JANESVILLE, WI– A poll of likely Republican voters shows House Speaker Paul Ryan well below 50 percent in his race to maintain his seat in Wisconsin’s first Congressional district.
The poll was conducted by P.M.I., with 424 respondents randomly called from a file of 11,000 likely GOP primary voters. It shows that with one month remaining before Wisconsin’s August 9th vote, Ryan is polling at 43 percent.
Ryan’s challenger, Wisconsin businessman Paul Nehlen, is polling at 32 percent.
The Nehlen campaign notes that Ryan’s 43 percent “represents a drop of more than 30 points since the Nehlen campaign began polling likely Republican primary voters earlier in the year.”
“This poll shows voters are considering their options and choosing to opt out of Paul Ryan’s job-killing policies,” Nehlen said.
The new poll could be viewed as a warning sign to Ryan, as Wisconsin voters may be growing increasingly frustrated with the key elements of Ryan’s longstanding policy agenda.
Nehlen told Breitbart that the reason Ryan has tanked below 50 percent in the latest poll is a direct result of his policies on trade, immigration, and national sovereignty.
“Paul Ryan is the most open borders, pro-Wall Street, anti-worker member of Congress in either party,” Paul Nehlen said during a Saturday press conference, which was held in front of Ryan’s border wall surrounding his Janesville mansion. “Everything that Americans despise about their government, Paul Ryan represents… Can you name one time when Paul Ryan fought as hard for you and your family as he’s fought for corporate America?” Nehlen asked.
In recent weeks, Nehlen has launched an aggressive billboard campaign that has thrown a spotlight on Ryan’s longstanding support for open borders immigration policies that would flood the labor market, as well as trade policies that ship American jobs overseas.
On immigration, Ryan has a two-decade long history of pushing open borders policies. Dating back to his time as a Congressional staffer in the mid-90s, Ryan worked to derail the bipartisan immigration curbs inspired by Civil Rights leader and late-Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
In 2013, Ryan worked hand in hand with Luis Gutierrez to push Marco Rubio’s border-opening immigration agenda.
For years, Ryan has been vocal about his desire to enact open borders. Every month the U.S. imports a population of immigrants that is larger than the occupancy of Lambeau Field. Yet Ryan has repeatedly pushed policies that would make that number even larger—despite the fact that 92% of the GOP electorate, and 83% of the American electorate in general, want to see immigration levels frozen or reduced.
Just last year, Ryan’s omnibus spending bill funded a controversial expansion of the refugee resettlement program—funding visas for nearly 300,000 (temporary and permanent) Muslim migrants within the course of a single year.
Despite the fact that seven in ten GOP Wisconsin voters support Donald Trump’s proposal to enact a temporary pause on Muslim migration, Ryan has ruled out curbing Muslim migration into the United States—insisting “that’s not who we are.”
Every year the U.S. issues visas to a population of temporary and permanent Muslim migrants that is larger in size than the number of Paul Ryan voters in Wisconsin’s first Congressional district.
On trade, Ryan has been one of Congress’ leading advocates for globalist policies that have impacted American jobs.
Since Ryan took office in 1999, Wisconsin has lost one-fifth of its total manufacturing jobs.
Yet in 2015, Ryan acted as President Obama’s “partner” in his effort to fast track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In a 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Ryan described the TPP as a “historic” agreement, which “would mean greater access to a billion customers for American manufacturers, farmers, and ranchers.”
Wisconsin suffered a net loss of nearly 40,000 jobs in 2015 alone due to the U.S. trade deficit with TPP countries, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Wisconsin exit polls showed that a majority of Wisconsin GOP voters (54%) believe that foreign trade kills jobs.
Moreover, in recent months, Ryan has taken a series of actions that seem designed to undermine his own party’s 2016 presidential aspirations and further the candidacy Hillary Clinton.
Ryan dragged out his decision to endorse Donald Trump for weeks—leaving voters with the distinct impression that Ryan does not consider the choice between Trump versus Clinton to be an easy one.
