S4 Ep7: America Needs Mushrooms (with Rep. Tim Ryan)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I’m Sarah Longwell a publisher of the Bulwark. And this week, we are talking about whether or not Democrats can still wing big races in red states. Kentucky’s got a big gubernatorial race coming up this week. And Donald Trump won Kentucky by twenty six points in twenty twenty, but they have a Democratic governor, Andy Bashir, who’s hanging in there in this reelection bid.

So naturally, we wanted to talk to Kentucky voters who voted for Beshire in twenty nineteen and then for Trump in twenty twenty. I’m also wondering what lessons a red state Democrat like Bashire leaves for the rest of the party because the twenty twenty four Senate map is littered with Red State Democrat incumbents like Joe Manchin in West Virginia and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. And we’ve got focus groups out on deck from people who voted for those Democrats and for Trump. Now I’ve got a guest today who knows a bit about red state Democrats and running in tough races. Former congressman, Tim Ryan of Ohio.

Tim, great to see you.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Okay. Tim, you are the first guest on the show. I’ve actually run independent. It’s expenditures to help elect. And so I’ve had some skin in the game on you.

You are since I stopped working for Republicans and started working for pro democracy candidates and trying to defeat anti democracy candidates, have been one of my favorite people to go to bat for And I wish you were a sitting senator right now.

Thank you.

But listen, since that didn’t happen, you’ve got a new organization called We The People two fifty. Why don’t you start by telling us about that?

Yeah. It’s a political organization, but it’s really focused on issues, and we wanna give a home to the exhausted majority. I think of the people we’re gonna be talking about here today, and you’ve been focused on for the past few months and years, people who are exhausted and they feel like they don’t have a home. We want them to come to we the people join, which we’re trying to get a representative in every county across the country. And focus on issues that don’t get any oxygen, but yet they’re the most innovative solutions to our problems.

How we’re using MDMA and Cybin to heal veterans, how we’re using cannabinoids and cannabis to heal addiction, how food is being used as medicine and driving down health care costs. Mindfulness and trauma informed care in our schools to heal our kids so that they can have access to their brain and learning. These are happening. These strategies are working across the country and little pockets here or there, but get zero oxygen. We’re not even having debates in the presidential election, really, with the top two candidates So no one’s talking about the new ideas that can actually help peel the country, and that we, the people we’re gonna be highlighting those things.

So I gotta say, actually, the exhaustive majority part that makes toll sense, I had not quite realized that you were focusing on some of the mindfulness like, as now somebody in my forties, there’s this age you hit where you start trying to think about, like, hey, how do I access more joy? How do I like, grow as a person, whatever. And sometimes as you start to delve into this stuff, people bring up psilocybin, they bring up, like, there’s lot of mindfulness stuff, stuff that I’ve never paid attention to before. But, you know, your brain, especially in politics, right? You’re so crowded by all the dark stuff that you start looking for Okay.

How do I find some space? Like, what brought you to that work?

Well, politics. Yeah.

Believe it or not.

I had I had meditated a little bit on and off. Had a priest back home teach me centering prayer, which is a Catholic Christian based meditation technique, and that spurred a journey for me. And in two thousand eight, I’d been in Congress. I think six years, been in politics about eight years. I was about ready to beat burnout.

And so I went on a five day, it was called the power of mindfulness retreat by John it’s in who basically made mindfulness secular here in the United States and really started to research it. I went to this retreat and it just blew the top off my head, like, five days without phones, no journaling, no TV, you know, not calling home the mom and asking for help. It was you in your own mind. I watched my mind calm down, the chatter that you just mentioned, like, stopped. And you become more and more present in the moment that you’re in.

And it’s really a radical act. I mean, if anyone’s looking to be a radical in today’s day and age, start doing sitting meditation because the world’s running around with their hair on fire. So the radical act is actually sitting and being quiet and trying to under stand how your mind works. And so what happens when you do that every day or, you know, several times a week is your brain comes out of fight or flight mode the folks that we’re gonna talk about today in the exhausted majority or they’re upset or they’re pissed or whatever the case may be, your brain is in a constant state of some level of fight or flight mode, which means you literally take offline your prefrontal cortex, your higher level thinking skills, And that’s why we have kinda mob mentality now. We’ve got very reactionary groups of people in the political arena now.

And so I was burned out. So I went on this retreat, and then I started realizing that they have mindfulness in schools. They had mindfulness healing vets with post traumatic stress. They had mindfulness and health care to keep you healthy and boost your immune system, which helps you, you know, fight off disease. So I went down that road for myself, and then I started learning how there are policy implications here to actually heal the body politic And then that eventually led to breath work and breathing techniques and yoga and a psilocybin and MDMA.

