In Tim Ryan’s Ohio Senate Race, the D Is Often Silent

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Tim Ryan is the kind of candidate who appears to put some thought into appearing to put no thought into appearances.

His daily uniform exudes well-practiced campaign casual: an Ohio State hoodie on game day; a T-shirt from Dropkick Murphys, the union-minded Celtic punk band, for a recent speech at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. gathering, where he took the stage to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”; untied white Nikes for a canvass kickoff in the capital, laced tastefully days later for a condolence visit to a Toledo union hall.

His stump speech is a hits reel befitting an eastern Ohio congressman, as if culled from the down-home liner notes of a Springsteen track about the industrial Midwest.

“My grandfather was a steelworker…”

“I’m campaigning for the exhausted majority…”

“Star of the high school football team…”

“O-H!” (I-O.)

Most political races are about authenticity on some level: who tries too hard, who doesn’t try hard enough, who can read the electorate without staring. Mr. Ryan, 49, has made Ohio perhaps the country’s unlikeliest Senate battleground by taking this premise to its logical extreme.

He is seeking to depict his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance, the author and venture capitalist made famous by a memoir of life in Appalachia, as something of a political fabulist — a playacting fraud (“Uncomfortable in Flannel,” the text flashes in one attack ad) who opposed Donald J. Trump before he supported him. He is trying to make the contest about whose public persona is closer to the truth, and closer to Ohio’s — often eliding his own political calibrations through the years as a former abortion opponent who once earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association.

Mr. Ryan is, if polls are to be believed even a little, in contention in a state that Mr. Trump twice carried by eight points and Democrats had effectively written off, complicating Republican plans to flip the chamber. The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC closely aligned with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, grew concerned enough over the summer to reserve $28 million in television and radio ads to prop up Mr. Vance, who has raised far less money than Mr. Ryan on his own. A spokesman for the super PAC said it was spending notably more in only two states, Georgia and Pennsylvania, both considered tossups.

The race in Ohio has become a real-time experiment with national ramifications for a party desperate for a new template to engage white working-class voters who have come to distrust most Democrats.

Mr. Ryan has, accordingly, suggested common cause with such Ohioans by frequently expressing ambivalence about Democrats. He has said that President Biden, whom he endorsed shortly after abandoning his own quixotic 2020 run, should not seek re-election. Or come campaign with him. “I mean, he understands,” Mr. Ryan said in a wide-ranging interview at a fish fry in Columbus, declining a hypothetical offer from the president. “I don’t know what his rating is here.” But he knows the gist.

The Democrat, who often avoids the word “Democrat” in public, has highlighted his appearances on Fox News, running one ad that includes an approving clip from Tucker Carlson. In another spot, he chucks a football at a television monitor that reads, “Defund the Police.” (“Still got it,” he says, after tossing a last spiral at a screen showing Mr. Vance’s face.)

On policy, Mr. Ryan has associated himself with elements of the Trump trade agenda, attributing the struggles of Ohio workers to China. “It is us versus China,” he has said, drawing rebukes from some Democrats who accused Mr. Ryan of inflaming hostility toward Asian Americans.

Testimonials from allies can devolve into a kind of homespun word cloud, generally dominated by “normal,” “Ohio” and “guy” and specked with details from his local arc: the son of the Mahoning Valley, reared during the steel crisis; the teenage quarterback recruited to play at Youngstown State, before an injury rerouted him to politics; the 20-something elected to Congress.

“Ryan is Ohio,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

“He really is kind of a normal guy,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Ohio’s sole nonjudicial statewide elected Democrat.

Mr. Ryan’s curated political brand can obscure some nominal contradictions within it. He is a 10-term Washington mainstay who has previously pursued the presidency, now accusing his opponent of opportunism and coastal elitism. (After publishing “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016, Mr. Vance became a fascination among liberals hoping to understand the Trump phenomenon.)

Mr. Ryan has preached generational change for most of the last two decades, long enough to become a graying candidate himself. (“We are not in good shape,” he wrote in his first book, “A Mindful Nation,” about the benefits of meditation. “If our country were an alcoholic, we would be bottomed out and headed to rehab.” This was 2012.)

He is the sort of Democrat many Democrats decided they needed after reading “Hillbilly Elegy”: plausible as a diner-goer, firm with a handshake, white and male.

“They’ve got to put you in this little box,” Mr. Ryan lamented of “the culture elite” in the interview, chafing at being pigeonholed sometimes as “the white working-class guy.” “That’s how we lose.”

That Mr. Ryan might well be running the best race of any Democratic Senate candidate this cycle can feel by turns immaterial and existential for his supporters, the campaign doubling now as a kind of referendum: If he falls short anyway, what does that say about his state? His party? The notion that the right messenger can sell in any political environment?

“Ohio is Ohio,” said Ted Strickland, the state’s former Democratic governor, who lost his own Senate bid six years ago by more than 20 points. “He is threading the eye of a very small needle.”

‘Restlessly ambitious’

As the 2016 election drew near, Mr. Ryan could not escape the conclusion that became the Democratic consensus in Ohio: His party was blowing it.

