The NPR Politics Podcast - How The Race For Ohio's Open Senate Seat Looks From The Campaign Trail

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Republicans are the slight favorites to win an open Senate seat in Ohio, but first their candidate will need to prevail in a crowded primary fight. Democratic front-runner Tim Ryan is already keeping a packed campaign schedule — but he could have trouble persuading the independent voters he needs in an increasingly Republican state.This episode: White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, and national political correspondent Don Gonyea.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Angelina in Brooklyn, New York, and I just received my second fully funded acceptance into a political science PhD program. Hey! I've worked incredibly hard towards this goal over the last four years as a first-generation college student, and I'm currently over the moon. This podcast is recorded at... It is 1.35 p.m. on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, and hopefully I'm closer to making a decision to where I'm going to study for the next five years, researching American politics, voting, representation,

and political identities. Okay, here's the show. That is awesome. Wow. All right. Congratulations, and we need more of that. That is awesome. Wow. All right. Congratulations. And we need more of that. Yes.

And five years of fully funded education. That's amazing. Congratulations. Yes. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House.

I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Don Gagne, National Political Correspondent. Don, you are just back from reporting in Ohio. And you were there because there is a key open Senate race this year after Republican Senator Rob Portman announced his retirement. The other seat in this state is held by Democrat Sherrod Brown. So in the past, it has seemed like Ohio was a swing state, and this could go either way, right? That's right. I mean, first, can I just say how good it felt to

be running around a battleground state for a day chasing candidates around? It's something that I used to do all the time and that we just have not had much of a chance to do lately. So I was following Democrat, the Congressman Tim Ryan, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for that open U.S. Senate seat. He's hoping to flip the seat. But man, in one day, we started out in Columbus at a union hall, then went to a business where they make Spanish clay tiles for rooftops in New Lexington, then to McConnellsville, a place called the Chatterbox Tavern, for gosh sakes, then to Marietta.

Oh, don't I get jealous. Yeah, you sound so excited. And Tim Ryan, people may remember that name. He was one of maybe like 50, 60 people that were running for president back in 2020. He was. It wasn't quite that many, but it was a lot of people. Yes. He wanted to kind of represent, you know, represent the Midwest.

And look, he's an ambitious young member of Congress. So he saw all those people running. So he threw his hat in as well. And he's really wearing his blue collar roots on his sleeve as he runs. He's from Youngstown. And he talks about the, you know, the generations of union members in his family and how that way of life is going away and how workers need somebody to fight for them. He's not necessarily a pure moderate. He takes a lot of progressive positions. He was for Medicare for All for a while there when he was running for president, but he sees his path to the Senate as being the voice and the fighter for those workers who have been forgotten. They are, incidentally, a lot of the same workers who voted for Donald Trump twice in Ohio. Well, Don, I mean, it's interesting because you're talking about him appealing to his blue collar roots now in the Senate race when he was running for president, wasn't he trying to get suburban

white women and getting the yoga vote? I mean, that sounds like different. Yes. Yeah. So yoga, blue collar. I mean, I'm not saying that, you know, blue collar people, I'm sure do yoga too, but it's just does, it doesn't ring the same, right? Yes. But he also talks about going to the Union Hall and having a beer or two or three and talking about the things that are important to these workers and very much, you know, in just kind of his manner, his talk, his very down-to-earth approach to politics, being a guy who those workers can identify with. Can I tell you about the first stop of our day? Please do. Please do. We went to one of the Carpenters Union training centers where apprentices show up and they learn new skills to get accreditation. So Ryan shows up, first stop of the day, and there's this group of,

you know, carpenter trainees standing around. And he wanders up and it's like, hey guys, how you doing? You know, where you from? Where you working? And I will tell you, it did not even take a minute before the conversation was not about politics or the economy or anything like that. It was about football. And they're immediately all talking about the NFL playoffs and the Cincinnati Bengals are going to the Super Bowl. So he barely talked about his campaign or anything with these guys, but he was there to make an impression. And maybe at some point down the road, they go, oh, Tim Ryan, he's the guy you came to our union hall. Oh, he's the guy we talked football with, you know, and then they're more open to hearing what else he's got to say.

I had a conversation with one of those workers. His name's Jamel Kendrick. This conversation also underscores how early Ryan is, you know, making these kind of visits and having this fully packed kind of a day on the campaign trail, because a lot of these guys just aren't paying attention yet. We're getting plenty of work. I just want to make sure that the work just stays. Columbus is doing a lot of growing right now, maybe with Mr. I'm sorry, what was his name? Ryan. Mr. Ryan.

