The Revenge of Tim ‘I Told You So’ Ryan
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LIMA, OH. — A typical Democrat wouldn’t be here.
It’s the final stretch of his Senate race, and Tim Ryan is spending one of the campaign’s last Saturdays in Allen County, where Trump won by a mammoth 40 points two years ago. Most in his party believe the white working-class voters here have been permanently lost to the GOP. But Ryan made his way to this cavernous union hall in northwest Ohio because he hasn’t given up.
On stage, the 10-term congressman stood before a crowd of just a few dozen. He talked about ending a “broken economic system” in which workers “work six or seven days a week to make ends meet.” He lambasted trade deals that sent American manufacturing jobs to China — and criticized his GOP opponent, J.D. Vance, for raising “all that money from the big corporations who shipped our jobs overseas.” He said the word “Democrat” only four times during his half hour of remarks — and almost always in a negative context.
It was probably a wise approach in a county that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ryan is nevertheless convinced his voters are at union halls in counties just like it across Ohio. Over the last 18 months of campaigning, has held hundreds of similar events throughout he state — including a second one at a building trades hall in East Toledo that evening. “That’s the coalition,” Ryan tells me, bleary-eyed and slumped in a chair at the Toledo stop. “You’ve got to get those guys back.”
In national Democratic circles, it hasn’t been fashionable since Trump’s 2016 win to “get those guys back” — at least not with Ryan’s vigor. A vocal faction responded to the shock of Trump’s victory with a strategy to increase turnout in Sun Belt states, believing that the emergence of a younger, more diverse electorate held greater promise for the party. Those efforts paid off in 2020, when states like Arizona and Georgia — which hadn’t cast their electoral votes for a Democrat since the 20th century — went for Joe Biden.
But that shift in focus pushed former working-class Democratic strongholds like Ohio, where Trump twice won by 8 points, farther down on the party’s list of priorities. Ryan vehemently objected, and he has demanded his party rebuild the so-called “Blue Wall” that Trump breached. His mission has sometimes included self-destructive tactics, such as challenging Nancy Pelosi for House Democrats’ top leadership post. “That’s an insane thing to do, for anybody,” Ryan admits. But it was necessary in the Trump era, Ryan reasons: “Somebody had to have that conversation of how screwed up it is that this demagogue can come out of nowhere and bullshit everybody.”
The vacant U.S. Senate seat in Ohio has allowed Ryan to put his best ideas to the test — and wildly exceed expectations in doing so. Most recent polls have shown Ryan, who is running to replace retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R), in an effective tie with Vance, a venture capitalist whose campaign was buoyed by millions of dollars in support from Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. That competitiveness caught Republicans flat-footed, forcing the party and its allies to spend $28 million on advertising in a state where it hadn’t planned on spending much at all.
More than simply a Senate race, what’s unfolding in Ohio is a redemption arc for a congressman who has been ignored, marginalized and maligned by his own party for his out-of-vogue political prescriptions. If Ryan wins, he proves a Democrat can win on the backs of voters his party has forsaken. If he loses, he likely demonstrates a willingness among those voters to return to the Democratic fold — so long as the party courts them as acutely as Ryan has. Neither outcome is likely to settle his party’s debate over winning tactics, but Ryan will have nevertheless proved his point, donning his fellow Democrats’ doubt as a badge of honor.
For much of the last decade, Tim Ryan has related to his party in the same manner as a pebble relates to the inside of a shoe. While Democrats licked their wounds after the GOP swept the White House and Congress, Ryan blamed his party for flubbing its outreach to working-class voters like the ones in his Youngstown-based district. “We need blue-collar workers to vote blue, and in order to do that, we need to have the message and the messengers … able to connect with them,” he said on CNN soon after Trump’s win. Ryan challenged Pelosi for the House minority leader post soon thereafter and belly-flopped spectacularly. He led a second failed rebellion in 2018 after Democrats regained control of the House.
Critics dismissed Ryan’s efforts as arrogant, and, at times, misogynistic (a “#FiveWhiteGuys” hashtag derided Ryan and his allies for trying to deny Pelosi the gavel shortly after a record number of Democratic women won their congressional races). His brief run in the 2020 presidential race had been similarly received as a vanity project. Ryan, who branded himself as a “progressive who knows how to talk to working-class people,” spent his two appearances on the Democratic presidential debate stage replaying his criticisms of the party’s “perception problem”’ on a loop. His lone high-profile moment came when an irate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) excoriated Ryan for second-guessing the line items in Sanders’ universal health care bill — “I wrote the damn bill!” Sanders barked to thunderous applause.
