No entity in American politics seems as sure about what the midterm elections are about as the Ohio Democratic Party. His opponent in the Senate race is Republican JD Vance, a “vulture capitalist” from San Francisco, in the preferred parlance of the state party, who opened “a virtual non-profit organization” to fight addiction who hired a psychiatrist with ties to Purdue Pharma to help her. Her own running mate, Rep. Tim Ryan, meanwhile, is a longtime pro-union citizen and onetime college quarterback with a Midwestern accent and a knack for keeping a safe distance from elements of his party's progressive social agenda. During the campaign, he showed a penchant for playing reality trainer to the younger, more ideological Vance. Asked on a debate stage to criticize Nancy Pelosi, Ryan pointed out that he had run against her for House minority leader and then turned to Vance, whom he addressed as “J. RE.” “You've got to have the guts to stand up to your leaders,” Ryan said. “Those leaders in DC, they're going to eat you like a chew toy, right? I mean, you called Trump 'America's Hitler.' Then you kissed him. the ass.” It's been a while—perhaps not since Barack Obama's battles with Mitt Romney a decade ago—since the Democrat could completely play the sweetie in a political confrontation and the Republican the nerd.
For the Democratic Party, Ryan has provided a rare glimmer of optimism. Ohio, once a bellwether, has become more decidedly Republican—Donald Trump won the state by about eight points in both 2016 and 2020—but Ryan was very close to Vance throughout the cycle, and recently left with him in two major polls. Ryan, who is forty-nine and has represented the state in Congress for two decades, can strongly challenge a particular, increasingly anachronistic type of Democrat: He is a free trade skeptic, has been pro-life for much of his career and despite not being quite hawkish on immigration is still somewhat hawkish for a Democrat. If you're optimistic about the potential of this kind of approach, then you might see Ryan and John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Senate candidate who also evokes the working-class Democrat of the Midwest, as signs of revival. “After years of being overlooked, Tim Ryan is pointing his party toward a path to recovery in the Midwest,” argued Alec MacGillis, in ProPublica and the Times. If you're a pessimist, then you might see Ryan more simply, as the last of his kind.
Winning ten congressional races in the Mahoning Valley, especially as it has become much more Trumpian, took a certain amount of savvy. On this campaign, Ryan said he hopes Joe Biden doesn't run for President in 2024, which has the effect of distancing himself from Biden's unpopularity without abandoning Democratic policy positions. (He also says he wants Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump off the stage as part of a “generational change.”) Ryan is appealing to an “exhausted majority,” an emotionally astute phrase that suggests 2022 politics may boil down to to partisan Democrats, partisan Republicans, and people who are fed up with all of that.
For years, Ryan has occasionally appeared on Fox News, offering a revelation of Democratic support for hawkish positions on trade, immigration or China. This summer, he created a clever ad consisting entirely of clips of Fox News personalities praising him. Maria Bartiromo: “Congressman Ryan, you have been a job creator. You were tough on China.” Peter Doocy: “Tim Ryan, who is obviously proposing some of the more modest ideas.” Tucker Carlson: “Watch what happened when Rep. Tim Ryan tried to remind his fellow Democrats that most Americans don't actually support open borders.” As Dispatch's Audrey Fahlberg and Harvest Prude pointed out, the ad allowed Ryan to claim the “moderate” banner even though he hadn't often used that word to describe himself and even though, at that point, he had voted with Biden one hundred percent of the time. There was a certain irony to this, since Ryan was raising money from progressive donors to market himself to conservative audiences as a moderate. But he also, perhaps inadvertently, argued that Ryan was personally indispensable to the national Democratic Party because there were virtually no other members within it who could produce a Fox News praise reel like this. One of a kind is something that helps being a politician.
Many Democrats have increasingly focused on Ryan's issues and the geographic terrain as essential to the Party's future. In an essay in The Atlantic this week, Sen. Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, argued that “the postwar neoliberal economic plan is coming to an end.” Murphy suggested that the Biden agenda's investments in infrastructure and clean energy, support for domestic work and strong antitrust enforcement represented a path to prosperity for Americans who felt left behind and, possibly, a way to revitalize the support for his party from working-class Americans. .
Such calls for a renewed economic nationalism suggest that the commitments the Democratic Party made to globalization during the 1990s and early 2000s—codified in its passage NAFTA and support for China joining the World Trade Organization—could unravel and the experiment be repeated. But there is a paradox in this vision of the democratic future. He imagines an economy completely transformed, one that no longer relies on coal, but somehow provides exactly the same job base, with exactly the same policy, with exactly the same appeal. Membership in Ohio is about half of what it was in 1989. Of course, it is possible that the Democratic Party can create a transformation that reinvigorates union politics, with high-wage jobs filled by high school graduates in new production facilities—all fit neatly into the social hole left by deindustrialization. But it is more likely that even if such a transformation takes place—and if it does it will take years, if not decades—its beneficiaries will be shaped differently and organized around different issues than before.
Perhaps for this reason, some Democrats in the Midwest have campaigned on a combination of a familiar pro-labor approach to the economy with a much more overt social progressivism, such as Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Fetterman. Both Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro, who is leading the Pennsylvania governor's race, are mainstream liberals who appeal to suburban voters.
One reason the contest between Vance and Ryan is so exciting is that the two men have crossed paths, literally and figuratively. Vance grew up poor in Middletown, Ohio. He made it through the Marines, Ohio State University and Yale Law School, where his mentor, Professor Amy Chua, encouraged him to write the memoir that became “Hillbilly Elegy.” He cultivated ties in Silicon Valley and worked in venture capital, but maintained a role as a social commentator. His main interest seemed to be reviving the Midwest from the effects of post-industrial decline. The Times created a photo from 2018 of Vance and Ryan smiling together on a bus during a Ryan-led tour of the Midwest for venture capitalists as a way to encourage investment.
But in this campaign Vance and Ryan have adopted the basic emotional tones of their parties: Vance, who has become a culture warrior, has projected a bleak outlook on modernity and called for a retreat to traditional values, while Ryan boasted about the coming era of microchip manufacturing and clean energy in Ohio. MacGillis noted, in his Times piece, that Ryan contrasts Vance's opposition to EV subsidies with his own view, in which they are a key component of renewal. “Worried about losing internal combustion car jobs – man, where have you been?” Ryan said to McGillis. “These jobs are progressing. This factory was empty.”
The most telling part of the Ohio Senate race is that Ryan isn't exactly running for an upset. Over time he changed his position on abortion from pro-life to pro-choice. In economic matters, he tries to cross the coming economy and the old one. It's mostly a reliable vote for Democrats in Congress. In relation to Vance, he has positioned himself as an optimist. Ryan is asking Ohio voters for a lot. But he is not calling for an end to globalization. ♦
