House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., warned Monday that Republicans will have to work to keep Wisconsin red, saying conservatives will have to battle the state’s progressive traditions.
Wisconsin shocked the nation — and the Hillary Clinton campaign — by voting for President-elect Trump over Clinton.
Ryan spoke to Milwaukee radio host Charlie Sykes, who broadcast his last show Monday. He said Wisconsin has become the home of well-known conservatives such as himself, Gov. Scott Walker and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who will be President-elect Trump’s chief of staff, because they waged an intellectual debate.
But Wisconsin, home to founding progressive leaders such as former Sen. Bob La Follette, is not naturally conservative, unlike some Southern states, he said.
“We don’t have that luxury in Wisconsin,” Ryan said. “We have to constantly convince and persuade and we’re — our ideas are always challenged and questioned because this is not a doctrinaire state for the left or the right.”
The La Follette tradition “made us work even harder to try and persuade and explain why, as classical conservatives, we think differently,” Ryan said. “We, every single day, when we do something that is conservative, we have to go explain it to our citizens; we have to explain it to our fellow voters and citizens why we’re doing [it] and what difference it will make and why it’s better and different than sort of what the progressive left has done and dominated in this state for so long.”
Although Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., won re-election in November and Trump took the state for the first time in decades, it’s an ongoing fight, Ryan said.
“You can’t just rest on laurels and assume everyone listens to the same shows and thinks the same thing, because they don’t here in Wisconsin,” he said. “And you constantly have to be energetic and persuasive and really attune to your principles and your convictions and show how those applied to the problems, come up with better solutions.
“And so, we just have our work cut out for us, and we work hard at it, and I think that is why we have an energetic conservatism here in Wisconsin,” he concluded. Ryan said that before he became the most powerful member of the House last year, his leadership used to try and silence him.
Ryan said that before he became the most powerful member of the House last year, his leadership used to try and silence him.
“I spent more time, I’d say, in the backbench, than I have in leadership,” said Ryan who was House Budget Committee chairman and later as Ways and Means chairman before ascending to speaker.
“[T]he party really tried to isolate me a number of years ago,” he said. “And trying to explain to our members, ‘do not touch what Ryan is talking about, don’t deal with these fiscal issues, these entitlements, it’s political suicide,'” he said about proposals he drafted to overhaul programs such as welfare and to narrow the deficit.
“And I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold,” he explained. “What happened, really, was the 2010 election, I think. The 2010 election brought all these, sort of Tea Party conservative Republicans into office.”
