House Speaker Paul Ryan wins GOP nomination to run again

According to early returns, Ryan was on pace to defeat Nehlen by a hefty margin, with the speaker garnering more than 80 percent of the vote with almost 90 percent of the district’s precincts reporting.

“We knew we were going to do well”, Ryan said.

“Speaker Ryan’s commitment to faithfully representing the people of Wisconsin and making the case for conservatism have never changed, and his years of principled public service make him a trusted leader in our party”, Priebus said.

There was no Eric Cantor-style upset in a businessman’s bid to oust House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in that state’s GOP primary Tuesday night.

But they also could be read as an implicit critique of Trump, whose tone and approach to politics are far more slashing and confrontational than Ryan’s.

Ryan was asked if Nehlen’s resounding defeat was a bellwether for whether Donald Trump was “doomed” in the general election. Polls found Ryan with a wide lead in the race and showed him to be extremely popular with Republicans in the district.

Ryan says the victory isn’t a reflection on how Trump will fare in Wisconsin, but rather that “right here in Wisconsin people know me very, very well”.

House Speaker Paul Ryan squelched any chance of an August surprise in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, while a former Marine running for the first time easily won a three-way race for an open congressional seat in the northeast of the state.

Don’t call it a victory party for House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Ryan, 46, who reluctantly won the speaker’s gavel past year, faces huge challenges in the coming months: protecting the House GOP’s 59-seat majority, promoting a conservative policy agenda to an electorate that is mostly paying attention to Trump – and, like an overworked parent, trying to calm his party’s infighting. Trump said he was not ready to endorse Ryan, but several days later at a rally in Green Bay, he did announce his endorsement.

Mr Ryan, the top elected Republican, has been voted in nine times by constituents in his congressional district, so the race would usually garner little attention. That stuff sells, but it doesn’t stick. At the end of the night, the result was much closer to one than the other.

Nehlen tried to link himself to Trump’s outsider status..

In one July 23 incident, Nehlen supporters and mothers whose children were killed by undocumented immigrants challenged Ryan’s lack of full support for Trump’s immigration agenda.

No House speaker in modern political history has lost a primary, and Ryan is hugely popular in the southeastern Wisconsin district he has represented for almost two decades.