And you realize Sarah, there is a lot of research around this now. I mean, we’ve learned more about the brain in the last twenty years than we have in the previous two hundred. And so we the people I wanna amplify this, but literally from a policy perspective, like, if we have the science, If we know this is working, why is this not part of the public discourse? Why are we letting still eighteen to twenty vets kill themselves a day? When we know we have something that can heal them.

Why do we have half the country with diabetes or prediabetes when we know we can revert diabetes using food as medicine? Why are we allowing our kids to not learn well because they’re in trauma, and we come in with some very sophisticated policy on how we’re gonna help kids learn better. And the reality is if you don’t get them out of trauma, if you don’t get their brains out of trauma, they’re never gonna be able to learn. So that’s a competitiveness issue for the country. And what I love about this is in talking about it literally on your podcast right now.

Is that these are new ideas that have yet to fall into. Oh, that’s a democratic idea. Oh, that’s a liberal idea. That’s a conservative idea. That’s BS.

It’s like we’re getting people healthier and driving down health care costs. Is that a soft, liberal? Everyone needs to be a healthy thing, or is that a conservative we need to save money thing? It’s actually both. So if we can get into this realm of the new ideas, I think we can bring about some healing to the country and some common ground.

So that’s how it happened for me. And now I’m in the policy space, as well as, you know, trying to keep my own stress level down as is

a citizen in the United States of America, which could be very taxing.

Yeah. Well, it’s funny. I mean, I could do the whole hour with you on this because I, for the time in my life having ignored all of these things for forever. And suddenly, maybe because I sit and listen to a lot of focus groups, find myself being like, I need to breathe better. Like, I need to find a way to get my nervous system to just be, like, down lower.

Like, at some point, some like, well, what do you do to relax? And I’m like, oh, well, I listened to political Secret Podcast. And they were like, oh, you shouldn’t do that. I’m like, that and so I am like, so far behind you on this journey, but, like, I know that there’s at least pieces of this journey that I’m gonna have to go on, especially because just the grappling right now with the fact that we were about to face a rerun of twenty twenty. I can’t tell you what that’s doing to my nervous system, but actually forget about me.

The other thing about doing focus groups all the time is that I listen to people constantly and the amount of loneliness that you hear in people, the amount of resentment. I think about it in terms of, okay, well, I need to persuade people from an electoral standpoint, and I need to have a strategy, and all that’s true. But then I’m like, gosh, I don’t know. Maybe I should just go into work that helps lower resentment in people. And, like, helps them be less lonely because I swear to god, I think I would have a bigger effect on not having Donald Trump be reelected if I could lower resentment in the country by, like, ten percent because it is driving so much of the negative political behavior, the reaching for somebody that you think is just gonna blow it all up for you or just beat up your enemies because, like, you feel crappy all the time about everything.

Yeah. Let let’s just say real quick since you brought it up. So as you know, politics is downstream of culture. So we’ve gotta, I think, get into the culture. And I think the problem, the loneliness the high suicide rates, the deaths of despair, the addiction, all of that.

I think there’s a level of disconnection in our society today. That we’ve not seen. We think because we’re on technology, we’re more connected in some sense we are, but it ultimately makes us more disconnected. We’re disconnected from each other. We’re disconnected from ourselves, the deepest part of who we are, because our mind’s spinning all the time.

We get out of our bodies, You know, there was a James Joyce character that he wrote about. I forget the name, but it was, like, he described him as living a short distance from his body. But he was literally his head was somewhere else, and so we’re disconnected from who we are truly, the deepest part of who we are and that’s a human condition that we’re dealing with now, and we’re disconnected from nature. I mean, we just don’t spend time in nature anymore. So all of these things that we need to be connected to ourselves the world and nature around us of which we come from and each other completely disconnected.

Makes us feel miserable because we’re social beings. And we need to feel that level of connection. That’s a survival mechanism. That’s why we’re still here. That’s why we have language.

That’s why we developed it because we had to look and talk. We have nonverbal expressions. We had to remember that the bear was over there. Don’t go. Or if we wanted to kill our prey, we needed eight of us because we’re not that fast.

And we’re not that strong. So we better learn how to talk to each other and listen. We evolve to be social creatures. And so today, we’re so disconnected from each other. It makes us feel miserable.

And social media perpetuates that, and that’s what we see in our politics, which is downstream of all that.

This idea of being beside yourself. Right? Like, people feel beside themselves literally, that’s what they mean. Like, you are out of your body, somewhere else, unable to be present. And also, I can never get into this in a news segment hit or even in all the political podcasts I do.

