Please stop saying Tim Ryan ran a "smart" campaign
He lost to a San Franciscan charlatan by 6.2 points.
The best thing that can be said about Tim Ryan’s campaign is it forced Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s SuperPAC to spend $31 million in Ohio, which could’ve been spent in Georgia, Nevada, or Pennsylvania.
But given the margins by which other Republicans won in Ohio, that says more about Vance’s tepid campaign than it does anything Ryan did. The national Democrats applauding Ryan’s campaign are the same ones that abandoned Ryan in his moment of need because they correctly foresaw he had no chance of winning.
Other people applauding him are from Beltway Republicans that don’t live in Ohio and didn’t see Ryan’s campaign outside of fundraising and polling numbers:
It’s preposterous to claim that Ryan spurred turnout for down-ballot races when he couldn’t even win the geographic area that sent him to Congress for nearly two decades.
Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur is the longest-serving woman in both legislative chambers.
The other two winners, Akron’s Emilia Sykes and Cincinnati’s Greg Landsman, are candidates with deep ties to their districts who ran as proud Democrats against their MAGA opponents.
All three Congressional winners did more to boost Ryan than vice versa.
Over in Pennsylvania, which isn’t entirely equitable to Ohio but still similar enough to compare, Democratic nominee John Fetterman did what Ryan wanted; Fetterman won white white-class voters back into the party at a margin that affected the outcome of the race.
Look at how somebody who stooped to voting for Oz defined the race.
From Trip Gabriel of nytimes.com:
Rob Gleason, a former chairman of the state Republican Party who lives in central Pennsylvania, rejected the idea that Democrats, thanks to Mr. Fetterman, had made lasting inroads with white working-class voters. Dr. Oz, Mr. Gleason said, lost mostly because Mr. Fetterman succeeded in painting him as a rich out-of-stater with multiple houses — a class-war campaign.
“I’m still mystified how he could do so well because he didn’t release any of his medical records, he didn’t do good in the debate, he embraced Biden,” Mr. Gleason said of Mr. Fetterman, who is continuing to recover from a severe stroke in May. “He’s an odd-looking guy, in shorts and a hoodie. I thought this was going to be easy.
“The class struggle and fact Oz wasn’t from Pennsylvania,” Mr. Gleason continued, “that was the death knell.”
Fetterman stood for something other than the latest poll shoved in front of him by a consultant. Fetterman hit Oz as being from New Jersey, while Ryan pushed a convoluted fake opioid charity scandal about Vance. Fetterman could brawl in a way that Ryan couldn’t because Ryan wanted to play footsie with Republican voters.
Ryan’s campaign was about what he wasn’t. He bragged about protecting the working class by voting with Trump, the deranged orange billionaire who made a crew out of screwing working people.
Ryan even cut an entire ad proving he could shoot an inanimate object with a handgun:
Let’s see how the gun freaks reacted to this courtship from Vance:
How are you going to cut an ad showcasing your gun knowledge and not hire somebody to make sure you look like you’ve actually shot a weapon before? This is the laziness you get when your campaign is driven by polls and focus groups.
The danger in Ryan’s gambit for Obama-Trump voters was that he’d alienate his base while failing to impress Republican-leaning voters.
Gun enthusiasts mocked Ryan’s ad, and I doubt suburban moms who worry about their children being shot at school were inspired by it, either. But anytime you can shoot yourself in the foot, not once but twice, you have to do it!
I’m not saying Ryan should have run as a communist revolutionary, though that would have been cool. A leftist candidate would have done worse.
The vapidity of Ryan’s campaign meant he couldn’t wage class war like Fetterman because Ryan was too worried about offending voters who were never going to vote for him in the first place.
When the autopsy of a campaign reveals the candidate should have done the opposite of what they did, that is not “smart.” It’s dumb.
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Being from Ytown means I always knew Tim was a loser but to take an ass kicking from JD and then go get a lobbying gig for natural gas sure seems like some kind of moderate Republican performance art to me.