- US midterm elections 2022. 'Democrat Tim Ryan is running against his own party – it could help him win.' Nov. 7, 2022.
In an increasingly red state, Ohio Senate hopeful Ryan blames Democrats as much as Republicans for failing the working class.
Tim Ryan stood in the middle of the electrical workers union hall, facing the signs declaring he puts “Workers First”, and prepared to call for a revolution of sorts. But this was Dayton, Ohio, where patriotism and religion are largely unquestioned even if political loyalties are fluid. So first came the national anthem and then the prayers. After that, the Democrat congressman and candidate for the US Senate laid into his targets. Ryan made a fleeting reference to his Republican opponent, JD Vance, with a derisive remark about the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy – a controversial account of growing up amid poverty and drug addiction – suddenly growing a beard to look more like the working-class Ohio voters he hopes will elect him.
After that, the Democrat had little to say about Vance as he turned his guns on another target. Ryan does not have the enthusiastic support of his party’s leadership in Washington even though the outcome of his race could decide control of the Senate. But then Ryan is not an enthusiast for the Democratic national leadership or his party’s record over recent decades. Ohio saw more than one-quarter of its manufacturing jobs shipped off to Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) signed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in the 1990s and later to China after it joined the World Trade Organization.
At the union hall rally in Dayton, a city that has lost about a third of its population over the past 40 years as jobs disappeared, Ryan was cheered when he said Democrats were as much to blame as Republicans. “You’ve seen a broken economic system where both parties have sold out to the corporate interests that shift our jobs down to the southern part of this country, then to Mexico, then to China. There is no economic freedom if there’s no jobs here in the U.S,” he told the crowd. Ryan returned to the theme later in speaking about “people who’ve been on the other side of globalisation and automation and bad trade deals that, quite frankly, both parties passed that devastated communities like ours”.
In 2016, Donald Trump tapped into anger about the loss of jobs and its impact on communities with a promise to stop the closure of a major General Motors car plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which employed more than 10,000 workers at its peak. He told a rally in a neighbouring city he would bring back jobs to the region: “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.” That promise helped deliver north-eastern Ohio to Trump and flip a state that twice voted to put Barack Obama into the White House. In 2019, the Lordstown plant shut anyway, adding to the woes of a city that had already lost its hospital. It was not alone. Few places Trump promised to revive saw him deliver. That has opened the door for Ryan to say the Republicans don’t have any real interest in helping working Americans because they really represent the corporations that employ them.
But many of those workers long ago decided that the Democrats aren’t serving their interests either...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/07/tim-ryan-ohio-senate-midterms-jd-vance
- To consider: Peter Thiel, JD Vance's old boss put $15 Million into Vance's campaign and heavily supported other candidates as well.
= new reply since forum marked as read