Ryan relishes his reputation as an iconoclast — so much so that he’s made it a cornerstone of his Senate campaign. He skipped appearing with Biden during his swings through Ohio, and he has encouraged former President Barack Obama to keep away. In a rerun of his House antics, he hasn’t committed to supporting Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to lead the chamber next year. He has, however, committed to being “a royal pain in the ass” if he makes it there, Ryan told Politico last week.
The rebellion serves a key function: To put as much distance as he can between himself and the Democratic brand. “It’s a pretty negative one in places like this,” Ryan tells me in Toledo. I ask him how he thinks it’s perceived. “Elite,” he says, before I even finish the question. “That sensibility is just a huge headwind for us.”
So Ryan has barnstormed the reddest corners of Ohio as the patron saint of the anti-elite. “We remind them of an old-school Democrat who’s all-in for the working person,” as Ryan puts it — “white, Black, Brown, gay, straight, men, women, service, manufacturing — anybody out there busting their ass.” He’s fervently opposed to trade deals, especially any involving China; so fervent was his first television advertisement’s “us versus them” rhetoric against “Communist China” that he was accused of Sinophobia by fellow House Democrats. Ryan dismisses Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as “not helpful,” but has applauded “the New Green Deal — 1,000 percent for that,” he told me in 2018, drawing a line between the transition to a climate-friendly economy and job creation.
Ryan is also loath to invoke Sanders, his 2020 debate sparring partner. But Ryan’s anti-trade, pro-green economy overtures sound a lot like the Vermont senator’s.“Look, I think Tim is running a very good campaign,” Sanders tells me. “What he is in his own way — not my way — is he is trying to stand with the working class of Ohio — trying to stand with them and take on powerful special interests.”
To be clear, opposition to trade deals and China’s economic omnipresence are concerns Sanders and Ryan both share with Trump. Ryan has shied away from that association with the former president, even winking at Trump’s “America First” slogan in an early TV ad. Indeed, Ryan sometimes runs so far from his party that he almost looks like a Republican. He’s as likely to be found decrying trade deals on Fox News as he to be on MSNBC doing the same — or running an advertisement on the right-wing channel that’s a supercut of Fox’s conservative hosts offering praise for the moderate Democrat. His campaign bus and the rubber bracelets he hands out at campaign events — “Ohio needs an @$$-kicker” — are all red. (Neither an homage to the Ohio State Buckeyes nor a subconscious nod to the GOP, a Ryan spokesperson says: “Tim likes the color and it’s easy to spot in the wild.”)
But Ryan is clear that he is not condoning the GOP’s election denialism, the insurrection on January 6th or any of Trump’s other sundry attacks on democracy. He doesn’t think many voters who cast ballots for Trump in Ohio do, either. “We are running against people who want to destroy the country, and we keep fucking up our message, keep screwing up what we’re supposed to be doing here and who we’re supposed to be for,” Ryan says. “These guys, they voted for Trump, but they’re not storming the Capitol — that’s not their values.”
Ryan swears a lot — when he speaks to me, to voters, during his campaign speeches. In his two debates with Vance, he belittled his opponent with colloquial sobriquets like “my guy” and “brother.” Ryan characterizes the current political moment with beer belly sophistication: “age of stupidity.” The 49-year-old Ryan, tall and broad shouldered, looks like a former football player because he is: The grandson of steelworkers was recruited to play at Youngstown State until an injury ended his career. He campaigns in a Gen X soccer dad uniform of jeans, white Nikes, and a red — always red — “Tim Ryan for Senate” windbreaker.
He nails, in other words, the “authenticity” factor, that je ne sais quois that helps candidates thrive when political conditions would suggest otherwise. “Tim Ryan has done a good job communicating to people that he’s on their side in a very human way,” says Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark. That’s helped Ryan as much as it may have hurt Vance, whose time in Silicon Valley and essays in The Atlantic about “day trips to wine country” have, as Ryan and his allies insist, reduced him to an opportunistic carpetbagger.
Ryan is running “the best campaign of the cycle,” Longwell says. “I try very hard to not play fantasy politics, but the one place where I’ve been willing to indulge in some real optimism is Ohio.” His embrace of the working class is key to Longwell’s assessment, but so, too, is his courtship of highly-educated suburban voters, who have emerged as Democrats’ reliable demographic since Trump’s 2016 victory. On the stump, Ryan talks about GOP attacks on abortion rights as “government overreach,” addressing the issue without taking up the culture war. His football career cuts both ways: Ryan talks about treating his lingering injuries with yoga and a mindfulness practice, New Age remedies with suburban “yoga mom” appeal.
