Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 08:45 pm
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is much less popular than other new Speakers. Only 29% approve of Paul Ryan, while 54% disapprove of the job he is doing according to a new Pew Research poll.
A year and a half into the job he took over from former Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Ryan’s approval rating is lower than Boehner’s shortly after his term began (36%), according to the poll. It’s also lower than former Speaker Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s (35%) after her term began.
“About half of Republicans and Republican leaners (51%) say they approve of the job Ryan is doing, while 31% say they disapprove. A greater share of Republicans currently disapprove of the job Ryan is doing than disapproved of Boehner in 2011 (19%) or Gingrich in 1995 (23%).”
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Democrats are also not impressed with Ryan. Seventy-five percent of Democrats disapprove of Ryan’s performance, while only 49% of Democrats disapproved of John Boehner in 2011.
The lesson for Speaker Ryan is that people aren’t stupid. Ryan thought he could BS people into giving up their own health care. The Speaker bought too much of his own Beltway hype. Nobody in the rest of the country was fooled by his health care plan, and now Democrats have been handed the perfect poster child in their campaign to take back the House in 2018.
Republicans ran against Nancy Pelosi in 2010, and the desperate right may try to do so again in 2018, but the times have changed.
Paul Ryan is the person who tried to take health care from 24 million Americans so that he could give the wealthy a tax cut. It is Speaker Ryan who dreams of ending Medicaid through block grants and privatizing Medicare. It is Ryan who has his heart set on killing Social Security.
Speaker Ryan, along with Donald Trump, is going to face the wrath of the voters next year, and the result could be the end of the line for the Speakership of Paul Ryan.
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