Congressman Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) has announced his withdrawal from the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020.
Although he managed to appear in the first two debates, Congressman Ryan failed to gain traction and consistently struggled to poll at even one percent. As a result, he did not qualify for the two more recent debates. The stricter criteria for the upcoming fifth debate made it all but certain he would not appear on that stage either.
During his campaign, the Midwestern congressman presented himself as one of the few more moderate voices in the Democratic primary, as a frequent critic of the party’s increasingly leftward lurch on a handful of key issues. In the first debate, his standout moment was when he and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) clashed over foreign policy, with Gabbard widely seen as the winner of that exchange.
In the second debate, Ryan was one of a handful of moderate candidates who attacked the socialist policies of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), along with former Congressman John Delaney (D-Md.), Governor Steve Bullock (D-Mont.), and former Governor John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), who has already dropped out. But these attacks failed to blunt Warren’s momentum, and she is currently in a statistical tie with former Vice President Joe Biden as the frontrunner for the nomination.
Ryan represents the 13th Congressional District of Ohio, which he has said to be representative of the types of rural voters who flocked to President Trump in 2016 after voting Democratic for years. Immediately following the 2016 election, he decried the Democratic Party as having become a “coastal party” that had forgotten about Middle America. Later that month, he unsuccessfully challenged Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for the position of House Minority Leader, earning 63 votes to Pelosi’s 134.
Ryan has been in Congress since 2003, when he was first elected to represent the 17th district, which was redrawn into the 13th district in 2013. He previously served one term in the Ohio State Senate from the 32nd district, from 2001 to 2002. Ryan is the ninth major candidate to withdraw from the Democratic primaries, which is the largest presidential primary field in history. Eighteen candidates remain.