceive only about a half-point difference between Mr. Obama’s performance in the battlegrounds and his national figures. This is similar to the actual results from 2008, when Mr. Obama won the 11 battleground states by an average of 7.7 percentage points (weighted by turnout) and the national popular vote by 7.3 points.

By contrast, Talking Points Memo has Mr. Obama three points ahead on average in the battlegrounds, but three points behind in the national popular vote — a six-point spread. Real Clear Politics shows about a three -and-a-half-point gap, while HuffPost Pollster, whose methodology is the most similar to FiveThirtyEight, has a two-point difference.

A two-point difference is within the realm of possibility, although our model would require a bit more evidence to support a difference that large (specifically, poor polling for Mr. Obama in non-battleground states relative to his polling in swing states).

But there’s just no way that Mr. Obama would be even-money in the Electoral College if he were trailing in the national popular vote by four to six points.

All of this is a very long-winded way of answering the question in the headline: is Mr. Romney ahead right now? None of the systems that rely on state-level polling say that he’s ahead in the Electoral College right now, although the FiveThirtyEight models perceive a slightly smaller Electoral College gap between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama than some of the other systems.

The difference is that we, and HuffPost Pollster, are looking at the Electoral College and the popular vote in a holistic way. The evidence is ambiguous enough that it’s hard to know for sure, but the fact that Mr. Obama appears to hold a lead in the Electoral College is reason to be suspicious that Mr. Romney leads in the popular vote.

But here’s another way to think about the issue, returning to the competing hypothesis that we articulated earlier. If the national polls are right and the state polls are wrong, then Mr. Romney might be favored right now. If the state polls are right and the national polls are wrong, then Mr. Obama is ahead. And if you take them both very literally — meaning that Mr. Obama is ahead in the Electoral College but behind in the popular vote — then he’d win another term, after a very long election night.

Two of the three hypothesis yield an Obama win. It’s something of a coincidence that our model now shows Mr. Obama with almost exactly a 2-in-3 chance of winning (as do Vegas betting lines), but it isn’t the worst way to think about the election.