The tides have turned.
As House Speaker Paul Ryan’s big government, open borders agenda has been on display since he was elected to the top position in the House of Representatives in October, his polling numbers have collapsed.
New polling data from YouGov shows that Ryan’s favorability ratings have dropped nearly a quarter since he took the Speakership.
“Favorable ratings of Ryan from Republicans have dropped 24 points since early November,” YouGov announced when releasing the new Economist/YouGov polling data.
Ryan’s favorability with Republican voters has dropped below 50 percent for the first time in his Speakership, as well, as he’s now fallen to just 45 percent favorability among Republicans. Of Republicans polled, he is viewed by a mere 18 percent as very favorable while 27 percent view him as somewhat favorable.
Among all voters, Ryan’s favorability ratings are even lower—just 29 percent. Among all those polled, a paltry 8 percent view Ryan as “very favorable” while just 21 percent view him as “somewhat favorable.”
Less than half—just 45 percent, again—of Republicans polled approve of the way Ryan is running the House of Representatives. Only 16 percent strongly approve, while 29 percent somewhat approve.
Even more damning than those details is the next page of the poll, which found just 29 percent of Republicans believe Ryan is someone who “sticks to his principles, no matter what.”
A whopping 71 percent of Republicans, meanwhile, believe Ryan “compromises” on his claim that his core beliefs are conservative in order to “get things done.”
Those unbelievably awful numbers come in the wake of several phony efforts by Ryan to act like a conservative. The most egregious thing he has done as Speaker of the House is the omnibus spending bill that just passed—costing taxpayers $1.1 trillion and totaling more than 2,000 pages—a bill that funds every bit of President Obama’s efforts to fundamentally transform the United States. Afterwards, Ryan appeared on a variety of establishment right talk shows in an attempt to inaccurately claim that the omnibus bill was a victory for conservatives.
But Ryan also forced through—without allowing any amendments—a bill that he incorrectly claimed would “pause” the refugee program in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. The bill, from House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX), would actually only require three people who serve at the pleasure of the president—the FBI director, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Director of National Intelligence—to certify they’ve reviewed the president’s plans and agree with them.
What’s truly remarkable about this whole scenario is that the political class has been building Ryan into what he is since the mid-1990s when he was a lowly congressional staffer. He’s literally a creation of Washington, D.C., and the donor class, who eventually married the wealthy Janna Little, and ran for Congress in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin. Interestingly, Paul and Janna Ryan live in a mansion in Janesville with a giant fence around the whole property–but Ryan didn’t think it was worth it to fund a border fence that federal law has provided for on the U.S. border with Mexico for years.
He has been groomed by the power brokers of Washington and of Wall Street since he was first sent to Washington—eventually picked in 2012 to be former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s running mate. They lost the election, but Ryan came back to Congress and when his predecessor John Boehner was run out of town—ironically for doing much of what Ryan has done so far, just for longer—the donor class turned back to Ryan to hold their political machine together one last time.
And in just a couple months, the Paul Ryan project has crashed and burned. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next several months as 2016 progresses, and it’s unclear if Ryan will be able to regain his bearings amid this devastating lack of GOP confidence in his leadership.
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