Ryan, who represents a district in northeastern Ohio that includes Youngstown and part of Akron, is perhaps best known for his criticism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and his accompanying argument that Democrats have stopped connecting with working-class voters, especially in the Midwest. He challenged Pelosi for the minority leader position in 2016 and, two years later, was again a leader of a push to elect someone else.
He began his presidential campaign with a TV appearance Thursday morning on “The View,” in which he emphasized jobs and the economy. “I’m a progressive who knows how to talk to working-class people,” he said. “At the end of the day, the progressive agenda is what’s best for working families.”
On “The View,” an ABC program, the hosts pressed Ryan on whether he was a true progressive or a moderate.
“I believe in the free enterprise system,” he responded. “I believe that we need to reform government. We can’t just go ask people for tax dollars to go dump into a broken health care system where we spend 2 1/2 times as much money as every other industrialized country and get worse results; a broken food system that has got half the country with diabetes or pre-diabetes; a broken environmental system.”
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Ryan’s path to the nomination is steep, and not just because the field is so crowded. The last — and only — sitting House member to be elected president was James Garfield in 1880.
But Ryan believes there is an opening in the race for a Midwesterner who can focus on winning back the voters who flipped to President Donald Trump in 2016, turning states like Michigan and Wisconsin red for the first time in about three decades.
Of the 17 Democratic candidates, only three — Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana; and Ryan — are from the Midwest.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.