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Is Tim Ryan the Last of the Midwestern Union Democrats?

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No entity in American politics seems so sure of what the midterms are about as the Ohio Democratic Party. Its opponent in the Senate race is the Republican J. D. Vance, a “vulture capitalist” from San Francisco, in the state party’s preferred parlance, who opened “a sham non-profit” to fight addiction that hired a psychiatrist with links to Purdue Pharma to help lead it. Its own candidate, the congressman Tim Ryan, meanwhile, is a longtime pro-union pol 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 has shown an inclination to play reality instructor 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. D.” “You have to have the courage to take on your own leaders,” Ryan said. “These leaders in D.C., they will eat you up like a chew toy, right? I mean, you were calling Trump ‘America’s Hitler.’ Then you kissed his ass.” It has been a while—maybe not since Barack Obama’s battles with Mitt Romney, a decade ago—since the Democrat could so completely play the jock in a political standoff and the Republican the nerd.

For the Democratic Party, Ryan has supplied a rare point of optimism. Ohio, once a bellwether, has become more straightforwardly Republican—Donald Trump won the state by about eight points in both 2016 and 2020—but Ryan has polled very close to Vance throughout the cycle, and has recently pulled even with him in two major polls. Ryan, who is forty-nine and has represented the state in Congress for two decades, can vividly evoke a particular, increasingly anachronistic type of Democrat: he is skeptical of free trade, was pro-life for much of his career, and despite not being quite an immigration hawk is still somewhat hawkish for a Democrat. If you are optimistic about the possibilities of this kind of approach, then you might see Ryan and John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Senate candidate who also evokes the Midwestern labor Democrat of yore, as signs of revival. “After years of being overlooked, Tim Ryan is pointing his party towards a path to recovery in the Midwest,” Alec MacGillis recently argued, in ProPublica and the Times. If you are pessimistic, then you might see Ryan more simply, as just about the last of his kind.

Winning ten congressional races in the Mahoning Valley, especially as it’s turned much more Trumpy, has required a certain amount of savvy. On the stump this campaign, Ryan has said that he hopes Joe Biden does not run for President in 2024, which has the effect of distancing himself from Biden’s unpopularity without forswearing Democratic policy positions. (He also says he wants Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump to exit the stage as part of a “generational change.”) Ryan addresses himself to an “exhausted majority,” an emotionally astute phrasing that suggests the politics of 2022 can be boiled down to partisan Democrats, partisan Republicans, and people who are sick of it all.

For years, Ryan had appeared occasionally on Fox News, offering a veneer of Democratic support for hawkish positions on trade, immigration, or China. This summer, he produced a clever ad that was composed exclusively of clips of Fox News personalities praising him. Maria Bartiromo: “Congressman Ryan, you’ve been a jobs creator. You’ve been tough on China.” Peter Doocy: “Tim Ryan, who is obviously pitching some of the more moderate ideas.” Tucker Carlson: “Watch what happened when Congressman Tim Ryan tried to remind his fellow-Democrats that most Americans don’t actually support open borders.” As the Dispatch’s Audrey Fahlberg and Harvest Prude pointed out, the ad let Ryan claim the banner of “moderate” even though he had not often used that word to describe himself, and even though he had, at that point, voted with Biden a hundred per cent of the time. There was a pretzeling set of ironies to this, in that Ryan was raising money from progressive donors to advertise himself to conservative audiences as a moderate. But it also, perhaps unintentionally, made a case that Ryan was personally indispensable to the national Democratic Party, because there were basically no other members within it who could generate a Fox News praise reel like this. One of a kind is a helpful thing for a politician to be.

Many Democrats have increasingly begun to focus on Ryan’s issues and geographic terrain as essential for the future of the Party. In an essay in The Atlantic this week, Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, argued that “the postwar neoliberal economic project is nearing its end.” Murphy suggested that the Biden agenda’s investments in infrastructure and clean energy, support for domestic labor, and vigorous antitrust enforcement represented a path to prosperity for Americans who felt left behind and, possibly, a way to revive support for his party among working-class Americans.

Such calls for a renewed economic nationalism suggest that the commitments the Democratic Party made to globalization during the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands—encoded in the passage of NAFTA and support for China joining the World Trade Organization—could be unwound, and the experiment run over again. But there is a paradox in this vision of the Democratic future. It imagines an economy fully transformed, one that is no longer based on carbon but somehow supplying exactly the same labor base, with exactly the same politics, subject to exactly the same kind of appeal. Union membership in Ohio is about half of what it was in 1989. Of course, it is possible that the Democratic Party will be able to engineer a transformation that revitalizes union-hall politics, with high-wage jobs performed by high-school-educated workers in new manufacturing facilities—all plugging neatly into the social hole left by deindustrialization. But it is more likely that even if such a transformation does take place—and if it does it will likely take years, if not decades—its beneficiaries would have a different shape and organize themselves around different issues than before.

Perhaps for this reason, some Democrats in the Midwest have been campaigning on a combination of a familiar pro-labor approach to the economy with a much more overt social progressivism, such as Senator 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 compelling is that the two men have crossed paths, both literally and figuratively. Vance grew up poor in Middletown, Ohio. He made it out via 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 overarching interest seemed to be the revitalization the Midwest from the effects of post-industrial decline. The Times produced a photo from 2018 of Vance and Ryan grinning together on a bus, during a Ryan-led tour of the Midwest for venture capitalists, as a way of encouraging investments.

But in this campaign Vance and Ryan have adopted the basic emotional tones of their parties: Vance, who has become a bristling culture warrior, has projected a bleak perspective on modernity and called for a retreat to traditional values, whereas Ryan has bragged about the coming age of microchip and clean-energy manufacturing in Ohio. MacGillis noted, in his Times piece, that Ryan contrasted Vance’s opposition to electric-vehicle subsidies with his own view, in which they are a major component of renewal. “He’s worried about losing the internal-combustion-auto jobs—dude, where’ve you been?” Ryan said to MacGillis. “Those jobs are going. That factory was empty.”

The most telling part of the Ohio Senate race is that Ryan isn’t exactly running as a throwback, either. He has, over time, changed his position on abortion, from pro-life to pro-choice. On economic matters, he is trying to straddle the coming economy and the older one. He is a mostly reliable vote for the Democrats in Congress. Relative to Vance, he has positioned himself as an optimist. Ryan is asking the voters of Ohio for many things. But he isn’t asking for a globalization do-over. ♦

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