Hopefully he can go ahead and push some of that things forward and keep us working and, you know, keep us happy. And again, this is a voter who kind of forgotten the name of the guy you just talked to. But he liked what he heard and he enjoyed the conversation. Most of it was about football. But he's also an independent voter, self-described, who voted for Joe Biden but did consider voting for Donald Trump. Ultimately, he told me he voted his heart and not his head, which is an interesting thing to hear. But that is absolutely the kind of voter that Tim Ryan needs. You know, this reminds me of a certain kind of politician that I feel like you're more often to see in the House because it's just kind of more of a House approach to things where the connection with the voters isn't necessarily on policy issues at the start. That this is, it means something to feel like a person next door or a person they know. But it also kind of reminds me of, say,

Heidi Heitkamp, who's a former senator from North Dakota. And she was one of those people who, you know, voters said that they liked her, that they wanted to have a beer with her or talk about their farm. They were happy to hang out with her, but they didn't vote for her because she, at the end of the day, was a Democrat. And I wonder if that's a little bit of what might be starting to happen here. You can see Tim Ryan keeping kind of an arm's length from the National Democratic Party, right? So, you know, I asked Ryan if that was his template. I'm an Ohio Democrat, which is independent. I mean, I've gotten in fights with Democrats before, and I get in fights with Republicans, and I'm for what's in my community's best interest. And to me, I think that's a big differentiator, too, in Ohio, because

Ohioans will go back and forth. I mean, if you look at the 18 campaign, there were a lot of people that were completely comfortable voting for Mike DeWine for governor, Republican, and Sherrod Brown for the Senate. So Ohio voters, especially independents, they look at the candidate and say, is he Ohio or she Ohio versus the other person? And I think we're going to win that argument. Oh, that's a hard situation in an environment where politics is so tribal right now. Exactly. And he, right now, he says he's leaving all the culture war stuff to the Republicans. All right. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll talk more about this when we get back. And we're back. Let's talk about what the Republican side looks like. So what is going on in that primary race? So there are some very big Ohio names on that side of the aisle. There's Josh Mandel, who's run for statewide office multiple times. He is running for the nomination, and he

is running very much as a hardcore pro-Trump, the 2020 election was stolen type of candidate. Also running, another high-profile person, the author of that best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, and there's been a movie made out of it, J.D. Vance. Then we have Jane Timken, who is a former chairperson of the Ohio Republican Party, and a businessman named Bernie Moreno, and there are others in the race. But what is really going on on that side of the aisle is there is so much jockeying looking for Donald Trump's endorsement. He is not endorsed yet. So it is very much about Trump. If I could bring it back to Tim Ryan for a moment, I asked him if the fact that the Republican nominee, at least at this point, appears to be someone who is going to be very Trumpy, given the way they're all running at

this point, if that makes it a little easier for him to carve out this economic message. And he said, I don't think they're running to be Trumpy. I quite frankly don't think they're running a Trump campaign. I think they're running a culture war campaign trying to kiss Trump's rear end. I mean, if you remember how Trump ran in 2016, he was talking about expanding health care, rebuilding the country, focusing on work, getting these jobs back. NAFTA, NAFTA, NAFTA.

And, you know, you got these guys that are talking about every little culture war that they can find themselves getting into, they started. And it's all about, you know, division. So he thinks that gives him an opening. But I encountered a voter at that coffee shop in Pomeroy, way down on the Ohio River, when I was out with Ryan. And he had a long talk with this voter in this coffee shop. And then I went up to her afterward and I found out that she is a Republican. She's 33 years old. Her name is Lindsay McKinney. She was very impressed by what she heard from Ryan. She voted for Trump and

thought things were going great under Trump, does not think that the 2020 election was stolen and wishes Trump would let that go. So already this is a complicated person, right? She says she votes for the person, not the party, so she would be open to voting for Tim Ryan. And then she said, but if Donald Trump endorses, that would be a positive. Well, as a Trump supporter and somebody who voted for Trump, and if he was going to be the right president, of course, like his opinions matter to me. And what he is saying is important. And I think for anybody who supports Trump, I think that his word matters to an extent. You can hear her baby there crying.

Your baby was in the car seat, you know, at the coffee shop with her that day. She's a stay-at-home mom, and she has two other kids who are in elementary school. And these are the kind of real people that you encounter. But it also kind of speaks to how difficult working these parts of the state and getting anything out of it is for a candidate like Tim Ryan. He had as good of an encounter with this voter as you could. And she's still really intrigued to see who Trump endorses on the other side. Kelsey, you know, what does the Senate map look like this cycle? I guess a third of the seats are up for election. Obviously, it's a 50-50, you know, split in the chamber right now. So, you know, if anyone was able, any party is able to flip a seat,

that would, you know, change the balance of power. So what's it looking like? Well, it is really kind of the as high as stakes midterm election as you're going to get in the Senate. And basically, both sides are trying to just keep the math in their favor. This is going to be one of those ones where it is an all out fight until the very end, because in a situation where there's an expectation that the House is going to flip from Democrats to Republicans for a whole host of reasons that we've talked about a lot on this podcast. Not just the fact that the midterm election is not usually great, is historically terrible for the party of the president when there's single party control in Washington.

But with all of those factors going on, the control of the Senate is kind of the premier battleground. So any one seat could make a huge difference. Well, it seems like that's something that we're going to keep our eye on at the Politics Podcast. I hope so. That's my whole plan for the next several months. That's kind of our job. So but I think we need to just leave it there for now. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell.

I cover Congress. And I'm Don Gagne, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.