JANESVILLE, Wis. — In an abandoned parking lot on the outskirts of Paul Ryan’s hometown, Paul Nehlen railed against what he called the House speaker’s “open borders policies" and claimed Ryan is “giving American jobs to foreigners.”

Attendance at the Wednesday evening rally was sparse: about two-dozen supporters, at least half of them campaign volunteers or staffers, and three who told POLITICO they weren’t even from the southeast Wisconsin district.


Yet Nehlen, Ryan’s little-known, long-shot primary challenger, has managed to generate a wave of national political attention leading up to Tuesday’s election, thanks to a recent nod from his idol and campaign inspiration, Donald Trump. Earlier this week, the GOP nominee pointedly refused to endorse Ryan and went out of his way to compliment Nehlen’s campaign.

“I was on CNN last night and this morning! MSNBC. Lot of shows,” the 47-year-old longtime factory manager exclaimed in Trump-like fashion to the small crowd. “It’s going to be full-court press.” A yellow construction dump truck behind him was painted with, “Dump Paul Ryan” and “Get the dirt on Ryan.”

It turns out that Ryan — who’s been plagued by Trump on Capitol Hill for the better part of a year — can’t even avoid the guy in his own backyard. Ryan may be one of the most popular figures in the Republican Party, but Nehlen, a remarkably well-financed gadfly running a mini-version of the real estate tycoon’s campaign, is forcing the House speaker and nine-term congressman to have to defend himself in a primary for the first time in years.

Like Trump, Nehlen calls himself a “builder” and a “businessman,” though the local press has questioned his résumé. He wants to build a wall to stop immigration and harps on trade deals traditionally backed by Republicans. And he’s doing his darnedest to yoke Ryan to the working-class frustration Trump has tapped into so effectively.

“Paul Ryan … has chosen to lead on the Puerto Rican hedge fund investor bailout; he’s chosen to lead on the worst trade deal that we’ve ever seen in our lifetime … which will give our jobs away; he’s chosen to lead on funding everything the Obama administration wants and more,” Nehlen said at a news conference this week. “We have a guy who has never worked as hard for Wisconsin families as [he has for] corporate donors.”

While Ryan is extremely popular in his district — with an 84 percent favorability rating among Republicans — he’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV ads to counter the attacks.

“The guy who is running against me is just making this stuff up,” the speaker said Thursday morning on WTAQ's "The Jerry Bader Show." "I am not for 'open borders' ... We added a thousand more Border Patrol agents to the appropriations bill for the Border Patrol just last year in December."

To be clear: this is no Eric Cantor situation. Ryan is expected to clobber Nehlen in the 1st Congressional District, which Trump lost to Ted Cruz in the state's April presidential primary by 19 points.

A May poll had the speaker up more than 70 points. Ryan has 15 times more campaign cash on hand and boasts the endorsement of every Republican sheriff in his district, plus all 16 GOP state legislators and top county Republican leaders.

Nehlen, on the other hand, flew in ex-Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, an anti-immigration commentator, to campaign for him this week. While his backers include big-name conservatives like Ann Coulter (who will campaign with him this weekend), Michelle Malkin and Sarah Palin, he’s getting pummeled by local editorial boards and conservative leaders for making false claims against Ryan and staging aggressive demonstrations. The most outlandish: showing up at Ryan’s home more than once, including to accuse him of hypocrisy for having a fence around it.

"People like Paul Ryan and Mark Zuckerberg love open borders so long as they stop at the property lines to their mansions," Nehlen said, according to Breitbart News, which has trumpeted the challenger and blasted Ryan on a regular basis. (Ryan, for the record, doesn't live in a mansion.)

On top of that, almost all of Nehlen's $1 million campaign stash — a significantly bigger haul than your typical no-chance challenger, thanks to a drumbeat of coverage from conservative media — has come almost entirely from non-Wisconsinites.

“It’s an out-of-state insurgent campaign powered by these ‘scam PACs’ with a lot of out-of-state people,” Ryan said in his radio interview. “People in Wisconsin don’t like these out-of-state campaigns coming in.”

Despite his obvious deficiencies, Nehlen has seized on the same working-class discontent that Trump rode to the nomination, forcing Ryan to face down the GOP’s new, populist brand of Republicanism at home.

"He’s not establishment. He’s not the insider," 72-year-old dietitian Georgia Janisch said of Nehlen at the Wednesday rally. "Paul Ryan is supporting amnesty and [the Trans-Pacific Partnership and] seems to be voting with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats."

Until this week, only local media and conservative Breitbart News were paying much attention to Nehlen’s campaign. Then, on Monday, Trump thanked Nehlen on Twitter for defending him after the barrage of criticism for his feud with a Muslim family whose son died in the Iraq War.

The lack of national media coverage in his first few weeks as a candidate wasn’t for lack of trying. On June 23, Nehlen flew to the district four mothers whose children, according to press reports and the parents, were killed by undocumented immigrants. They went to Ryan’s home to present him with pictures of the deceased, and Nehlen accused Ryan of personally causing their deaths because he hasn’t changed immigration policies.

“Many candidates employ gimmicks to try to grab the media’s attention, but Paul Nehlen’s campaign theatrics outside his opponent’s home this past weekend were particularly despicable,” the editorial board of the Janesville Gazette wrote afterward. “No constructive discussion could occur in such an environment, as Nehlen is clearly taking advantage of these mothers and their tragedies in a bid to solicit votes.”

That was just the beginning of the bashing. Mark Belling, a Milwaukee-based conservative radio personality, called Nehlen an “odd duck that nobody has ever heard of and even fewer have ever seen.”

Still, Ryan has clearly felt the need to hit back. By Tuesday’s primary, he’ll have spent about $611,000 on local TV and radio ads since early July, according to The Tracking Firm, a group monitoring political advertising. That's a major uptick for Ryan, who has not resorted to TV ads much in recent election cycles to dispatch Republican challengers, according to a review of his past campaign finance filings.

"Ryan for Congress has nearly $10 million cash on hand — more than any House candidate. Of course we are going to invest those resources and continue talking with Wisconsinites about the principled conservative reforms Paul has fought for, just like we have done every election year in southern Wisconsin," his campaign said in a statement.

Nehlen has accused Ryan of putting donors and out-of-district interests ahead of his own constituents. But Ryan’s supporters say Nehlen is the actual outsider, pointing to his campaign coffers as proof. Indeed, of the more than 650 contributions given to Nehlen from April 1 to July 31, only two dozen were from inside Wisconsin, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Ryan, meanwhile, has played up his local roots.

“I’m a fifth-generation Wisconsinite," he said Thursday. "I live in the heart of Janesville, in the block I grew up on.”

This probably isn't the last electoral headache Ryan will suffer. Republican leaders in Congress often become targets for out-of-district-backed challengers and attacks from groups that don’t like their decisions.

Even Nehlen has admitted that his campaign is as much about Ryan’s performance as speaker as it is about his own candidacy, if not more. Some of Nehlen's local supporters are urging him to run again if he loses.

For now, at least, Ryan looks perfectly safe.

“Paul Ryan has built 18 years of goodwill — that’s not going to to be wiped away by this unknown agitator,” said Nancy Milholland, leader of the Racine County Tea Party, adding that she is “100 percent” confident Ryan will crush Nehlen on Tuesday. “Nehlen doesn’t understand the district … He’s a stranger here. He doesn’t know us.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to more precisely describe the deaths of four people whose mothers appeared in Ryan’s district to protest his immigration views.