But, like, people don’t realize how much part of Trump’s success is because he is creating a sense of tribe, a sense of belonging, and a sense of joy in that tribe, like it’s weird because on one hand, it’s driven by kind of a darkness, a grievance, but also you look at those rallies. These are red solo cup fun having. Listening to music, wearing the merge, like, feeling connected to other people. And, like, some of that brings out the worst in us because part of that connection is in rejecting a bunch of other people, right, their hatred of of other people, but, like, they feel that sense of tribe. And I think the fact that he’s been able to create that people underestimate how much that psychology is part of his success and that Democrats finding their own way to put a kind of light into the world to give people a sense of I wanna be part of that.

I wanna follow that. I want it to feel good. I don’t want it to feel, like I’m I’m eating my vet and just voting against this other thing. And I don’t know. I mean, that’s just like a bigger thing, but, okay, oh my gosh.

We gotta listen to these focus groups.

Alright.

Okay. Look,

look at this. We can’t do what makes us happy. We can’t talk about what’s gonna make us happy. We gotta go to the focus. We gotta go to the focus group.

That’s the

world we’re living in. But let’s do it.

I think we can weave all of this in here. So it’s a beautiful thing.

I think so too. So on Ohio, really quickly. We’re gonna listen to some about the race, but like, I got involved in your race, and I was chasing the dragon a little bit. I know where Ohio is. I was listening to voters, but Like, if anybody could do it, it was you.

Now I’m not sure that Democrats can still win there.

Well, I think we had a couple things cutting against us. You know, one, it was an off year in Ohio. Our Democratic Party is is getting better, but it wasn’t there to, like, a Wisconsin Democratic Party where they really know how to crank out votes and have a pretty sophisticated operation. I think the party was just kinda getting there. We just had a new leader come in And she’s doing a good job, but it wasn’t, like, online yet for our race.

We didn’t get any help from Washington, DC. And we had a gubernatorial candidate that we ran, I think, twenty points ahead of the gubernatorial candidate. So we didn’t get any help from the rest of the ticket at all. You know, like Mandela Barnes lost by one in Wisconsin, then the governor won. Our governor lost by twenty five or twenty six points.

And so that was a real drag for us too. So I think it is winnable. I think the Democratic National brand in Ohio was terrible, but Sherrod Brown has a good chance, I believe, because he has his own brand. He’s been in politics a long time and is not seen really as a real DC Democrat. He’s seen as an Ohio Democrat.

And so you can win here. But I cannot express more deeply how toxic the democratic brand is in a place like Ohio.

And is that Joe Biden’s brand or Democrats just broadly?

I think Democrats, and I think the president went from being seen as kinda the moderate, stable guy to, you know, getting in bed, maybe with some of the extremists. Fair or not fair. I mean, he did re industrialize the country for the first time in a generation or two. And so that’s important. But I think he does fall into that now.

Like, he’s a DC Democrat. He’s in with the extremes of the party. And and that’s damaged him a lot. And I think you’re seeing that in the polls too. But in Ohio as well, I think that it’s all Biden and the Democratic Party are the same.

And the big problem, I think, president has, is that people don’t feel good economically they feel anxiety in gas prices and food prices. They don’t feel like they’re doing better than they were four years ago, whether they are or aren’t. They don’t feel that way. At all, and the president put his name on that economic package.

Yeah.

You know, calling it bidenomics. I think that was a bad move, and I think that’s hurting him now.

Well, that being the negative part. I’m gonna give you some good news. Let’s listen to the Ohio Brown Trump voters, because they didn’t regret their vote for Sherrod Brown, and they were pretty open to voting for him again. Just listen.

I just remember he was relatable. Maybe not, like, a perfect persona. I totally related to him. And his views I agreed with. I normally am Democratic voting.

So I still like him. I think he’s done what he can in this environment of politics where they just fight each other so nothing can move forward. But I think he’s upheld what he said. I remember having confidence that he actually would advocate for the people. And then when it comes to jobs and employment, I also have confidence in that area.

Based on on what I know he hasn’t failed miserably.

I just remember following him for a long time through politics. And prior to voting for him, I remember there was an article out about education And I can’t remember just like standardized testing or something. It was something along that line. I had reached out to him figuring, why not? And emailed him my views on something that he, he was discussing and it was printed in the newspaper.

And I did get a response, and it went to his email. So whether it’s him or a secretary or whoever, when I did get a response, And he seemed responsive to what my concerns were regarding this article. And as someone else said, he’s he is relatable I like how he carries himself. I listen to things he’s done. So that’s one of the reasons why I had, continue to vote for him.

And I gotta say when somebody says they haven’t failed miserably, In this environment, you cannot imagine what a vote of confidence that is. Yes. You’ve got that one. You have not failed miser

Can I try that with my wife at home? Like, honey. I mean

Come on. Where’s the bar here? Let’s go to the reasonable place.

Yeah. Exactly. You don’t completely suck. That’s awesome.

