Paul Ryan is rolling out his new budget this week, and in most substantive policy terms, it’s a repeat of last year’s version, Path To Prosperity (even the ad campaigns are near-identical).

This is, according to conventional wisdom, terrible for Republicans. Though popular with party purists, Path To Prosperity landed last year with a thud; Democrats, with a little help from everybody’s favorite wacky uncle, were able to use to paint the Republicans as austere bulls in the Medicare china shop, and even picked up a surprise House seat from the fallout.

But did the budget actually hurt Republicans, or is this a case of ye olde echo chamber? In other words, did Chris Matthews and Chris Cizilla repeat the mantra that this budget was political poison so many times that it became accepted as true without actually being true?

Short answer: kinda. Ryan’s budget was released at the nadir of Obama’s approval ratings—41 percent, which, except for one moment during the debt ceiling fight, has been Obama’s basement. But even at his weakest point Obama was still more popular than Republicans. A comparison of polls from before Ryan’s budget and immediately after show little change in the GOP’s approval ratings, with support for Republicans and the Republican House both hovering in the mid to low thirties, where they remained throughout the summer of 2011. ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Quinnipac all have the Republicans holding steady at 34% approval during February, March, and April, with an average of 62.6% disapproval. Quinnipiac’s data, which were more collected, do show the GOP’s numbers sliding by June, potentially over Ryan’s budget, suggesting that some damage begun.

But this slide would not be fully felt until July, when the GOP’s nasty game of Russian Roulette with the debt limit plunged their approval into the high twenties and sent their disapproval into the high sixties. By late August, Quinnipiac had the Republicans at a horrific 23/71 split, a divide that actually worsened in the fall, with the Republicans’ approval reaching its lowest point at 19% in November—almost half of their already-low number six months before. ABC News/Washington Post had the Republicans slightly higher during the debt ceiling debate—28/63—but by December their polls also showed a precipitous decline for Republicans that matched Quinnipiac’s.

The raw numbers (approve/ disapprove/ not sure):

ABC News/Washington Post:

Quinnipiac:

CNN:

There are a number of explanations for this. I prefer the simplest, which is that while the Ryan budget was passed by the Republican House, it wasn’t seriously considered by the Senate, and never had a real chance of becoming law; in other words, while the Path to Prosperity may have been deeply unpopular with a lot of the electorate, there was little reason for expressing this dislike, as the budget never came close to becoming a reality.

Long answer: the Ryan budget cost the Republicans a chance to reset the narrative against Obama. 

As noted, Obama was at his lowest point at the moment of the Path to Prosperity (Obama suffered from the debt fight as well, but overcame it; the Republicans never did). The President had spent the previous few months conceding to GOP demands in an unsuccessful attempt to position himself as the Conciliator in Chief; meanwhile, the stagnant economy was raising warnings of a double-dip recession, and the Tea Party’s message of “slash anything with the word ‘spending’ attached to it” reigned. This was the Republicans’ moment to plant the debate permanently onto their turf.

Instead, the Ryan budget handed the Democrats an unexpected victory. Newt Gingrich’s attack of the budget as “radical” revealed a rift within the party as the Republicans were trying to paper over divisions between themselves and the Tea Party, and present a unified message against Obama. Worse, Path to Prosperity’s plan to replace Medicare with a voucher system was the perfect instrument for Democrats to finally portray the real-life consequences of the right’s spending cuts. As I will never tire of pointing out, spending cuts are much more popular as a political concept than a reality, and the moment seniors heard that their Medicare was in jeopardy, they revolted. Instead of the Senate vote being a symbolic protest of government extravagance, the Democrats got to spin it as their protection of seniors’ benefits from the scissors of extreme Republicans.

In other words, the fact that the Republicans’ approval ratings didn’t move after Ryan’s budget was a defeat in its own: this was their moment to break out of their cellar of unpopularity, and they missed it.

Had the Republicans backed off of the more extreme austerity arguments, Path to Prosperity probably would have been a forgotten policy battle. Instead, the GOP doubled down, turning the debt ceiling vote into an embarrassing debacle that cost the United States its triple-A credit rating. That did cost them, severely: the Tea Party has never recovered from the debt ceiling debate, costing the Republicans their fresh wind. Since then, the economy has improved, with Obama’s numbers along with it, while a dispiriting primary fight has enervated GOP support.

Ryan’s new budget is extremely unlikely to improve on Path to Prosperity’s performance. Greg Sargeant has a rundown of how Democrats are already moving to tie Mitt Romney to the budget, sticking the putative GOP nominee between the rock of endorsing Ryan’s plan and the hard place of running from it (he’s Romney, so he’ll probably do both). And the debate over spending cuts versus tax rates has been swinging back toward the Democrats: the Occupy Wall Street movement of last fall reintroduced income inequality as a legitimate topic, all but guaranteeing that the debate over Ryan’s plan will focus on its regressive tax cuts for the wealthy—indeed, some think it’s nothing but a Trojan Horse for those cuts, and I’m inclined to agree. Good luck selling that message in the fall of 2012.

---

Follow Evan McMurry @evanmcmurry

Comments (0)

ALSO IN...

Republican