By Griffin Connolly
CQ-Roll Call
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the always-raging spin war between Democrats and Republicans, Democratic candidate Randy Bryce got the upper hand over the weekend on House Speaker Paul D. Ryan.
Bryce captured a screenshot of one of Ryan’s tweets and turned it around into a fundraising drive for his campaign to unseat the speaker in Wisconsin’s 1st District.
Ryan tweeted Saturday about a public high school secretary in Pennsylvania he had met who told him her $1.50 pay raise each week would “more than cover her Costco membership for the year.”
Before Ryan deleted the tweet, Bryce took a screenshot. He then asked his followers to “chip in $1.50 now to help us repeal and replace Ryan permanently this November.”
Since he initiated the drive, Bryce has raised $130,109 from donors, he told Politico. Half donated $1.50 to his campaign.
Ryan isn’t the only politician whose words have been used against him in messaging battles over the tax code overhaul passed in December.
Republicans have repeatedly hammered House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California for saying the $1,000 bonuses millions of Americans received after the tax overhaul became law were “crumbs” compared to “the bonus that corporate America received.”
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise’s office has published at least a dozen press releases ribbing Pelosi’s “crumbs” comment.
President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence also had some fun with the phrase.
“If you’re going to say $1,000 is crumbs, you live in a different world than I live in,” Pence said last week at the Republican congressional retreat. “Any leader in America that would say $1,000 in the pockets of working families is crumbs is out of touch with the American people.”
Bryce raised nearly $2.7 million in 2017, per his FEC files, a huge sum for a challenger in an off-year before midterms. But that was just a fourth of the $10.1 million Ryan raised.
Bryce, a former ironworker widely known on social media as “Iron Stache” for his bushy mustache, faces steep odds in a red district like Wisconsin’s 1st.