So you know Sherrod Brown, right, you’re both part of the Ohio de delegation. Yep. You know, you hear what people are saying there. Like, he’s accessible. They like him.

When they say like how he cares himself, I assume they mean he’s kinda got floppy hair and seems like a normal guy. You know? Yeah. So Why do you think he can win? I know you said before he’s got his own political brand, but tell me about that brand in the state.

Yeah. I think that’s it. I mean, he focuses and Democrats could really learn a lot from shared Brown. He focuses on economics. He focuses on jobs and pensions and trade and He’s taken on the Obama administration with trade deals.

He took on the Clinton administration with NAFTA. Like, he has been in those bites on behalf of working class people was instrumental in getting pensions for teamsters here in Ohio fought for benefits coal miners, like, people don’t forget that stuff. And he just stays in that economic lane, and he has a progressive voting occurred as I did. But if you’re not talking about economics in Ohio, and I would assume most of the country, people think you’re disconnected them. Like, you’re running for political office.

I need your help. My economic situation is tenuous paycheck to paycheck, and you came in here, and the first five things you talked about were social issues. That even if those people agree with you, what they hear in feel is you don’t understand what they’re thinking about all the time. Sherrod Brown never has that problem. And that’s why he’s gonna win.

And I he’s gonna have an advantage over my race a couple years ago. He will have the institutional support from Chuck Schumer. He’ll have the money from Chuck Schumer, and he’ll have a presidential turnout. So I hope that the president plays here at least a little bit, and I hope that he can motivate the black community, the brown community, the young kids, college kids, I hope that we can figure out a way to energize those groups because the polling is showing a falling off and even some moving towards Trump on those issues because they’re not seeing us hammer those economic issues like we should and saying, no, no, the economy’s going really good. I mean, what are you gonna tell somebody?

When they’re not doing well. And and you’re the president, and you’re saying, no. No. Let me explain this to you again. You’re really doing okay.

And they’re like, in Ohio, a lot of guys are gonna tell you to go pound salt. Yeah. But Sherrod knows they’re Sarah Longwell, and he will be on that message. And I hope that the president message of you’re doing better than you really think you are doesn’t hurt Jared on the turnout aspect of what he will need in a presidential year to get those voters out.

Now that I spend more time than I used to looking at Democratic politics and, like, trying to understand the Democratic coalition. I remember when it first dawned on me that I was like, oh, no. Your job is so much harder than our job was when we were try to help republicans. Like, you just have this disparate, unruly, coalition of people, one of the reasons I think Republicans don’t, you know, talk about diversity too much is that, the homogeneity is their strength. And so how does Sherrod Brown avoid you were talking about Joe Biden getting pulled by some of the more progressive activist groups?

I mean, because everybody’s gotta constituency. Right? There’s all these big groups. They hold a constituency, and so Democrats feel like they need to be responsive to a lot of them. How does he both get the turnout he needs from Democrats, but avoid being pulled by them to talk about their issues because I am struck.

I wanna take what you just said about taking an economic message, like bottle it and force feed it to every other Democrat because more often, they kinda do that Hillary Clinton, like, and you get a car and you get a car and you get a policy issue and you get a policy issue. And it’s, like, for all these different groups, and it’s not one message that, like, broadly is gonna appeal.

Yeah. That drives me crazy. And I love the fact that the Democratic Party is the party of diversity. I love that. That’s why I’m a Democrat.

You know, my grandfather was Italian. And at that point, you know, he was the first generation immigrant coming into the country and going to work in steel mills. Like, so that’s why my family has always been Democrats because you know, they were union and they were first generation American. I just think Sherrod is so disciplined, like, I’ve campaigned with him a bunch over the last twenty years. He’s a disciplined campaigner that focuses on economics, and he will not get pulled off of that message.

Now whether or not young voters that resonates with them. I think in the Midwest, it still will because they’re wanting to leave college and go into the job market or they wanna stay in Ohio, maybe, and they want the economic growth here to be prominent. Shared is also going to have benefits from the infrastructure bill. So the Brent Spence bridge, which ties Kentucky to Cincinnati. Two percent, I think, of the country’s GDP flows over that bridge.

That’s gonna be on the list. This infrastructure money is starting to flow. The chips act has landed the Intel project here just a little bit north of Columbus. Which is gonna mean, like, a hundred billion dollars literally in investments. Like, all the building and construction trade unions are working on these projects that’s gonna be, a really big deal in the inflation reduction act.

We got battery plans popping up in Ohio, and the construction is union for those plans. So I didn’t have that advantage. We’d pass that stuff, but none of it was hitting the ground. Sherrod will have that actually hitting the ground. The union halls are empty.

