Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim Ryan avoids talking about Trump on the trail as he paints GOP opponent JD Vance as extreme

• Insider spent a day following Rep. Tim Ryan across Ohio as campaigned for US Senate.
• He's running a tight race against GOP nominee JD Vance, despite Trump winning Ohio twice.
• Ryan denounced GOP "bullshit artists" in an interview with Insider, but conspicuously avoided Trump.

LORAIN, Ohio — As Tim Ryan made his way across Northern Ohio on the second-to-last Thursday before the midterm elections, the 10-term Democratic congressman kicked off his stump speeches with the same, dad joke bit.

"So Andrea and I started playing this game," said Ryan, as he stood alongside his wife of 9 years at a campaign stop in Lorain. "What if JD Vance was our teenager?" 

Ryan is currently locked in a tight race for US Senate against Vance, the Republican nominee,  author of the much-celebrated book Hillbilly Elegy, a former venture capitalist, and a prominent critic-turned-acolyte of former President Donald Trump. Polling averages have consistently shown a tight race between the two candidates, despite Trump winning the state by more than 8 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020.

In the hypothetical "game" that Ryan lays out, a teenage Vance informs Ryan and his wife that he wants to go out with his friends, prompting the duo — as good and sensible parents — to ask him where he's going, and who he's going with.

"And he says: Marjorie Taylor Greene," Ryan continued as the crowd breaks into laughter at the mention of the far-right Georgia congresswoman. "And you say: what!? Marjorie — she wants to overthrow the government!"

The crowd continued to laugh as Ryan listed off a litany of author right-wing boogeymen; Republican Sen. Ted Cruz is also in the car — which is headed to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' house for a bonfire book-burning ceremony — while conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones sits up front behind the wheel.

"You are grounded, go to your room," Ryan mock-replies, before drawing his story back to the reality of his Senate campaign. "That is who we're dealing with."

Unmentioned in Ryan's stand-up bit — and in almost all of the congressman's campaign stops that Insider observed on Wednesday and Thursday of last week — was former President Donald Trump, the man who inspired Greene to enter politics, has helped to mainstream Jones, and helped DeSantis win a competitive primary in 2018 as he sought his state's governorship.

In an interview with Insider on his bright red campaign bus in Lorain, Ryan perked up when asked about the bit: "Wasn't that funny?" he asked. But he denied that the omission of Trump was any sort of calculation. "I really didn't give it much thought," he said.

"Those people are funny, funnier, like — I think make the story a lot funnier," he continued. "Like Trump is like… you know, Trump."

'The exhausted majority versus the extremists'

On the trail and in TV advertisements, Ryan self-consciously portrays himself as an everyman, speaking about his marital disagreements, the sports teams he's following, and as the champion of Ohioans exhausted by culture wars and divisive politics. 

He says he opposes extremes on the right and left, insists to crowds of supporters that Republicans are quietly backing his campaign, and positions himself as a bold, truth-telling, common-sense advocate for Ohioans. Even so, he largely hews to the Democratic party line on policy matters, with a slightly greater hawkishness towards China and more protectionist stances on trade than others in his party. 

"It's pretty direct, you know, it's like, the exhausted majority versus the extremists," he told Insider. "I think it's important to isolate them, so that we can prevent them from getting power." 

But Ryan's anecdote about Vance illustrates a larger reality about his campaign; to win in Ohio, Ryan has to peel off voters who backed the man who's arguably stoked much of the division in American politics in recent years. 

And that means going easy on Trump.

During a Fox News-hosted town hall event in Columbus on Tuesday, when Ryan was asked about comments he made about needing to "kill and confront" the "MAGA movement," he immediately made it about January 6 — all while omitting the former president who Ryan has said incited the Capitol riot.

—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 1, 2022

And when asked whether Trump should comply with the January 6 committee's subpoena during his second debate with Vance in October, Ryan answered in the affirmative, but said that the former president should be "afforded all of the rights that every other American citizen is afforded."

Trump's off-stage presence is evident even in Ryan's now-favored line of attack against Vance: that he's an "ass-kisser." Ryan's debate zinger against Vance — which he's turned into a campaign T-shirt — is about the GOP candidate's flip-flopping and apparent fealty to Trump, rather than about the former president himself.

