Why Ohio's Tim Ryan Is Democrats' Most Important 2022 Candidate - Seib
In a 2022 midterm election cycle full of critical races, Tim Ryan in many ways will be the Democrats’ most important candidate. Mr. Ryan is a House member from blue-collar Ohio—the Mahoning Valley, Youngstown, Akron—who is seeking to win a Senate seat opened up by the retiring Republican Rob Portman. Mr. Ryan’s candidacy will be a testing ground for virtually every key question Democrats face next year:
Can they win back working-class Trump voters? Is the Trump influence a positive or a negative for Republicans? Can Democrats maintain the foothold in the industrial Midwest that gave Joe Biden the presidency? Can they keep the focus on bread-and-butter issues rather than the cultural issues Republicans will stress? Can they hang onto the Senate even if they lose control of the House? Moreover, there may be no Democrat in the land pulling harder for his party to get its act together and pass both a bipartisan infrastructure bill and some version of President Biden’s $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” plan. Mr. Ryan’s campaign focuses, above all, on the idea that government should be investing heavily in turning Ohio’s old industrial economy into a new, clean-energy economy that provides new jobs to traditional workers.
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This drama is unfolding in a state that has been one of the nation’s political bellwethers for the last half-century—but that Democrats fear has been slipping away from them. Ohio had gone with the winner, regardless of party, in every presidential election since 1964, until Donald Trump broke the streak by winning Ohio while losing the national election in 2020. That has added to Democratic fears that this key state is moving out of their reach.
Ohio’s Republican drift stands as a sign of Democrats’ loosening connection with the union-dominated factory towns and blue-collar workers that were long the backbone of the party. Those workers, alienated from the progressive politics that dominate in the Democratic enclaves on the East and West coasts, were the voters Mr. Trump picked off in carrying the state . Yet maybe they aren’t lost for good to Democrats. Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, himself decidedly progressive, won re-election comfortably in 2018—in between the two Trump wins in Ohio—by arguing trade deals had hurt working-class Americans and advocating a higher minimum wage and support for union power. In short, he managed to win Trump voters.
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On the Republican side, five of the six candidates vying for the Senate nomination are jostling to prove who can best emulate Mr. Trump. Nothing could be better for Mr. Ryan’s campaign than for his Republican foes to spend millions slicing up one another—or for Mr. Trump to keep their focus on his grievances about how he thinks the 2020 election was stolen from him rather than on national Democrats’ current-day problems, or on an agenda for the future. In sum, nearly all the forces that will course through 2022 are running through Ohio—and landing squarely in the Tim Ryan campaign.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-ohios-tim-ryan-is-democrats-most-important-2022-candidate-11634566217 (subscription)
