Now that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has announced he isn't going to run for reelection in 2018, Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District is now in play — and could go Democratic in November.
"We have a map of the districts that we consider swingable. There are 71 districts on our map, and we actually added Paul Ryan's district a couple months ago," Ethan Todras-Whitehill, co-founder of Swing Left, an organization that helps activists find the nearest congressional district that could be picked up by Democrats, told Salon.
"We actually added this district to the map before Ryan retired," Todras-Whitehill said. "Now at the time we were upfront with people that, as things go, Wisconsin 1 was at that point a pretty big reach. You know, the sort of district that you would only win in a big wave. However, our argument for adding the district was that if we can force Paul Ryan to play defense on his home turf, that's more time that he's going to have to spend campaigning in his district and fundraising for himself, and less time that he can spend helping out other vulnerable Republicans."
But Ryan's decision to retire has changed their equation — and if you're hoping for Democrats to win Ryan's district, this change has been a good thing.
"With his retirement, it actually becomes a legitimate, bona fide swing district, not just a district we have on the map to force Ryan to play defense," Todras-Whitehill said.
Todras-Whitehill's analysis seems to be backed up by political science expert Larry Sabato — director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia — who gave Salon his own take on the state of the race for Ryan's seat:
What to do with WI-1 in our ratings, now that it is open, is somewhat vexing. The seat definitely is to the right of center. While Barack Obama carried it narrowly in 2008, it flipped to the Mitt-Romney/Paul Ryan GOP ticket in 2012 by four points. Donald Trump won it by 10 points. Ryan has easily won the seat in every election since his initial victory in 1998, when he defended the seat for Republicans after former Rep. Mark Neumann (R) left to pursue the first of several unsuccessful bids for statewide office. Neumann first won the seat in 1994, defeating then-Rep. Peter Barca (D), who had beaten Neumann narrowly in a 1993 special election. The special was necessitated by long-serving Rep. Les Aspin’s (D) ascension to secretary of defense after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 (Aspin’s time at Defense was short and unhappy, and he only served for about a year and then died in 1995).
The reason to bring up the history is just to note that the district does have some Democratic lineage, although it is also the kind of area — significantly whiter than the national average, and with a slightly below-average level of four-year college attainment — that has been trending away from Democrats prior to the emergence of Donald Trump. The district’s Republicanism was on display in last week’s state Supreme Court race, when conservative Michael Screnock carried the district by about five points despite losing statewide by about 11 points, according to DecisionDeskHQ’s J. Miles Coleman. Republicans believe the district favors them even as an open seat, pointing to internal polling showing a generic Republican leading there by about a dozen points.
The district’s recent Republicanism forms the argument for making the district Leans Republican. However, it’s hard to give Republicans much of a benefit of the doubt in most places given the president’s weak approval rating, the normal tendency for the president’s party to lose ground in the House in midterms, and the extra level of exposure the president’s party has in defending open seats. So we’re going to start the WI-1 open seat race as a Toss-up, while also acknowledging the uphill climb Democrats ultimately may have there.
Melanie Conklin, communications director for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, was pretty excited.
"The Republican brand under Donald Trump is toxic and Paul Ryan appears to be leaving it, quitting," Conklin told Salon. "And what's interesting from our point of view is that rather than walk away from the divisions and the hatred that has become the Republican brand, as Paul Ryan is doing, Scott Walker appears to be doubling down." She said that Ryan and Walker represented divergent approaches that Republican politicians in Wisconsin, and throughout America, have been taking in dealing with the controversies of the Trump era — "either decide to walk away from that division and anger or change and be more reflective of Wisconsin values."
There's a big risk for Democrats, however, and that's that the district may stay Republican, but become more extreme — such as Ryan's top primary opponent Paul Nehlen, who is best known for getting banned by Twitter for posting a racist tweet about Meghan Markle and who has also made anti-Semitic comments.
"The more extreme candidate is, they're less likely to win but there's a bigger risk if they do," Todras-Whitehill told Salon, mentioning Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin as an example of one Republican whose extremism made him an excellent choice to win an otherwise potentially competitive race. "Sen. Claire McCaskill actually ran campaigns calling Todd Akin 'too conservative' and what she was trying to do was basically boost Akin's chances of winning, because he was the most extreme candidate, so he'd be the worst person to get into office. On the other hand, she saw him as her best possible opponent to run against."
Todras-Whitehill added, "If you view it from the perspective of the country as a whole, obviously you don't want a guy like Paul Nehlen getting into office. If you view it from the perspective of the chances of Democrats flipping a district, then the more extreme and the more far right of a candidate, the better chance Democrats have of flipping that district."
One of the two Democrats seeking to run against Ryan, Randy Bryce, made it clear that he doesn't think mainstream Republicans will actually allow someone he called "a Nazi" like Nehlen to be their standard bearer in such an important district.
"I don't see that happening," Bryce told Salon. "I think it's interesting that there's a Nazi that's in the race. But the Republican Party in the state, they didn't allow him to attend one of their annual events. I don't think he's gonna be the Republican person that's going to be on the ballot in November."
Bryce also didn't seem surprised that Ryan had opted not to seek another term.
"I've never accused Paul Ryan of being a stupid man," Bryce told Salon. "I don't think that him quitting is gonna effect other things as far as being a leader. It's more along the lines of him seeing what's been taking place throughout the country, and including Wisconsin too with the special election results as well as the election we just had the other Tuesday with the Supreme Court race. It's been going on throughout the entire country."
He added, "I mean him getting out is definitely helpful as far as the picture of rats leaving a sinking ship."
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