(CNN) At a press conference earlier this month, a reporter challenged House Speaker Paul Ryan's assertion that Republicans need to pass their tax bill in order to remain politically viable going into 2018 -- when history suggests the opposite might actually be true.

After all, congresses controlled by Democrats passed major initiatives in 1993 and 2010 before being swept out of power in subsequent midterm elections. How was this tax plan, a version of which has since been approved in the House while another comes under scrutiny in the Senate, going to save the GOP next year?

Ryan's answer, in short: The Democratic bills -- the 1993 crime legislation and Obamacare -- were "unpopular," while the Republican tax plan, he said, "is not unpopular."

"And by the way," he added, "this is something we ran on. We didn't -- we didn't do like some of the Democrat majorities of the past, and pass some big, huge thing on an unsuspecting country. We ran in 2016 on doing this tax reform. The president ran on doing this tax cut and tax reform."

Setting aside the questionable nature of Ryan's election analysis, and memory of last year's campaign, let's consider the part of these remarks most easily subject to empirical evaluation -- that the GOP plan is "not unpopular."

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