Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, reportedly thinks his ticket to higher office is the “yoga vote.” What, exactly, that means is unclear. But Ryan’s ambitions are serious, and that means his theory is likely to be tested soon.
Ryan is an endangered species— a Democrat in the Rust Belt. He’s gotten a lot of mileage out of it since 2016. Based on reports this month, Ryan either wants House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s, D-Calif., job, or Donald Trump’s. According to a new report in The Intercept, the congressman, who represents a district in northeastern Ohio, “has been telling political consultants and operatives that he intends to run for president” and is even “beginning to put together a team.”
As The Intercept points out, “Ryan’s district is one of the few poor, majority-white districts that is represented by a Democrat,” and has hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs since the turn of the millennium. Ryan regularly laments the party’s failure to connect with voters whose concerns are primarily economic.
And that’s where his “yoga vote” strategy seems odd. The label doesn’t exactly run parallel to similar demographic catchalls like the “soccer mom vote,” narrowly describing people who do yoga, but is aimed instead at voters with whom broader ideas about mindfulness might resonate. James Gimian, the publisher of Mindful magazine, knows Ryan. He told The Intercept “The so-called yoga voters are the kind of folks who realize that while they grew up with their mom saying, ‘Pay attention,’ nobody trained them in how to pay attention and use their mind to focus on what’s important.”
“That’s a growing population — it’s no longer just Lululemon yoga women,” he added, further claiming anyone who is navigating the “emotional land mine of modern day living” is a target for Ryan’s message. Whatever that means.
Even if it’s not just “Lululemon yoga women,” that sounds a lot more like a strategy for Brooklyn than Akron, and makes for an odd complement to Ryan’s blue collar-oriented economic populism. For what it’s worth, this isn’t a passing interest for Ryan. He wrote a book called A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit, and is the founder of something called the House “Quiet Time Caucus.” Ryan is also an ambassador for YogaVotes, an organization focused on “Uniting the work we do on the mat with the decisions we make at the voting booth.” It’s safe to assume their membership isn’t concentrated in Youngstown.
To be clear, educated voters, especially women, are an important constituency for Democrats, and they make up a demographic the party has sought to activate in suburban areas this cycle, hoping to capitalize on growing distaste for Trump. But Ryan’s economic message would seem to be less resonant with them than with working class men whose frustrations with progressive identity politics and struggle to find gainful employment drove them to Trump and the GOP. Even if you accept Gimian’s expanded definition of the “yoga vote” to include people concerned more broadly with mindfulness, it’s still hard to see how that’s the Democratic Party’s ticket to a Rust Belt resurgence.
The possibility remains that Ryan sees himself as someone who can capture yoga voters and blue collar voters simultaneously, building a formidable coalition that other Democrats could never dream of uniting. But cultural anxieties are what’s driven many working class voters to Trump, and the founder of the House “Quiet Time Caucus” would seem an ineffective ambassador of economic populism. But, then again, so would a gaudy Manhattan billionaire.
Given that Ryan has reportedly (and confidently) told at least one operative he’s “gonna win” the 2020 primary, we should find out what on earth he’s actually talking about soon enough.