There we don’t have enough workers and not enough skill trades. So he’s gonna benefit from that as well, but he’s he his trick is he’s disciplined. His hair is not disciplined, but he is disciplined.

Yes. You got the price tag for the infrastructure bill, and he’s gonna get the benefits of the actual building.

Exactly. Yes. Exactly.

Alright. So and before we get it, you said the word college twice. I’m just not gonna let it pass that I went to college in Ohio. I went to Kenyan, and I love Ohio. That’s but also just because people know that I’m not gonna let the opportunity pass to say I went to Canyon in Ohio.

Beautiful place.

Okay. So now we’re gonna go to Kentucky. We’ve got this governor’s race coming up this week, Andy Beshire, He’s done a good job of keeping Joe Biden’s brand off him. I mean, he must be, or otherwise he wouldn’t be running such a close race because Biden remember lost by twenty six points, but a lot of the recent internal pulls that we’ve seen from them, they’ve got him up a little bit. You know, so, I mean, he’s got an internal pull.

It’s got him up by eight. I don’t think he’s winning by that much, but He’s got things, you know, in range, but the Republicans are trying really hard to tie him to Biden. Let’s listen to one ad from a called Kentucky values and hear what they think about him.

A big thanks also to Governor Andy Bishir.

Biden has a lot to thank Bishir for. Bishir pushed Biden radical transgender agenda, even light about sex change surgery for kids.

A big thanks also to the Governor Andy Beshir.

Thanks to Beshir. Few people are working than when he took office.

A big thanks also to Governor Randy Bishir.

Thanks to Bishir, nearly two thousand criminals are back on the streets.

A big thanks also to the Governor Andy Bishier.

Biden and Bishier. Thanks. But no thanks.

Okay. So is that landing with voters? Let’s listen to them.

We’re one of the few states that has no backlog on the rape kits. Know, because Andy pushed that through. I don’t agree with his position on abortion, but I think what he’s doing for the state the position that we’re in financially, the things that he’s done educationally, the large corporations that are building in Kentucky that are gonna help us tremendously financially. I think he cares for the people of the state of Kentucky. And I don’t always agree with what my dad and mom did, but we, we got fed clothed and put to bed at night.

And I think that’s the same. I feel with Andy that, Yeah. There’s some things I wish he did different. I wish he would approach differently. But I think he’s done a tremendous job, and I welcome another term for him to be able to bring some more of those realities to us?

Probably back when I voted for him. I was a little naive about things. I didn’t really pay much attention to anything. But during COVID, like, the way he handled COVID and the way I seen other states handle COVID and stuff, that’s what probably put a good taste in my mouth so to speak for him? It’s really sad toms, but you do kinda have to, you know, lace your bootstrap stuff You know, we can we can get through this, as Andy says, we can get through this, and we will get through this together.

So not everyone in the focus group we did in Kentucky said they were gonna vote for Andy Bashir again, but it did jump out how much all of these bashir trump voters had nice things to say about him. They talked about how much they thought he handled COVID well, which you do not hear for Democratic governors too much. And the main thing that I noticed when I was watching They all called him Andy. They just fucking called him. Like, he was their buddy.

Yeah.

So tell me, I I don’t know if you’ve been tracking this race closely, but, like, Is he doing the same thing as Sherrod Brown or is he doing something different where he’s really just focusing on connecting with people? Which it sounds like Sherrod Brown does too.

Yeah. I think that being a governor is just so much different than being in DC, you know, being a senator. And you’re home all the time. So you’re always in the state, and you’re always doing events. So you do.

You get that personal touch with a lot of people that get to see you and touch you and look at you. And and then, obviously, you know, that guy who was talking about abortion, he doesn’t agree with Andy on abortion. Andy, who’s now my buddy. Too. Yeah.

I think he probably lets that slide because I bet Governor Beshir is not talking about that all the time. I bet he’s not waking up every morning, sending out a press release about abortion. He’s sending out releases about the economic development stuff, the jobs they were talking about. And really focusing on Kentucky. So he’s a little bit insulated from DC, which governors can do.

And he’s talking about economics, which is essential. And he’s not talking about the things that would really piss that guy off. If you were trying to jam an abortion argument down that guy’s throat, he would be pissed, and he wouldn’t vote for you. But and he’s not doing that because he’s a very, very good leader. And I think it seems like it bearing out in the polling.

We don’t get Kentucky TV up here. So I don’t get to see any of the ads or anything, but that makes a lot of sense that a smart governor with a lot of political experience stays in the date focuses on economics and doesn’t get people cranked up on these very divisive issues.

Yeah. Well, unfortunately, even though, like, not everybody was going for him. Let’s listen to the the no votes.

