Pat Ryan Ran As a ‘Different Kind of Democrat’ — and Won Big

Democratic congressman Pat Ryan has been here before. In the 2022 midterms, the Army vet and former Ulster County executive won both a special and general election to represent New York’s 18th district in Hudson Valley, even as Republicans in the state managed to flip an unprecedented four House seats. This year, Ryan won again, defeating his challenger, Alison Esposito, by more than 13 points while outperforming Vice-President Kamala Harris in his district by double digits. He campaigned heavily on the economy and protecting reproductive rights while also challenging his own party on congestion pricing and the border crisis. Ryan offered an explanation for his success in an election postmortem thread on social media. “I’ve made clear over and over again to my constituents that I fight FOR them and AGAINST anyone who would do them harm. Period, full stop,” he wrote.

I spoke to Ryan about what lessons Democrats can take from 2024, and why the party should adopt his brand of “patriotic populism.”

In 2022, you won a tight race during a difficult cycle for the Democratic Party nationally. Earlier this month, you did it again, expanding your margin from last time. How did you approach this year’s race in comparison to the midterms? 
We approached the race the same way, which was just showing up everywhere over and over and over, and being obsessively focused on affordability. I tied everything we did to lowering costs for folks over the last entire two years, and we especially prioritized going to the parts of the district where we didn’t win in 2022 to make sure we listened to people and engaged. We just kept hearing about the affordability crisis, so everything we did was focused on that. Our closing message was really about making the community more affordable, more safe, and more free, and I think that that won the day, both on substance and style. It still really matters in a House race to show folks — not tell them, but show them — that you’re fighting for them by consistently showing up and engaging. Rather than getting stuck in a lot of these kinds of ideological frames — moderate versus progressive, liberal versus conservative, any of that — just being very clear who is for the people and explicitly against elites, whether that’s in big corporations or political elites that have been in power a really long time. So, I think that connected with folks.

There’s been a lot of postmortems and a lot of finger-pointing since Trump won. What are the lessons that Democrats need to take from this loss? 
I’ve really been focused on what we did well, rather than the finger-pointing and the back-and-forth and the blame. To me, that’s never been an effective thing, whether in an after-action review as an Army officer in combat or in my startups. So I’ve tried to put some thoughts out into the universe around that — what we did well in our race, where we did very much over-perform, and what a lot of my colleagues did in similar tough House districts where they over-performed. And I think a big part of it is showing independence. I was one of the very first to call on President Biden to step aside. I know from conversations with a lot of my constituents that it mattered a lot to show my willingness to speak truth to power. I stood up to my own party in New York on the issue of congestion pricing, which I think would be a regressive taxation on working people that are coming in and out of New York City, and I called them out early and often on the failure to secure the border. On a bunch of issues, I really showed that I was from a different kind of Democrat, willing to speak up to anyone in any party or any place that was hurting my constituents.

So I think, again, it’s about rejecting these ideological frames and being very clear who are the heroes and who are the villains. In Trump’s worldview, he is the hero. He is the only one who can solve these problems in a very autocratic, dictatorial way. He is the only solution in his story. What I’m working on and thinking through — my working title is “patriotic populism,” where the villains are greedy and corrupt elites. Whether that’s like the oil executives that sat in a room with Donald Trump when he said, ‘If you give me a billion dollars, I’ll essentially give you whatever you want,” or Jeff Bezos, who pays zero in corporate taxes and pays not enough to his workers, or the local utility in my district, Central Hudson, which was a centerpiece of our campaign in terms of our focus on economic security and lowering costs. Those are the villains. The hero, and this is the big difference and the important difference, has to be the American people. Scrappy, hungry innovators are the hero of the story. To me, they are the patriots, and that’s the operative word in “patriotic populism.” It reminds people of that patriotic component and why we formed the country in the first place.

