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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.”
It was the sort of message — progressive populism to challenge right-wing, Trumpist populism — that some voters had expected to hear from one of Ryan’s fellow Ohioans, Sen. Sherrod Brown, who flirted with the idea of a presidential campaign before deciding last month not to run.
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.”
Over his 16 years in the House, Ryan has shifted to the left on some of the country’s most contentious issues.
For much of his career, he opposed abortion, citing his Catholic faith. But in 2015, he wrote in an Op-Ed for The Akron Beacon Journal in which he said that after speaking with women about their reasons for choosing to have abortions, he had “come to believe that we must trust women and families — not politicians — to make the best decision for their lives.”
He made a similar reversal on gun policy after the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017, breaking publicly from the National Rifle Association — which had previously given him A ratings — and announcing that he would take the roughly $20,000 he had received from its political action committee and donate it to organizations seeking stricter gun laws.
He is also a co-sponsor of Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All bill. The Republican National Committee highlighted that support in its response to Ryan’s announcement, calling him one more addition “to the long list of liberal candidates demanding government-run health care.”
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.
On “The View,” Ryan said his daughter had called him one day, crying, to tell him her friend was going to have to move because a local General Motors plant had closed.
“My daughter called me and said, ‘You’ve got to do something,’” Ryan recalled. “And I said: ‘I’m going to do something. I’m going to run for president of the United States.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.