Paul Ryan says GOP ‘much more likely to lose’ in 2024 if Trump is nominated

Former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan believes naming Donald Trump as the party’s 2024 presidential nominee would be a bad move.

Ryan said Tuesday that the next GOP presidential candidate needs to make progress with a certain integral demographic of the electorate: suburban voters.

“This new swing voter in American politics is the suburban voter, and it’s really clear that the suburban voter doesn’t like Trump, but he likes Republicans,” Ryan said during an interview with the Fox Business host Stuart Varney on his show. Varney & Co.. “So I think anybody not named Trump, I think, is so much more likely to win the White House for us.”

“We’ll want to win the White House so badly and beat the Democrats, and we know we’re so much more likely to lose with Trump because he’s not popular with the suburban voters we’ll want to win,” he said. Ryan added.

Trump has yet to declare his intentions for the next round of presidential elections.

Ryan, who has since worked in the private sector and is a visiting lecturer in political science and economics at the University of Notre Dame, did not deny his history of disagreeing with Trump.

“Everyone knows our feelings for each other,” Ryan said, alluding to him and Trump. “We will not appoint Trump because we want to win.”

He compared the current state of the GOP to what Democrats have done in previous presidential election cycles.

The Democratic Party went from focusing on John Kerry and Howard Dean in 2004 to Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in 2016, Ryan said, then seemingly further with Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in 2020 before President Joe Biden was finally elected. as more moderate. candidate.

When asked by Varney if he was “a DeSantis type” in reference to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is in the middle of his own re-election campaign, Ryan replied that the GOP has a “great stable of candidates.”

Besides DeSantis, Ryan specifically mentioned former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, and even former Vice President Mike Pence.

“Why would we want to risk giving the nomination to someone we know — my party didn’t lose as much as fast as we did with Trump,” Ryan said. “We lost the House, the Senate and the White House in two years. I don’t want to repeat that, and I want to win.”

In other Tuesday interview with Yahoo! FinanceRyan reiterated his dislike of Trump as a candidate, saying, “We’re worse off with Trump as a candidate than with anyone else.”

There is no love lost between Ryan and Trump.

Last year, Trump called Ryan a “RINO” – a “Republican in name only” – and blamed him for shortcomings in the GOP’s 2012 presidential election.

The former president’s comments were made in response to Ryan expressing his antipathy for another Trump presidential run.

“Paul Ryan was a curse on the Republican Party,” the former president said. “He has no idea what needs to be done for our country, was a weak and ineffectual leader, and spends all of his time fighting Republicans rather than Democrats who are destroying our country.”

In June of this year, Ryan pushed members of his own party who “didn’t have the guts” to impeach Trump. This again prompted Trump to verbally fire back, once again referring to Ryan as a “RINO” in addition to “a pathetic loser.”