Longwell notes a commercial in which Ryan is sitting with his wife and having a glass of wine, talking about how they only agree with one another 70 percent of the time. “He’s telegraphing the college-educated suburbanites in that ad,” she notes. (There’s also a chance Ryan doesn’t need to do much to activate those voters, who have proclivity to reject Vance’s anti-abortion and pro-Trump sensibilities.)
This has all amounted to a statistical tie with Vance in a state where recent elections would suggest a much wider gap. Ryan is polling better than almost any Democrats attempting to flip GOP-held Senate seats, bested only by Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman and Wisconsin’s Mandela Barnes. He’s raised nearly $40 million dollars, an enormous sum only Fetterman has eclipsed. But Ryan’s success hasn’t inspired support from the national party, which has buoyed Barnes, Fetterman, and North Carolina’s Cheri Beasley with tens of millions in outside spending. “Ohio is the battleground of the past,” a Democratic strategist told the Washington Post last week, adding that the party is better off investing in places with more college-educated voters that are trending bluer, not former strongholds that are trending red.
The sentiment played right into Ryan’s hands. “I will fight anybody from any party who’s trying to peddle that bullcrap here in Ohio,” Ryan said during his event at the union hall in Lima. “If you need a college degree to get the passport to be able to go into the political party — no shot on my watch.”
“They really said that out loud!” Ryan tells me. “We kind of knew that was where everyone was going. But you can’t, like,” Ryan pauses and shakes his head. “It’s so insulting.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) shrugs off the suggestion that national Democrats ought to be doing more. “There’s not a bottomless amount of money and help,” he tells me at Ryan’s event in Toledo. “The priority is always incumbents. That’s the way the system works, always has worked. When I ran in ’06, that’s the way it worked — hi, how are you?” Brown has been saved from the tedium of Democrats’ pursestrings by the president of a local pipefitters’ union.
Brown is the only elected Democrat Ryan namedrops on the campaign trail. Some of that is intuitive: Brown happens to be the only Democrat elected to statewide office in Ohio, having defended his seat for a third time in 2018 by roughly the same margin as Trump’s victory two years earlier. More of it is about how Brown won: On a message that drove home the very same worker-centric platform Ryan champions. On the lawn outside of the building trades union in Toledo, union members raced toward Brown like moths to an (American-made) lantern. Brown, gravel-voiced and characteristically disheveled in a pinstripe blazer and black sneakers, welcomed their approach, slipping so seamlessly into the jargon of plant closures and union pensions you’d think he worked a line.
Brown maintains a more progressive posture than Ryan — the senator, for example, supported the Biden administration’s decision to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt per borrower, while Ryan dismissed it as an elitist handout. Brown won’t take the bait when I ask how they’re different: “He’s taller and younger but other than that, not much — nice try, though,” he says. But in crucial ways, “Tim has absolutely emulated a lot of Sherrod’s 2018 campaign,” says Justin Barasky, who managed Brown’s race. “But it’s not by design as much as it is real.”
Ryan was in his fullest expression at his event in Toledo. After delivering remarks, he drank a beer, tossed a football, and obliged a pair of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers members to take a selfie with him in front of their motorcycles. The sun set behind a pair of 20-foot-tall inflatables of a “corporate pig” and “fat cat” squeezing a worker in one fist and a bag of money in the other. The pig’s face had been covered with a photo of Vance.
Union members spoke glowingly of Ryan — always in terms of policy before personality. “We load equipment and teach foreign people how to run the equipment as it ships away, and people lose their jobs,” says Tracy Counselor, the pipefitters’ union president who spoke with Brown. “It’s refreshing to see someone actually fighting for us.” Joe Abernathy, a leader in his local IBEW, says he’s hearing a lot of enthusiasm for Ryan, even among members who voted for Trump. “It’s a common misnomer that we’re all Democrats,” Abernathy explains. “We’ve got to find some way to reach across the aisle, and I think Tim does an excellent job of that.”
It was easy to gaze upon the scene and think Ryan has cracked some code, but the odds are still very much stacked against him. Enthusiasm is among Republicans, not Democrats, across the board this cycle. Collin Docterman, the chair of the Scioto County Democratic Party in deep red southern Ohio, says he’s optimistic Ryan’s methods will convince some working class voters to vote for him, but definitely not all. “There’ still a demonization of anyone with a ‘D’ by their name — people think Democrats are bought and paid for by the Hollywood elite,” he explains. “It’ll be a long time before we get out of a general mentality here.”
No matter what happens, Ryan’s supporters hope Democrats are paying attention. “If Tim wins, there’s going to be a lot of important reasons why,” Barasky says. “But it’s important, if Tim loses, that we don’t learn the wrong lesson from what is an unbelievable campaign.”
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