Former House Speaker Paul Ryan says Trump is on track to get crushed in the suburbs and the Upper Midwest
- Former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan privately said that President Donald Trump is on track to lose the suburbs and the key Upper Midwestern states he carried in 2016, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
- Ryan reportedly pointed to Trump's dire standing with voters in the Upper Midwest and with voters in suburbs who dislike both candidates.
- Trump's precipitous decline in polls has largely been driven by Americans' overwhelming disapproval of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan privately said that President Donald Trump was on course to lose badly in suburbs and the Upper Midwestern states he narrowly carried in 2016, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
The Times said that Ryan, who represented Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District for two decades and served as the speaker from 2015 to 2019, sounded the alarm about Trump's dire reelection prospects at a private event held by Solamere Capital, a private-equity firm cofounded by Sen. Mitt Romney's son Tagg Romney.
Ryan reportedly pointed to Trump's increasingly poor standing among voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — three states Trump won by margins of less than 1 percentage point each in 2016 — and former Vice President Joe Biden's lead among suburban voters who dislike both candidates. While Trump carried those kinds of voters in 2016, polls have indicated that Biden is leading them this time around.
"Biden is winning over Trump in this category of voters 70 to 30," Ryan said, according to a transcript of his comments obtained by The Times. "And if that sticks, he cannot win states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania."
Trump has trailed Biden in national polls, is behind in most of the battleground states that are crucial to his reelection, and has lost ground among many of the demographic groups he carried in 2016, including older voters, white women, and independents.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday found Biden leading Trump by 15 points among registered voters, while a Fox News poll also released Sunday found Trump behind by 8 points.
Trump's precipitous decline in the polls has largely been driven by Americans' strong disapproval of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and, to a similar or lesser extent, their disapproval of his handling of issues including race relations, healthcare, and crime.
The Times' article detailed how, with a little over three months until Election Day, many top Republican senators and governors had lost hope that Trump will take the virus seriously and were publicly breaking with him by acknowledging the severity of the pandemic and mandating that people in their states wear masks.
In an interview with "Fox News Sunday's" Chris Wallace, Trump continued to insist that the pandemic will eventually disappear, falsely attributed the surge in cases and deaths to more testing, suggested that many new cases were people with "the sniffles," and was fact-checked by Wallace in real time when he incorrectly claimed that the US had one of the lowest COVID-19 mortality rates.