Medicare plan tanks Romney's campaign in critical swing states

So how's that "bold" pick of Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate working for you, Mitt Romney?

Voters in three critical swing states broadly oppose the sweeping changes to Medicare proposed by Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and, by big margins, favor President Obama over Mitt Romney on the issue, according to new state polls by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Among seniors, the issue rivals the economy as a top voting issue, undercutting Romney's appeal in Florida, Ohio and Virginia. Generally, the more voters focus on Medicare, the more likely they are to support the president's bid for reelection. [...]

Asked whom they trust to deal with the Medicare program, Ohio voters side with Obama over Romney by a 19 percentage-point margin. The president has a 15-point advantage on the issue in Florida and a 13-point lead on it in Virginia. In a separate national poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation released Thursday, Obama's 17-point lead over Romney on Medicare is larger than it has been across public polls all year.

Romney's support among that most reliable of Republican voting blocs, seniors, is eroding nationally, and as this new survey shows, in swing states particularly. Romney and Ryan are failing to make their case that they are either "saving" Medicare by gutting it, or that these cuts to Medicare have to be made to satisfy the deficit gods. Three-quarters of the voters in these swing states reject that idea. Seventy percent of all voters in Florida, for example, say Medicare works well now, and that percentage rises to 91 percent of seniors.

Messing with Medicare benefits is a bad and unpopular idea. No matter how the Romney camp tries to sell it, they're losing on it.