
House Speaker Paul Ryan is a complete failure, and Americans know it.

Paul Ryan, the uber-conservative Wisconsin Republican who reluctantly accepted the role of House speaker in 2015 after no one else would take it, is failing. Badly.

And Americans are not happy about it.

Only 34 percent have a favorable view of him, compared with 48 percent who do not, according to a new Bloomberg poll.


That's an incredibly steep drop from the 47 percent who viewed him favorably back in December. But far more humiliating for the speaker is the fact that his approval rating is even lower than Donald Trump's — a point Ryan's Democratic challenger Randy Bryce is using to add to his campaign coffers.

Ryan has had a disastrous tenure as speaker. He has virtually no legislative accomplishments to his name — unlike his Democratic predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, who was extremely effective as speaker and continued to be, even she became minority leader.

Even with total Republican control of the government, Ryan can't get anything done. His first attempt at repealing Obamacare was so unpopular, his own caucus wouldn't support it. His second attempt barely passed and was such a mess that Senate Republicans declared it dead on arrival and said they would craft their own, from scratch.

Their plan turned out to be equally disastrous.

Ryan certainly knows how unpopular he and his policies are. That's why he's been hiding from his own constituents, refusing to hold town halls to address the concerns of the people he represents.

That makes him similar to Trump, who has been more or less AWOL from the public for a month. But Trump isn't paying the same price for it that Ryan is. At least not yet.

It's not all bad news for Ryan, though. While his pathetic 34 approval rating is certainly embarrassing, it's not his worst. In June 2011, the same poll showed a measly 23 percent approval rating. Which means as bad as his numbers are now, they could actually go even lower.

On second thought, maybe that is bad news for Ryan after all.