Ryan also positions himself as something of a renegade, telling POLITICO in an interview last month that he could be a "royal pain in the ass" as a member of the Senate Democratic caucus, and may not even vote for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. 

But those statements could amount to just posturing, or a means of creating leverage. Ryan said he'd "vote for whoever gives us the best deal in Ohio," alluding to withholding his vote unless he gets his preferred Senate committee assignments. And he indicated that being a "royal pain in the ass" may not rise to the level of obstruction seen by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema or Arizona over the course of the last year.

"I mean, my record's clear on a lot of the issues around elections, and voting rights, and women's health, and those kinds of things," said Ryan, who supports abolishing the 60-vote "filibuster" threshold needed to pass legislation in the chamber. 

Also omitted from Ryan's pitch is any lengthy discussion of environmental issues or climate change; he says he likes to discuss that issue through the lens of jobs and the economy, focusing on "green jobs" that are set to be generated by both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

"We talk about it in the context of jobs, knowing that all of that is going to lead to, you know, bending the curve on the climate issue," he said. "You got to meet people where they are. They want good work. They want a good job."

'I don't think it's that close'

Vance, for his part, is now running a largely conventional Republican campaign, seeking to tie Ryan and the Democratic Party to rising crimes, border security, inflation, and the fentanyl crisis. But the presence of a slew of GOP leaders in the state, particularly so late in the race, suggested that he's in need of a boost. And in seeking that boost, they appealed primarily to party ID.

"All of this crazy stuff came out of the House and ran into a wall in the Senate," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said at a GOP dinner in Lima, referring to Democratic attempts to pass their agenda. "And I'm afraid if we let Ohio slip away, we'll never, ever forgive ourselves. There's no way to get to 51 without holding Ohio. Can you get that?"

"Whether it's inflation, or a woke military, or whether it's the border, I mean, this is a simple equation," Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the party's Senate campaign arm, told voters at a Republican unity event in Canton a few days later. "We've got to elect JD, and we've got to get a majority."

And Republicans have taken notice of Ryan's eschewing of partisan labels, greeting it with a mixture of mirth and resentment.

"You know, maybe we should have invited Tim Ryan," said Vance at the Canton event, spurring laughter. "We have a Democrat who is running as far away from the Democrat Party as he possibly can."

Graham also argued that Ryan is running away from his party label. 

"I've been in the state for like two days, I don't even know the guy's a Democrat! I've watched every commercial. Not once he's said, 'oh, by the way, I'm a Democrat,'" said Graham in Lima. "If I were a Democrat right now, I wouldn't tell anybody either."  

Insider asked top Republicans at the Canton event why they believed that the race remained so close, given Trump's margins in recent years. Without fail, they insisted the polling was simply wrong.

"I don't think it's that close," said Jane Timken, the previous party chair and one of Vance's primary competitors, adding that she doesn't trust the polls. "I think that's the media narrative. I think JD is winning this race."

"It's not close," state party chair Bob Paduchik told Insider, citing absentee voting numbers. "It's going to be a great year here in Ohio for Republicans, JD Vance included."

Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, claimed that polls showing Ryan competitive with Vance were deliberately misleading.

"I think the polls have been historically wrong to suppress turnout, to make people think that people can't win, or to give Tim Ryan a boost, and we're actually seeing JD doing significantly better," she told a gaggle of reporters in response to Insider's question. "That doesn't mean people shouldn't go out and vote." 

Ryan's supporters, meanwhile, see the close race as a product of the congressman's unique appeal to Ohioans.

"I think he's got it figured out," Dan Brady, a former state legislator whose tenure in the state Senate overlapped with Ryan's, told Insider at an Albanian-owned coffee shop in Cleveland. "

While Ryan has made gutsy political moves before, including challenging Nancy Pelosi for House Democratic leader in 2016 and seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, this is the first time that he's had to give up his current office to do so. Recent political history suggests that he's more likely to lose than not.

Asked what he'd do if he loses this month, Ryan joked he'd hit the gym. 

"The Cleveland Browns need a quarterback, so probably start working out again," he said with a laugh on his campaign bus. "I have no idea. I really don't, you know, something along … some public service, something I would feel good about doing." 

"But I just won't let myself kind of go there," he added.