Paul Ryan May Have Produced a Bounce for Romney After All

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Did Mitt Romney get an electoral bounce from his choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate? Generally speaking, it hasn’t seemed so, but Sam Wang thinks otherwise. His model suggests that the Ryan pick did indeed help out Romney for a couple of weeks:

One week after the August 11 VP announcement, I pinpointed the size of the bounce at 1-2 points of swing in opinion. At the two-week mark, the swing has grown to 3-4 points. At the end is an uptick back towards Obama, which suggests that the post-Ryan bounce may have peaked.

In terms of EV, Sam pegs the Ryan bounce at about 40-50 electoral votes. However, “swings in the race are not predictive of the final outcome until the end of September. So the Bain- and Ryan-driven events are of only momentary interest.”

I mention this mainly as a counterpoint to people (like me!) who have suggested that the past few weeks have been pretty abysmal for Romney. If Sam is right, that’s true, but only until the Ryan announcement, at which point Romney started gaining back some of his earlier losses. Next up are the conventions, which usually produce temporary bounces, and then finally the real campaign. A month from now these temporary shifts in the polls will start to have a lot more meaning.

By the way, Sam says his long-term outlook still has President Obama’s re-elect probability at 88% with a likely electoral outcome of 283-353 EV. So his model overall is more Obama-friendly than most of the others out there.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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