Ryan
COLUMBUS – U.S. Rep. Mike Carey of Columbus was among the Republican congressmen who met with Donald Trump this week at the former president’s property in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Ohio’s U.S. Senate race came up, Carey said afterward in an interview.
“‘Tim Ryan is giving me credit for a bunch of things,’” Trump said, according to Carey. “I said, ‘I know Mr. President. Some of his campaign ads look like my campaign ads.’”
Ron Verb, a conservative talk radio host in Youngstown, said callers to his show, which airs throughout Ryan’s congressional district, go a little further when they search for a comparison.
“They call him Timmy Trump,” Verb said. “In fact, they say they would be surprised if in his next commercial, he doesn’t die his hair blonde and wear a blue suit and a red tie.”
Ryan’s focus on center-right voters, aided by a seven-figure ad blitz and a lack of corresponding ads from his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance, so far has paid off by making the race surprisingly competitive. Ryan’s campaign says their internal polling shows Ryan with a narrow lead, which functionally translates to a tie, and Republicans privately concede their polling shows a similar result.
But it also shows how tough it will be for Ryan to win, because of his need to gain support from one unlikely group of voters: Republicans.
Ryan’s team and allies believe he has a real shot of winning the November election.
“It’s never easy for a Democrat to win here statewide. But you do it by focusing on making people’s lives better, working to put more money in their pockets and being your authentic self,” said Justin Barasky, who managed Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown’s successful re-election campaign in 2018. “That’s what Tim is doing, and J.D. Vance isn’t doing any of those things.”
But Republicans remain confident, even while frustration with Vance’s campaign remains a widely held sentiment. They say they expect Ryan’s support will shrink once Republican ads begin airing in earnest. The response already has begun, in the form of $5 million in ads that launched this month. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate, also has scheduled to appear in Youngstown on Friday to boost Vance.
“If Republicans had slept on this race until October and not started the work that’s being done now, maybe there’s a scenario where he could have essentially snuck through,” said one national Republican involved with the race. “But I think the work to define him as a pretty liberal Democrat over the coming weeks is probably going to cap his support.”
“He’s going to get punched back,” said Jai Chabria, Vance’s top campaign strategist. “And the beauty of it for our side is, all we have to do is tell the truth about his record.”
Ryan’s team is looking to reverse recent political history, which has seen Democrats lose ground here since former president Donald Trump won the state twice, thanks to widespread support in previous Democratic strongholds in northern and eastern Ohio.
Like other Democrats before him, Ryan’s campaign strategy involves limiting losses in rural areas, competing in the former Democratic strongholds that Trump flipped while running up the score in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati and other larger cities. His ads cast him as a hoodie-clad everyman who’s a foe of bad trade deals and a friend of police and veterans, who even draws begrudging respect from Fox News hosts.
Herb Asher, a retired political scientist at Ohio State University, said Ryan has a “pretty liberal” voting record. But he said Ryan’s search for the political center has been aided by Vance, who ran a fiery, hard-right campaign while winning a nasty and historically expensive Republican primary in May.
Some of the Republican-leaning groups Ryan may overperform with, Asher said, include suburban women who support abortion rights – Vance describes himself as “100% pro life,” while Ryan opposes limits on abortion — and Cleveland-area voters of Eastern European descent who were turned off by Vance’s opposition to U.S. intervention in Ukraine earlier this year.
“If you move to the far right, you give your opponent a chance to do a little more straddling of the center,” Asher said. “So, I think Ryan has a chance.”
The Ryan campaign also points to the May primary, when Republican groups spent millions attacking Vance over his past opposition to Trump, leading to divisions among some Republican activists after Trump eventually endorsed him. They also are encouraged by the 23% that Matt Dolan, a relatively moderate Cleveland state senator, drew in a surprisingly strong third-place finish.
The Ryan campaign says their internal polling shows Ryan, for now, is drawing limited Republican support while also getting universal backing from Democrats.
“We’ve seen it in the polls, and you saw it in their primary,” said a Ryan campaign source. “I don’t think there’s any question there will be a chunk of Ryan-DeWine voters. I just think it comes down to how many there are.”
Republicans, meanwhile, have telegraphed how they plan to try to tear Ryan down. It’s not complicated. They intend to tie him to Democratic President Joe Biden, whose legislative agenda Ryan has staunchly supported. Amid a 40-year high in inflation, Republicans say Biden’s approval rating in Ohio is somewhere in the 30s. Accordingly, Ryan has seen it as politically wise to keep his distance, avoiding the president during two trips to Ohio this year.
Republicans also plan to try to chip away at Ryan’s claims to political independence, by pointing out that he once challenged Nancy Pelosi for House speaker before later voting for her, and during a brief run for president in 2019, he questioned Joe Biden’s energy and mental acuity before campaigning for him for president in 2020.
“Tim Ryan disavowing party bosses during a crucial election is nothing new – just ask the Ohio voters who watched his failed runs for speaker and president. With his latest support for the Bidenflation scam, Ryan proves once again that talk is cheap and loyalty to the Pelosi-Biden agenda rules the day.” Matt Fisher, spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said in a statement.
Brian Tringali, a Republican pollster who’s worked extensively in Ohio, said normally the political climate is baked in by the time campaign season picks up, giving candidates room to pivot to the center.
But this year’s congressional session has run unusually late, which has forced Ryan to take controversial votes on issues like abortion and the Democratic reconciliation bill as he’s actively campaigning, he said.
“His messaging looks like it would be coming from a moderate Republican,” Tringali said. “And the more he has to deal with legislative votes coming late in the cycle, the more likely it is that his voting record isn’t going to jive what his ads look like.”
As it stands, Tringali said he believes the race is competitive.
“But will it be competitive at the end, I think is a very open question,” he said.
The 2018 election shows that what Ryan is trying to pull off is at least theoretically possible.
That year, Brown won re-election by 7 points while Republicans, including Gov. Mike DeWine, swept the remainder of the statewide, nonjudicial ticket. Brown got 2.3 million votes that year, 124,000 more than DeWine and roughly 288,000 more than Rich Cordray, the Democratic nominee for governor. Some of the areas where Brown picked up the most votes compared to Cordray were in Northeast Ohio counties — Lake, Geauga and Lorain counties – that he previously represented in Congress.
It’s possible that Ryan could overperform in the Mahoning Valley, where he grew up and which he’s represented in Congress since 2003.
“I think he can,” said one Youngstown-area Democrat. “And it’s his only and best chance to win the state.”
In a national election climate that favored Democrats, Brown also benefitted from drawing a Republican opponent, Jim Renacci, who entered the race late, was poorly funded and never had run for statewide office before.
Renacci, a former congressman who now leads the Medina County Republican Party, in an interview recalled a common refrain he heard in 2018.
“There were Republicans who said point blank to me, ‘I don’t like Sherrod Brown’s positions. But I like Sherrod Brown,’” Renacci said.
Renacci also said he continues to hear concerns about Vance, including from activists who visited the county party headquarters jokingly asking whether Vance had died, and from a major Republican donor from Cleveland who shared plans to vote for Ryan.
“The question will be, how much do people know J.D. Vance? And how much do people know Tim Ryan?” Renacci said. “And then the question will come, how many Republicans will say, ‘I may not like Tim Ryan’s policies, but I like Tim Ryan.’ And that’s the fight J.D. Vance needs to be worried about.”