I voted for per share. I don’t regret that vote. And I do think Bishir did a lot of good things during the pandemic, but I also think you did a lot of harmful things. Bulwark for a small business I do tax returns all day for small businesses. His stands on businesses being closed during the pandemic, making it a mandate instead of a choice.

Killed a lot of small businesses, made it difficult for small businesses. So that’s definitely regrettable. I know he’s focused on bringing in large corporations. But you still have to have those mom up shops to support those. He also was very aggressive on closing religious services.

Somebody that attends religious services weekly multiple times a week. So that’s something that I definitely did not support. Kind of makes me regret that vote for him. Like Daniel Cameron, I think he’s a little bit more abrasive and brash that Bishir tends to be Bishir tends to be a little more meek, a little bit more humble.

With COVID. I think Bevan would have been a nightmare. I think we would have lost a lot of more lives. I think Andy did a good job through COVID. But I feel like and it seems as if he doesn’t wanna kinda give back that power If

I had to make a decision today, I would vote for Daniel Cameron, and I and I tell you the reason. One of the major reasons why I’m not trying to diminish any segment of the population in the United States. But when we focus on transgender issues as a major East, when we’re talking about a small percentage of people compared to those that are out of work, the southern border, you know, everything else going on in the world, our our gas prices and our food has gone through the roof. But we’re focused on that. That to me just says, we’re not looking at this through the proper lens.

And for me, that’s where I look at this and go. No. You can’t have my vote.

I think that He definitely put in place some really good measures to definitely save some lives, I believe. I worked in health care during COVID, so I was in an urgent care setting. Every single day. I’ve had COVID four times. Having said that, I do plan to vote for Daniel Cameron.

I think that He has really done some awesome things out of our capital, and I think the work that he’s doing right now, he’s doing it well. And I think that that he deserves an opportunity. Not that Bishir is awful or terrible or, you know, that I don’t like him. He is very likable. However, that doesn’t always make for the best policies.

So one of the things that I found pretty interesting, like, we never hear COVID anymore. Nobody talks about COVID anymore. And I wonder if there’s something about a governor’s race, because, like, I think you’re completely right. Like, the governor’s races exist on this entirely different plane than a federal race. If there are more governor’s races, I wonder if there will be more re litigation of COVID, the governor made those choices.

So if if I had to identify from listening to these groups, his vulnerabilities. One would be on COVID, but not everybody liked it even though they like him. And then also just the way people kinda like someone new Incompency has a lot of benefits, but in this environment we’re in right now, so does being the insurgent candidate because people really just are constantly wanting something new, But I I’m interested in how you think because I’ve been feeling like Democrats really have dodged a bullet on COVID. Like, people were really mad about the way Democrats handled it. But now they don’t talk about it anymore.

Like, it hasn’t really helped Ron DeSantis when he was trying to run on it. But I guess I wonder, do you think in twenty twenty four is gonna become a bigger thing, or do you think it still is something that’s dragging Democrats down? Cause it does seem like it’s relevant in this race.

I don’t know. I don’t know, like, the accountant there. Like, is he just kinda looking for something to vote against him on? You know, I mean, like, it was COVID. I mean, it was a pandemic, and businesses were getting closed down.

And, like, of course, church services were super spreader events. So I don’t know. I mean, sometimes people are, like, looking for a reason to vote against somebody, and maybe they bring that back up. But I do think that COVID may play a little bit of a part. But I it was just interesting.

The COVID stuff is very personal because I think some of the women that we’re talking were like, well, he seemed to do a good job with COVID. You know, and maybe it was they got the kids back to school in a certain amount of time. I don’t know. But, man, oh, man, to being a combat governor, you know, you didn’t plow the highway quick enough and let’s lift off the road and it’s your fault. You know, it’s hard when you’re in charge.

Yeah. I just wanna say and focus sometimes, like, weird things can happen where, like, one person mentions COVID because it’s, like, a thing for them. And then suddenly, everyone else talks about it.

Yeah.

When normally it isn’t, this friend of mine, it’s hard to tell whether or not that’s happening here. So I’m gonna bounce back to Ohio for one second because I wanna ask you just because I’ve got you about JVance. So you were trying to appeal, like, as a moderate to some anti JD Vance Republicans of which I knew based on our focus groups were available back in November. We wanted them to cross over and vote for you. And I just have sort of a general question about how you capture more conservative voters without compromising sort of your own set of values.

What’s the trick there?

You know, I think talking about reform two things would be reform. And I think Democrats have gotta start talking about budget deficits. We can’t continue to do this. So very much, I think, in line with with a Bill Clinton in that regard. And so the appeal to me is about reform.

