- Former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan privately warned that President 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 among voters in the suburbs, in the Upper Midwest, and with voters who dislike both candidates.
- Trump’s precipitous decline in the polls is largely driven by Americans overwhelmingly disapproving of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and turning on the president’s strategy.
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Former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan privately warned that President Donald Trump is on course to lose badly in the 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 first congressional district for two decades and served as Speaker from 2015-2019, sounded the alarm about Trump’s dire reelection prospects at a private event held by Solamere Capital, a private equity firm co-founded by Sen. Mitt Romney’s son Tagg Romney.
Ryan reportedly pointed to Trump’s increasingly poor standing among suburban voters, in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — three states Trump won by margins of less than one percentage point each in 2016 — and Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s lead among voters who dislike both candidates. While Trump carried those voters in 2016, polls indicate that Biden is leading them this time around.
“Biden is winning over Trump in this category of voters 70 to 30,” Ryan said in referring to those voters who disapprove of both Trump and Biden, 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 is trailing Biden in national polls, behind in most of the key battleground states that will be crucial to his reelection, and losing ground among many of the demographic groups he carried in 2016, including senior voters, white women, and independents.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday found Biden leading Trump by 15 percentage points among registered voters and 10 points among likely voters nationwide, while a Fox News poll also released Sunday had Trump behind by eight points.
Trump’s precipitous decline in the polls is largely driven by Americans strongly disapproving of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and, to a similar or lesser extent, also disapproving 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 have lost hope that Trump will take the virus seriously and are publicly breaking with the president by acknowledging the severity of the pandemic and mandating people in their states to wear masks.
In an interview with “Fox News Sunday’s” Chris Wallace, Trump continued to insist that pandemic will eventually disappear, falsely attributed the current surge in cases and deaths to more testing, suggested that many new cases are people “who have the sniffles,” and was fact-checked by Wallace in real-time when he incorrectly claimed that the US has one of the lowest COVID-19 mortality rates.
