One of the least known candidates on the Democratic stage tonight, Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, is the one most attuned to the electoral needs of his party.
Ryan eloquently emphasized that Democrats will have trouble winning if they are seen as bi-coastal, elitist, and academic, rather than reconnecting with blue-collar workers in Middle America, both geographically and culturally. That’s one big reason they lost to Donald Trump in 2016. Huge swaths of would-be Democratic voters don’t have any patience with the identity politics and crazy-left nostrums advanced by fake-Indian Harvard professors and Vermonters who honeymooned in Soviet Russia.
Ryan said that Democrats won’t win elections in places like Ohio or Kentucky if they don’t appeal to blue-collar workers. Talk about high carbon taxes to combat “climate change” won’t win votes from people who mine coal or work in car factories, or even who remember when those jobs were the bread and butter of their communities.
Ryan also sounded a patriotic tone when talking about the need to not withdraw from the world, but to combat those who protected the terrorists who flew planes into American buildings on 9/11. The isolationist Rep. Tulsi Gabbard wrongly said that the Taliban had nothing to do with those horrid attacks; Ryan rightly pointed out that al Qaeda could not have operated without Taliban support. Most Americans who were at least ten years old in 2001 still understand this. While they might not like having American troops in Afghanistan, they will identify with Ryan’s insistence that this nation still must act as if dangerous enemies still exist and must be combated.
For a left-wing Democratic primary electorate, this might not win enough friends for Ryan. But if Ryan ever reached a general election, these instincts of his would serve him well, in a way all the other quasi-socialists on stage could never achieve.
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates give the impression of being embarrassed to be American. Ryan has the vibe of someone who loves not just what his vision for a changed American would be, but who loves what America always has been. This is what most of Middle America believes. Unless the Democratic nominee believes it, too, he or she is unlikely to win.