I think there are so many and people are genuinely committed to trying to solve problems or to provide health care for people or provide food for people and and all of that. But I think if you wanna win over conservative voters that aren’t one issue voters on abortion or this or that, I think you gotta talk about reform and reforming the health care system. We spend so much on health care two and a half times the average industrialized country with the worst results. Like, that’s a broken system. So just because you defend universal coverage, just because you support the Medicare program and the Medicaid program, doesn’t mean you can have a very robust conversation about how we front load the money we’re spending towards prevention so that we can drive these costs down or the fact that half the country has diabetes and or prediabetes.

We talk about health care, but we don’t talk about health. And being healthy is about personal responsibility and how do we reward that and how do we build incentives in the system. So I think that kind of approach, I think, talking about things like Shop class in school, and not everybody has to go to college you know, the all that crazy talk that happened here that eroded the building and construction trades, eroded the skilled workforce, you know, if you’re healthy, you have to be working. There’s no free ride, you know, welfare to work. Again, Bill Clinton and his team really kinda captured a lot of that stuff that made people comfortable, you know, my dad’s a conservative.

He he voted for Clinton, you know, back in the day because he appealed to him on those But I think, honestly, Sarah, the Democrats have got to come around on the debt and deficits. What I would say is that, look, I voted for the inflation reduction act. I voted for the chip’s bill. I voted for the infrastructure bill. Two of the three were bipartisan in nature.

We have to re industrialize the United States. We have to make stuff here again. We did that. But now you have to pay for it. You’ve gotta pay the bills.

We can’t have the debt payments that the government makes. Pushing out investments and everything else because the debt’s so high. It’s gonna be higher annually than what our defense bill is. That’s insanity. So I think talking about being responsible and, I mean, think about what that communicates, and you know this, because of your time with the Republican Party.

When you’re talking about balancing budgets, you’re talking about being responsible.

Right.

And that is a value that voters have. If you’re saying, like, we’re just gonna borrow money and spend it on all kinds of crazy stuff, that’s irresponsible. So you communicate that to voters. And then you get into what you were talking about. You get this.

You get this. You get this. We’re just trying to buy everybody off. It’s like, wait a minute. What’s the person say And this is what the college loan thing did, and when I came out against it, it was like, how about the person who goes into the building and construction trades?

Like, are you gonna pay their loan off? They got for their truck that they had to get so that they could drive to the job site every day. It’s just like tilting the whole thing, not that we shouldn’t reduce interest rates and you know, it should be one percent interest. You shouldn’t have these companies making all this money. But those are the kind of things that communicate values to those conservative voters that I think would allow you to pull some over.

And with your help too, we had four to five hundred thousand people in Ohio. That voted for the Republican governor here and voted for me. We lost because we didn’t get turnout in an off year. You know? So it wasn’t that we didn’t get the crossover because we did.

We just didn’t have the off year turnout. We needed in a place like Ohio.

And without going into it strategically, it’s part of it though that the Republican party has also changed in that they are running on a more populist economic message than they used to so that they’re able to get to people like your dad who’s a conservative in a way that he would vote for Bill Clinton because he saw him as more of an economic I don’t know about an economic populist, but but somebody was like, make things in America, and and more pro union. Like, the Democrats have this sort of pro union legacy where I’m watching Republicans as they’ve had like a breakdown over who they are. And, like, as some of them reinvent themselves, some of them are reinventing themselves as economic populace, and, like, trade protectionists and pro union. I mean, Marco Rubio would came out on the side of the unions against Amazon. Is that part of the struggle too that the Republicans are changing?

I think Trump did scramble that.

Yeah.

For sure. I mean, I think one of his top lines he had in northeast Ohio probably in a lot of other Midwest states too was when He was running against Hillary, and he said, well, her husband passed NAFTA.

Yeah.

That to me was kill shot. It was devastating because in our area, we watched the factories close. In fact, where my dad worked, it was Delphi, they literally closed the factory down in Warren, Ohio, which is about ten, fifteen miles north of Youngstown, halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Close down and goes right over the border in the Mexico and then the Machiladores, and they build a factory there. And our workers went down to Mexico to train the workers that were eventually gonna take their jobs or they would unbolt the machine from the factory floor like my cousin Donnie did.

And shipped it to China. Like, those workers know it was right after NAFTA, and the jobs went to Mexico. So when Trump came in and was like, boom. Mentioning that, we had a lot of rank and file democrat union members saying I’ve been waiting for a guy like this my whole life. That’s when they moved Trump, and that’s where I think you get that little more populous strand of Republican there.

I mean, they haven’t done a ton on it, but that kind of approach is very effective. And I think part of their success now.

Well, and speaking of this, like, weird nervous breakdown. The Republicans have. I JD Vance went from being one of my favorite Republicans because we were all never trumpers together to one of my least favorite as he sort of did a metamorphosis But it sounds like when we were talking to the group of shared Trump voters that I was we were talking about before, there were, like, people didn’t even like Vance that much. We’re kinda coming around to him. Listen to one person.

