Another feature on Tim Ryan's effort to reach the white working class, here dubbed the "exhausted majority"

Here's another not really "rural" post I'm going to justify blogging about on Legal Ruralism because so many associate the white working class generally--and J.D. Vance in particular--with rural America.  

This latest story about Tim Ryan is by Jazmine Ulloa for the New York Times, and it appears under the headline, "Tim Ryan Struggles to Reach Ohio’s Exhausted Majority."  The subhead is, "Mr. Ryan, the Ohio Democrat running for Senate, has been listening to white working-class voters. Whether they are listening to him and the Democratic Party is the question."  (The Washington Post and NPR reported on Ryan's efforts last month, which I blogged about here.)

The NYT story plays up Ryan's 2020 loss (48%) in his native Trumbull County where he grew up--a sharp drop in support there since he first ran for Congress.  Ryan grew up in the small city of Niles, but Trumbull County is metropolitan, with a population of more than 200,000.  It is in the northeastern part of the state, bordering Pennsylvania, south of Akron: 

Representative Tim Ryan won re-election in 2020. But in one sharply personal way, he lost, too.

Mr. Ryan, 48, the Ohio Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, was born and raised in Niles, a manufacturing city of roughly 18,000 that sits halfway between Youngstown and Warren in southern Trumbull County.

Mr. Ryan had once won Trumbull with as much as 74 percent of the vote. That number fell to just 48 percent in 2020, when he narrowly lost the county by roughly one percentage point. A place that was once a bastion of white blue-collar Democrats turned away from a white Democratic native son whose blue-collar grandfather had been a steelworker in Niles for four decades.

Now, Mr. Ryan is trying to win back his party’s voters in Trumbull and throughout Ohio as he runs for Senate. His problem in Trumbull exemplifies the larger problem for Democrats in the Midwest: The lingering appeal of Trumpism and the erosion of support for the party among the white working-class voters who once formed a loyal part of its base in the industrial heart of the country.

* * * 

He is focused on bringing back voters who feel forgotten by Democrats and turned off by Republicans.

“I feel like I am representing the Exhausted Majority,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview, using a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked. People, Mr. Ryan added, “just want to move on and actually focus on the things that are really important.”

I can't help think that, in this case, these voters are exhausted for another reason--that they work so hard for so little.  And let's face it--that's exhausting.   

Meanwhile, Ryan's Republican opponents have just in the last day or so released controversial television ads that evince a race to the right. Here's one by Josh Mandel using the bridge in Selma, Alabama as a backdrop to his critique of "critical race theory."  

Meanwhile, another high profile Republican candidate in the race, J.D. Vance is out with this. Like Mandel's ad, Vance's ad centers how we define "racist," asking "Are you a racist?  Do you hate Mexicans?"  Further, Vance cites his mother's drug addiction--which he laid out in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy as a basis for bashing the white working class--as a reason to stop drugs coming in over the southern border.  It is especially interesting--and ironic--that Vance draws his mother's history of drug use into his campaign in a heartstrings move about the importance of kids not losing parents--ironic because in the book Vance condemned and distanced himself from his mother. 

Here's another piece about the struggle for "non-descript" Democrats (here Catherine Cortes-Masto, the Senator from Nevada) to break out and prevail in their elections given the national reputation of the Democratic Party.  This is an issue Steve Bullock, former governor of Montana, has also spoken about--in particular that the pandemic kept him from going out to meet and greet voters in 2000 when he was running for Senate, a fact that kept him from overcoming the Democrats' bad reputation in Montana, leading to his loss.  

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.