Congressman Tim Ryan is running for Ohio’s open U.S. Senate seat. First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002, he is now in his 10th term, serving Ohio’s 13th District which includes Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley — known as “Steel Valley” — as well as parts of Akron and Portage County. While Trump became the first Republican last year to win Mahoning County since 1956, Ryan won the county in 2020 by nearly 14 points.
Republican Senator Rob Portman surprised the political world in January 2021 when he announced that he would not run for reelection in Ohio. Even with Portman’s retirement, it will be a tough race for Ryan as Trump carried the state in 2020 by seven points. That being said, Senator Sherrod Brown won reelection by seven points here in the last midterm election, Republicans face a difficult and increasingly nasty and expensive multicandidate primary, and Ryan is the ideal candidate to build support from a diverse, working-class coalition of voters.
During his time in Congress, Ryan has been a stalwart leader in the fight to defend labor unions, strengthen and modernize America’s manufacturing base — including championing investments in battery development and clean energy technologies — and reform U.S. trade policies. He currently serves on the House Appropriations Committee, chairing the Subcommittee on Legislative Branch, and sitting on the Defense and Energy & Water Development subcommittees, which both control all federal spending on nuclear weapons.
Ryan has a solid voting record on the Council’s issues, voting in favor of repealing the 2002 AUMF, limiting President Trump’s war powers with Iran, withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and blocking new explosive nuclear weapons testing and the new W76-2 tactical nuclear weapon. He believes in the need to improve congressional oversight of the Pentagon budget to rein in unnecessary and wasteful spending and strongly supports a diplomacy-first foreign policy.