Exit polling and other data show that the economy and other kitchen table issues were top of mind for voters this cycle, but clearly there was some kind of disconnect between voters and the Harris campaign, which did run on some of these issues. Is it simply a problem of messaging, or something else? 
I think it’s substance and style. Both substance and style, to me, feed into the brand of the Democratic Party, so we have to look at both elements to fix our brand. On the substance, I certainly think it’s being much more clear economically that we’re fighting for working people and against both greedy and corrupt corporate elites and political elites. I think calling that out with more specificity and authenticity is important for people to understand that we’re with them. That manifests policy wise and in a bunch of ways, but it has to start on the values level. And then on the style: In my race and in my district, I essentially ran as a different kind of Democrat. Which is a nice way of saying the Democratic brand is not very popular in my district. And that’s just structurally unsustainable, if our best candidates have to run against the core party brand. So I think we have to stylistically get back to being normal, being of the communities and districts that we’re representing. And that’s certainly something that I think made a difference for us in our race.

Trump greatly expanded his voter base, increasing his support in Latino and Hispanic communities as well as among working-class voters overall. Do you see this realignment as something specific to this cycle and candidate, or are there larger warning signs for Democrats?
Inequality has been getting worse and worse for my entire lifetime. I’m 42 years old.  Especially in districts like mine, the affordability crisis is so urgent and so heavy on everybody, and that’s been building for decades and neither party has effectively addressed it. The old Republican Party fully sold out to corporate interests and it perpetuated the problem. And I think the Democratic Party wasn’t able to fully speak to or resolve it, but we made big headway on a lot of the inequality issues. So people are frustrated with both parties and that’s been building for a long time. I think what we saw this year is not an anomaly, but  a continuation of a trend. The good news to me, and the reason I’m optimistic looking forward for the Democratic Party, is I think this is  a wake-up call, and that Trump is going to show his true colors as the corrupt and bought-off wannabe dictator that he has told us he is and showed us he was in his first term. That creates a vacuum, and the Democratic Party has an opportunity to provide an alternative. That’s what I’m very focused on helping to build and lean into.

Trump and the Republican Party made significant inroads throughout the state, particularly in parts of New York City, where that would’ve been hard to imagine even a few years ago. Is the Democratic Party taking the state for granted?
I haven’t spent enough time looking at results outside of my district and the competitive House seats in New York, so I’d want to really think more about that in terms of the city. I do think it’s important to look at what happened in the New York House battleground seats, where we were the anomaly in a bad way in 2022. I was the only Democrat to win a tough race. This time, we flipped four back as a result of a very deliberate, early and aggressive, coordinated campaign that Governor Hochul, Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Gillibrand, our state party chair Jay Jacobs all said, “We’re going to do this.” We all invested. We all worked together. I was part of that from day one, before we even knew who our other candidates were going to be. I’m really proud that we bucked all those trends, both nationally and in other parts of the state, at least based on what I’ve seen. I think there’s a lot of positive lessons to be taken from in tight, competitive seats. I know in our race, we knocked on like 220,000 doors, and it was over a million in battleground seats across the state. And that matters, when we show people we give a shit and we come to their home and we listen and we engage them as humans and not just as votes. I think it’s an important lesson to be drawn, that no party should and certainly the Democratic Party shouldn’t, take anybody for granted. We certainly didn’t in my district and in the other House seats we won in New York.

Since the election, we’ve seen some Democrats, including some of your House colleagues, start to stake out positions that put them more to the right on issues like immigration and trans rights. How can Democrats try to meet voters where they are without ceding their own views or the views of the party?
I think this is really important and, and what I tried to speak to in that thread. I campaigned with AOC in my district and talked about clean water in the Hudson River and cleaning up corporate pollution and lead pipe remediation. I campaigned with the governor. Many times, people would ask me about Republicans. I talked about both Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro, my immediate neighbors to the north and south, and all the work we did together in a bipartisan way. But I also talked about a bill I did with Elise Stefanik. I agree with her on almost nothing, but we co-sponsored a bill about quantum computing and the Department of Defense, because the world’s biggest quantum super computing data center is being built in Poughkeepsie, New York in my district, and that matters a lot to both the country and my community. We have to think about building coalitions, rather than dividing people into narrow groups and pitting them against each other. That has to be the model: We’re not all going to agree on every single thing, but we’re going to focus on the areas where there is agreement in what we’re hearing from people on the ground. So as others take out sort of ideological positions, I think we have to go back to listening to our voters and our constituents and the American people and continue to stay grounded there.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.