Former aides to Hillary Clinton’s campaign said Mr. Ryan was an unsubtle (if well-meaning and generally prescient) back-seat driver. While he knew and liked Mrs. Clinton personally, he fumed at the candidate’s prediction, during a forum in Columbus, that she would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” in a more modern economy. He scolded her staff for cluelessness in planning a Friday night rally during high school football season. He pressed her team, according to one former Clinton aide, to go after Omarosa Manigault Newman, a prominent Trump supporter from Youngstown. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan said he was “not familiar with any calls for the Clinton team to run a campaign against Omarosa.”)

As Democrats looked inward after Mrs. Clinton underperformed significantly in union towns that were once party strongholds, Mr. Ryan decided to take a major political gamble: He ran against Nancy Pelosi for House Democratic leader, ignoring the counsel of several friends.

It was an unusual move for a largely anonymous congressman, known on the House floor as a chummy veteran of the backslapping “Pennsylvania corner.” “He always has been kind of restlessly ambitious,” said Mr. Strickland, who remembered discouraging him. “He just saw an opportunity to test his mettle.”

Privately, Ms. Pelosi seemed to view the challenge as more curious nuisance than serious threat. “I don’t know what he’s doing,” she told one associate then, convinced (correctly) that she had the votes. “If you’re going to do this kind of stuff, win.”

But Mr. Ryan saw a symbolic rationale, channeling the disillusionment with Democrats in the communities he represented. He may have also recognized the future political benefits. Today, as Mr. Vance notes the congressman’s unswerving support for the Democratic agenda in his Biden-era voting record, Mr. Ryan raises his race against Ms. Pelosi unprompted.

“People are like, ‘You don’t have the guts — you’re a rank-and-file Democrat, you just go toe the party line,’” he said in the interview. “I get to say, ‘Well, I ran against Nancy Pelosi.’” (Mr. Ryan described his presidential bid in similar terms, flagging a debate clash with Senator Bernie Sanders.)

Back home, Mr. Ryan has likewise positioned himself as a national ambassador for the region.

Four years ago, he helped organize a well-publicized bus tour through the Midwest for venture capitalists eyeing investment opportunities in overlooked areas. In photographs from the trip, one face stands out now, grinning with peers a few feet from Mr. Ryan, a lanyard hanging over his checkered button-down.

“J.D. Vance,” Mr. Ryan recalled. “On the bus!”

Finding a balance

In a midterm season that Democrats have often framed around fury at the overturning of Roe v. Wade — hopeful that prolific turnout from women can carry the day — it is striking how much of Mr. Ryan’s argument for himself can feel tethered to male bravado.

During a debate with Mr. Vance this month, Mr. Ryan said that Mr. Trump had taken the Republican nominee’s “dignity” from him by suggesting that Mr. Vance had been “kissing my ass” to win favor. “Ohio needs an ass-kicker, not an ass-kisser,” Mr. Ryan said.

He has called Mr. Vance “pathetic” for leaning on out-of-state surrogates, including Mr. Trump, to co-star at his events.

Mr. Ryan has sought a careful balance between insulting the Trump supporter he is facing and insulting them all, hoping to create a permission structure for Republican voters who admire the former president but might consider a Democrat, just this once. “We’re not judging them,” Mr. Ryan said. “We’re saying, ‘Look, I agreed with Trump on trade, I agreed with Trump on China.’ It doesn’t mean I support all this craziness.”

He has described Mr. Vance as an “extremist” who must be isolated and thwarted, noting his embrace of far-right figures like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Democracy is a decision,” Mr. Ryan has told audiences. “It’s not like gravity that just happens.”

Mr. Vance’s case to voters is more straightforward. “I am running against a Democrat,” the Republican told a crowd of 150 or so assembled inside a dimly lit banquet hall in Perrysburg on a recent afternoon. “You might not believe it from his TV commercials.”

After seven minutes of remarks, Mr. Vance introduced his co-headliner: “Ladies and gentlemen, the great Donald Trump Jr.!”

Hours later, Mr. Ryan could be found a short drive away at United Steelworkers Local 1-346 in Toledo, which was mourning the deaths of two workers in a refinery fire last month. He arrived in a “Beers Made in Ohio Just Taste Better” T-shirt and pulled the local’s president in for a hug, heading inside without cameras.

“Not a lot of politics today here in Toledo,” Mr. Ryan told reporters, who had been invited to the stop by his political operation. The campaign did park Mr. Ryan’s campaign bus a respectful distance down the road.

Once considered an indifferent campaigner and less-than-energetic fund-raiser by some local Democrats, Mr. Ryan has maintained a relentless schedule, so much so that both admirers and opponents seem tickled at an encounter with him in the wild.

“The guy with the football!” an Ohio State student shouted as Mr. Ryan worked a tailgate on a recent Saturday.

“Taxing Tim Ryan!” said another attendee, echoing a refrain from the super PAC ads against him.

“I was in your house!” announced a third young man, who said he had done HVAC work in the Ryan home.

The matchup on the field that afternoon was supposed to be lopsided. Even Mr. Ryan, ostensible champion of the underdog, had taunted the Buckeyes’ overmatched opponent. “I think we’ve got Rutgers today,” he said, as a laugh line, at his first event of the day.

But this underdog had come to play. Rutgers took a stunning early lead with a quick touchdown, as Mr. Ryan greeted a few last stragglers outside the stadium, imploring supporters to believe in his cause. “It’s David versus Goliath,” he has said of his race.

Shortly after Mr. Ryan left the tailgate, the Goliath on the field got its act together, winning comfortably, 49-10.