HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND INFURIATE PEOPLE. Trump’s Wisconsin strategy: Burn it all down.

“There’s no question, anytime Donald Trump takes after Paul Ryan, it just makes the people in Wisconsin a little more angry at him,” said Brandon Scholz, a longtime GOP operative who runs a governmental and public affairs shop in Madison.

Trump has never led a poll in Wisconsin during the general election, according to RealClearPolitics, and a Marquette Law School poll last week found him trailing Clinton by 7 percentage points — a departure from signs in September that he was closing the gap with Clinton.

In southeastern Wisconsin, home to the Milwaukee suburbs and some of the state’s most populous, heavily Republican counties, Clinton led Trump by just 42 percent to 40 percent, according to that October poll. In three of those deep-red counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington, known as the “WOW counties” — Trump led Clinton by only 39 to 37 percent.

“He doesn’t have a prayer if he can’t do well in those Republican counties, the WOW counties outside Milwaukee,” Scholz said. “Those are ground zero for Republicans. If you intend to … do well in Wisconsin, you’ve got to take those three counties with 70, 80 percent of the vote.”

It’s a sharp decline from Mitt Romney’s performance last cycle.

2016 isn’t going nearly as well as I’d hoped.