Since the vice presidential debate, Ryan has gone dark on battleground reporters. | REUTERS Ryan goes dark on local reporters

RENO — In his first eight weeks on the GOP ticket, Paul Ryan blazed his own campaign trail through the living rooms of swing-state voters, sitting for nearly 125 interviews with local television affiliates.

But since the week of the vice presidential debate, Ryan has gone dark on battleground reporters — doing no local television and only a handful of network interviews and syndicated radio shows.


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Ryan’s aggressive media schedule was largely concentrated in the swing states critical to the GOP ticket’s electoral map. From the day he joined the GOP ticket in August until Oct. 8, the Wisconsin lawmaker sat for nearly 30 interviews in the critical battleground state of Ohio — gifting more interviews than in any other state — and spoke with local reporters 20 times in in Virginia. Over the same time period, Ryan also did 19 interviews with Florida television affiliates and 16 in Iowa, according to a POLITICO analysis.

Ryan kept a similarly aggressive pace on the local radio airwaves, often talking to three to four hosts a day in states like Iowa, Virginia and Ohio. Those too have largely ceased in the campaign’s final month.

Ryan’s final local TV interview appears to have occurred on Oct. 8. It was the sit-down with a Michigan ABC affiliate in which reporters accused the lawmaker of walking off the set after being faced with some uncomfortable questions. But video of the exchange didn’t support that claim — although a Ryan staffer did cover the camera after the interview was over.

Ryan staffers at the time told reporters that the interview had run over its allotted time, and was not truncated.

“The reporter knew he was already well over the allotted time for the interview when he decided to ask a weird question relating gun violence to tax cuts,” Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck told POLITICO then. “When you do nearly 200 interviews in a couple months, eventually you’re going to see a local reporter embarrass himself.”

Ryan aides insist that the abrupt shift in Ryan’s media strategy is purely coincidental and not related to the interview. Ryan flew to Florida that night for debate prep.

The abrupt change in Ryan’s media strategy also came two weeks before Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s incendiary comments that when a woman is impregnated during a rape “it’s something God intended.”

Romney had just cut an ad for Mourdock, and was repeatedly badgered by reporters about whether he regretted it and would take it down. Romney aides has said that Romney “disagrees” with the comment and that it doesn’t reflect his views.

Ryan has been repeatedly questioned about the differences between his and Romney’s stances on abortion rights. While Romney supports exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother in an abortion ban, Ryan personally does not. He has said that his position and Romney’s are “unified.”

Romney and Ryan aides instead argued that the vice presidential nominee no longer needed the earned media in the final days of the campaign as much as he did when Romney plucked him out of virtual obscurity to those outside-the-Beltway on Aug. 11. At the time, Ryan’s national name recognition was only 50 percent.

“We reached a different stage of the campaign. With national interest picking up, our focus shifted” Ryan spokesman Michael Steel told POLITICO.

GOP campaign aides also pointed out that earlier in the campaign cycle, affiliates were less likely to devote significant coverage to a Ryan campaign rally.

“Now, this rally will be on every local channel in Reno,” a campaign aide observed while standing alongside the press riser at a rally this week that drew more than 1,000 people.

In explaining the sudden dip in Ryan’s presence on local television airwaves, campaign aides pointed to the fact that Vice President Joe Biden rarely sits for local interviews.

Ryan’s once-aggressive interview schedule — his days sometimes included as many as five separate sit-downs with swing-state reporters — didn’t go unnoticed.

An ABC News story published on Sept. 26 noted that Ryan had, during the course of a few days “found his way into the living rooms of voters in Cincinnati, Lima and Dayton, Ohio as well as Miami, Orlando and West Palm Beach, Florida.”

“The goal of the local media approach is also to bring the Romney-Ryan ticket’s message directly to voters — preferably for the campaign — without straying too far off talking points,” wrote ABC News reporters Shushannah Walshe and Michael Falcone. “…Local affiliates also provided the venue for Ryan’s first response to his running mate’s hidden-camera comments about the “47 percent.”

In the kicker of the ABC News piece, the reporters noted that “Romney-Ryan campaign aides say they plan to keep Ryan on a steady diet of local interviews heading into Nov. 6.”

CORRECTION: Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan for the GOP ticket on Aug. 11.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Andrea Drusch @ 11/04/2012 07:39 AM CORRECTION: Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan for the GOP ticket on Aug. 11.