Tim Ryan Struggles to Reach Ohio’s Exhausted Majority

Mr. Ryan, the Ohio Democrat running for Senate, has been listening to white working-class voters. Whether they are listening to him and the Democratic Party is the question. NILES, OHIO — Representative Tim Ryan won re-election in 2020. But in one sharply personal way, he lost, too. Mr. Ryan, 48, the Ohio Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, was born and raised in Niles, a manufacturing city of roughly 18,000 that sits halfway between Youngstown and Warren in southern Trumbull County. Mr. Ryan had once won Trumbull with as much as 74 percent of the vote. That number fell to just 48 percent in 2020, when he narrowly lost the county by roughly one percentage point. A place that was once a bastion of white blue-collar Democrats turned away from a white Democratic native son whose blue-collar grandfather had been a steelworker in Niles for four decades. Now, Mr. Ryan is trying to win back his party’s voters in Trumbull and throughout Ohio as he runs for Senate. His problem in Trumbull exemplifies the larger problem for Democrats in the Midwest: The lingering appeal of Trumpism and the erosion of support for the party among the white working-class voters who once formed a loyal part of its base in the industrial heart of the country. Many national Democratic pollsters and pundits have written off Mr. Ryan’s pursuit as a near-impossible task. They see Ohio as too red and too white to change course. But as his Republican opponents have been veering farther to the right and aggressively pursuing former President Donald J. Trump’s endorsement, Mr. Ryan is betting voters have had enough of the extremism in American politics. He is focused on bringing back voters who feel forgotten by Democrats and turned off by Republicans. “I feel like I am representing the Exhausted Majority,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview, using a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked. People, Mr. Ryan added, “just want to move on and actually focus on the things that are really important.” Like other Democrats in long-shot races, Mr. Ryan must stay firmly within a narrow lane as he vies to replace Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who is retiring. Mr. Ryan does not tout Medicare for All and other transformative policies that tend to energize progressives, and he does not want to talk about transgender women in sports and other divisive issues. Instead, he wants to campaign strictly on jobs, manufacturing and taking on China. His first television commercial — part of a $3.3 million ad buy — almost sounds like it came from a Republican, squarely centering on the nation’s fight to beat China on manufacturing. “It’s us versus them,” he says in a digital one-minute version of the ad, during which he mentions “China” eight times in 60 seconds. The ad has drawn criticism from some Asian advocacy groups and elected officials, who described it as racist and called on him to take it down. Shekar Narasimhan, the chairman of AAPI Victory Fund, a political action committee that mobilizes Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, urged Mr. Ryan to not use hate or fear to win votes. “That’s what the Trump Republicans do and why we fight them everywhere,” he said in a statement. Visit us for more information: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/index.html