Swing state Wisconsin, that and most people pick based on whom they can work with.
It's not like the needle really gets moved that much anyway.
But Ryan never won a state wide race in Wisconsin , and anyway Romney needed Florida and Ohio a lot more .
This. He should have went for Rubio.
I totally agree. He would have helped Romney to win states with massive Hispanic population like his home state of Florida, Colorado, Nevada and probably also New Mexico.
In addition, as we saw in most of the debates he participated, Rubio is clearly a better debater than Ryan who often looked intimitated during the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden and even got his ass kicked with Biden's « Now you're Jack Kennedy » line. Meanwhile, Rubio is more charismatic and smarter and he often strongly countered attacks against him during debates like when he slammed Jeb Bush for targetting Rubio on his vote record because they were both running for the same office while Jeb could have done the same to John McCain in 2008 even if he wasn't running against McCain. Another example is when Ted Cruz attacked Rubio on immigration reform while referring to an interview in Spanish after which Rubio replied « I don't know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn't speak Spanish. »
So I think Rubio would have performed better during the 2012 vice-presidential debate against Biden than Ryan did.
Rubio's style was to use memorized speeches in response to an expected question, most prominently featured in the examples you mention, particularly with Jeb. Biden is more of an informal/off-the-cuff debater similar to Christie & Trump. Rubio himself didn't make a mistake against Christie at the time, he did what he thought was correct, he was closely following this strategy. In the few days following the debate, Rubio went out of his way to repeat the same line over and over again when he was asked about it.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/rubio-defends-his-repetition-of-talking-point.htmlThat particular Cruz example isn't a good one, Cruz did respond back in spanish.
Rubio would do better against someone who uses the exact same debate style that he does (but who is less polished on that front) like Tim Kaine, but not an off-the-cuff candidate like Biden.
Christie's argument was quite literally empirically proven correct: he said rubio only knew how to respond in memorized speeches, which he did, and then he predicted that he would get disorderly when he tried to abandon the tactic, which is exactly what happened.
The unscripted Rubio was the one seen in the last couple of debates wherein he had to descend into juvenile jokes (exactly like Christie predicted it: 'gets [very] unruly when he gets off his talking points'). If you want to compare acts, Biden had more mature jokes in comparison.
(By the way, I know that rubio still had some in his camp who contemporaneously suggested that he did a good job by repeating himself, and I suspect that you were one of them at the time, with you only changing your mind after-the-fact).