Although Ryan has now technically endorsed Trump, he continues to be one of Trump’s most frequent public critics. In interviews about the election, Ryan seems much more aggressive in attacking Trump than he has been in going after Hillary Clinton.
In this sense, some argue that Ryan has perhaps done more damage to Trump with his endorsement than he could have done by not endorsing him—much the same way that Rick Santorum helped tank Marco Rubio by giving one of the worst endorsement interviews in history, in which he could not name a single accomplishment of Sen. Rubio.
Nehlen’s spokesman said that in light of the growing momentum in the district, the campaign is planning to substantially increase its expenditures. Nehlen’s spokesman, Eric Odom, said:
The Nehlen camp is running a full campaign operation with more than 1,000 doors being knocked each day, targeted mail dropping into homes, billboards up all over the district, aggressive sign marketing, TV and radio ads blanketing the district and mobile marketing reaching voters in ways that are making a significant impact. This effort is presenting profound influence in the district and voters are liking what they see. This poll, and the momentum that comes with it, has us ready to increase expenditures and step up our fight in a big way.
Sonya Naryshkin from Whitewater, Wisconsin had been a Ryan supporter for years before he began championing policies, which, she says, go against the interests of Wisconsin voters.”I had been a big supporter of Paul Ryan’s, I have pictures with him, I’ve gone to Washington to visit with him,” Naryshkin said. “But then he started supporting things that are not in line with our Constitution. He turned to the dark side. He’s totally subscribed to the New World Order.”
Naryshkin, who now supports Paul Nehlen, noted that this is the first year she will not attend the annual Wisconsin GOP fundraising cruise, which Ryan regularly attends.
Nick Gianitsos, a physician from Darien, Wisconsin, said that he too had originally been a big Ryan supporter.
“We hosted fundraisers for Paul Ryan for many years. I was there at the beginning with him back in 1998,” Gianitsos said. “Ryan would say something in this district and he’d sound like the second coming of Calvin Coolidge, but then he’d go to the land of the Lotus Eaters and all of these things [Ryan had said] would change, and suddenly we’d get TPP, and globalism, and crony capitalism.”
Gianitsos noted that Wisconsin voters have “seen a distinct change since Ryan has become Speaker of the House.”
“We now see the Paul Ryan smirk,” Gianitsos said. “We now see him talking down to us instead of being our neighbor. Ryan says [things like], ‘It’s not in our DNA.’ And ‘this is not who we are.’ [But] this is who we are. Isn’t he supposed to be one of us? I think he’s gotten this bravado ever since taking the Speakership maybe because he thinks he’s more insulated from the people because he’s the Speaker. You know, [he thinks] ‘who’s going to un-elect the Speaker?'”
Naryshkin agreed, explaining that since Ryan became Speaker, “the doors of communication to Ryan have totally closed.”
“We’ve been essentially lied to.” Giantisos added. “What you see here in this package that is the local Paul Ryan is not what you’re getting… He’s a completely different person when he gets on that plane and flies to that ten mile square in the Potomac. And he’s just completely controlled by the cronies and his handlers and his puppeteers.”
Ryan has “not been representing us, especially during the last seven years, which has just been a complete rollover and amplification of the Obama agenda.”
Giantisos said that his Wisconsin neighbors share his concerns about trade, immigration, and national sovereignty:
I worry about the national sovereignty. I worry about what’s happening in the EU happening here. This is what bothers me. I’m Greek, I’m actually a dual-national… I go to Greece. I see what the EU is all about and the loss of sovereignty there and individual nations cannot do anything without hearing from Brussels and how they’re overrun by migrants and the penalties imposed by the big banks in Germany and France and I see that they have no national sovereignty, and that’s essentially what this trans-pacific partnership’s going to be. it’s going be something very similar to an EU except on the other side of the world, and that bothers me. It really bothers me.
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