Remember GOP's Cheesehead Revolution? As Ryan leaves, Wisconsin's national influence wanes

Paul Ryan is retiring as House Speaker.

Reince Priebus left the White House last summer.

If Gov. Scott Walker loses this fall – one possible outcome of a Democratic wave – then Wisconsin’s famous “Big Three,” its troika of Republican stars, will be gone from the political game a few short years after mastering it.

That’s politics. Nothing stands still. What goes up must come down. Each one of these men is his own story, and Walker’s is still being written. But the arc of their careers has always said something about their state and their party.

They led the “Cheesehead Revolution,” the GOP’s audacious conquest of Wisconsin. They offered a model for bridging Republican frictions between establishment and base. They became national figures. They ran into Donald Trump. They suffered. They bent to his rise.

Now one (Priebus) has left the stage. Another (Ryan) says he’ll never run for office again. And the third, Walker, faces the headwinds of a Trump presidency with negative approval ratings.

No state epitomizes the GOP’s accommodation to Trump more than Wisconsin. He suffered his biggest loss in the presidential primaries here, thanks to the resistance of a cohesive party, a hostile gauntlet of conservative radio hosts and a wave of opposition in the deep red Milwaukee suburbs.

“If what happened in the 2016 primary in Wisconsin had happened nationally, we’d have a different president right now,” said Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari.

RELATED: Paul Ryan doesn't see himself ever running for office again

RELATED: Bice: Even after 20 years, Paul Ryan's record forever tied to Trump

But Wisconsin became one of Trump’s signature November victories. Walker, who was forced out of the primaries by Trump, came around. Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, became Trump’s chief of staff. Ryan went from campaign critic to presidential ally. The party faithful in Wisconsin went from disliking Trump to overwhelmingly embracing him. Trump’s positive rating among Republican voters in Ryan’s home state, which was below 40% in the spring of 2016, now tops 90%, and is nine points higher than Ryan’s, according to a recent survey by the Marquette Law School.

“When you have a president in your own party, he is the leader of the party,” said Republican Jim Sensenbrenner of Menomonee Falls, the second-longest-serving member of the House of Representatives. “The toughest job in Washington is to be speaker of the House when your party has the White House.”

In an interview with the Journal Sentinel after his retirement announcement, Ryan minimized his differences with Trump, despite the common perception that he and Trump represent different styles and visions for the Republican Party.

“There are times we don’t agree with each other. You know that. He and I know that. But by and large, we want to go in the same direction,” Ryan said.

Sensenbrenner, who is close to the speaker, said, “Paul Ryan and Donald Trump have two very different personalities, and that can’t be overblown.”

But he said the policy differences between the two are another matter, and have been “partially overblown.”

“Trump was for the tax cuts. Trump was for repeal and replace (Obamacare). Trump wanted to do something about (fixing) immigration as long as he got his wall,” said Sensenbrenner, citing Trump’s common ground with House Republicans.

Yet the contrast between the two was real, and Ryan’s retirement has been read by many as the defeat of his political brand. On policy, he can claim the GOP tax cut as a major victory. But Ryan, a self-proclaimed budget hawk, is presiding over rising budget deficits, and his signature issue of Medicare reform is opposed by Trump and persistently unpopular with the public.

“His top policies are a difficult sell,” said Azari. “I think we’ve known that for some time.”

Ryan has been most out of step with Trump on tone and style. In the interview, the speaker from Janesville repeated his calls for “inclusive, aspirational politics” and said his biggest problem with politics overall today is the practice of playing on people’s differences and divisions. Asked how he squared that with Trump’s politics and rhetoric, Ryan said: “Look, he won the election. He’s the president of the United States. We’re making really good progress on signature issues. … If you can deny the oxygen of identity politics, the best way to do that is have a faster growing economy, more upward mobility, higher wages.”

Ryan, Walker and Priebus are all thought of as “holdovers from the more traditional 21st-century Republican Party,” said Azari. They explicitly see themselves as heirs to Reagan Republicanism. Neither is true of Trump. But Azari said the Republican Party of today is still contending with different, even incompatible, views of what Reaganism represents.

“The jury is still out on whether (Trump-ism) is a fundamentally different brand of Republicanism,” she said.

RELATED: House Speaker Paul Ryan says he is not running for re-election

The jury is also out on whether Ryan’s exit symbolizes the end of a golden era for Republicans in Wisconsin, or Donald Trump’s turbulent takeover of the GOP, or just the finite nature of political careers. Once Ryan became speaker, his congressional life span was shortened, because most modern speakers don’t last long. Once Priebus became White House chief of staff, his days were numbered, because chiefs of staff don’t last long. Those steps up hastened their steps out of politics. But so did the chaos of the Trump presidency and the cloud it cast over the 2018 midterms.

“No time is ever a good time to lose the speaker of the House, in Congress, from the state of Wisconsin. No time is a good time to lose the Republican Party chairman of the national committee, because that means a lot to us, too. But you change, you adapt. I think we understand the challenges that are ahead of us,” Keith Gilkes, a GOP strategist and Walker adviser, said Thursday night at a Wispolitics.com forum in Madison.

“There always is the question of, ‘Where do you go next after your stars decide to move on?’ We had a pretty bleak period when Tommy Thompson went into the cabinet” and left the governor’s mansion in 2000, said Sensenbrenner.

Walker’s re-election race will write the rest of the story of Wisconsin’s Big Three, for now. He could survive a Trump presidency for many reasons, including the Democratic Party’s own problems in the state. In fact, he’s widely seen as the favorite going in to his race.

But if Hillary Clinton were president, his re-election wouldn’t even be in doubt. It would be a foregone conclusion. If Walker loses and becomes the third member of his high-flying Wisconsin trio to fall to earth, the explanations will start with Donald Trump.