Even though I’m mainly a Democrat, I don’t hate him. And I work by East Palestine. So I appreciate Mercedes bringing that up, and he actually came to and did seem concerned. So, yeah, I don’t mind him as much as I thought I would.

That lady voted for you. She voted for you in the last election. But I guess, is there anything about his first year that has surprised you? Like, do you think he’s doing a medium job? Okay.

Is he better than you thought worse?

I know this may surprise you. I haven’t paid that close of attention.

You were working on your You were doing healthy things for your

time. Yeah.

You know, serenity now.

You know, I think the East Palestine thing clearly gave him an opportunity to be present beyond the news. And, you know, he does a nice job of just, like, showing up and being there. I don’t know if it affects any of his policy stuff. But, you know, showing up as important. So I’m not totally schooled on what he’s been doing.

He’s not real active. He didn’t campaign very hard. During the campaign. He was really relying on being a Republican and the outside money coming in. And I don’t see anything much different than that of him, like, being super present around the state other than Yeah.

You know, maybe the East Palestine thing.

Okay. Well, unlike that woman, I don’t like him any better than I thought I would. So alright. Let’s wrap up by talking about the most endangered Senate Democrat. He’s so endangered.

He might stop being a Democrat. Joe Manchin, been going out of his way to separate himself from the Biden administration over the last couple years. You know, lately, a lot of people have been speculating because he’s gonna run on a no labels ticket, which The second that they said, a Republican is definitely gonna be at the top of the ticket. You know Joe Manchin is not gonna run on that ticket because if Joe Manchin’s not at the top of the ticket, he’s not doing Right. But the West Virginia mansion Trump voters we talked to seem to think that something is amiss with him, and they aren’t inclined to vote for him again.

Let’s listen.

I’m not sure what all it is, but he’s not full boat for West Virginia all in like he was during the elections. It’s like he maybe it’s because he’s trying to think more independent

And when he stepped back from us and then started popping up everywhere else, it was like, oh, what is he planning? What is he thinking?

My opinion, I saw it coming while he was stepping back from just West Virginia. And wanting to be out there with Texas governor, you know, and everybody else. He was showing he was ready to start running bigger But I think he would be good. He didn’t officially, you know, drop us, but we were like fifty percent, you know, his other fifty was let me see if everybody likes me too.

These voters do not like it that he seems to have national ambitions so that he’s been running around with Nancy Jacobson on the no labels. They don’t say no labels. They don’t, like, know exactly what he’s doing, but they get the sense that he is, like, in a run for something bigger, and they don’t like it. But you also ran for president, Do voters did they hold that against you? Like, did they not like the fact that you had sort of had national ambitions, or did that actually help raise your name ID and then you were able to kinda come home and be sort of a bigger figure to them?

Both. Yeah. It’s interesting how different people take it differently. Some are like, yeah, that’s our guy, and he’s you know, can go down there and make a difference. And he’s got his head on straight.

And then there are other people that are like, you know, you’re too big for your britches. You’re our congressman, you know, and you should be here with us. Don’t leave us. I heard that a lot too. Like, I don’t want you to leave us.

Yeah. Look at a nice way. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But it’s like, well, the president still represents you, you know, so you’re still a citizen. It’s just really weird. Like, you just don’t know how people especially, you know, a guy like Manchin, he was secretary of state.

He was governor. He was mister West Virginia. You know? And, like, that’s our guy. I don’t know.

It’s just weird. It’s hard to tell, you know, what percentage will be like, hell, yeah. That’s our dude versus We don’t want you, you know, getting above us thinking you’re some big shot, which happens. So hard to tell.

Yeah. Manchin’s got some time, and he obviously hasn’t said whether he’s gonna even rerun for that seat, but I suspect if he does, he won’t do it as a Democrat. He will run as an independent. And I’m not sure that’ll be enough to save him. I think your boy, Sharon, has a has a better chance of holding on, but I am I’m worried about all of it.

Those are the optimistic notes I like to close with.

I’m worried about all of it, though. That’s as optimistic as we got here.

You know what, though? I’m so glad we had that conversation up front. I want everybody to take care of themselves and, work on your breath work and notice that your nervous system is too high. And since I get a lot of comments like this, if my podcast is causing you a special set of angst and trauma. Just you just want to listen to it, go for a walk.

Go for a walk while you’re doing this and make your feel better.

There you go.

Don’t stop listening, guys. This is what it takes to know how we’re gonna win and, save democracy. Tim Ryan, thank you so much for being here.

Awesome,

Sarah. Great to be with you.

Thanks to all of you for listening to another episode of the Focus Secret Podcast. Remember to rate and subscribe and we will catch you next week. Bye bye.