Milbank: It’s time for a younger guy from Youngstown, Ohio

Democrats would benefit from some fresh blood to take on Donald Trump, the oldest president ever elected for the first time, and to revive enthusiasm among millennials, who didn’t turn out in the numbers Democrats needed.

Pelosi’s leadership team also misplayed the 2016 election. Its campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, insisted on a strategy of tying each Republican to Trump, even though, as I wrote at the time, evidence showed that this wouldn’t work. Democrats gained a paltry six seats.

But the most compelling reason for them to step aside is generational. Pelosi has been emblematic of her generation’s governing style on both sides: Passionately ideological and unyielding.

This is why Tim Ryan’s long-shot challenge to Pelosi is welcome. The 43-year-old backbencher from the Youngstown, Ohio, area won’t win, but he is doing Democrats a favor by forcing them to think about the desirability of keeping their septuagenarian leaders in place.

An interesting character

Ryan isn’t a flawless candidate. He’s only a recent convert to supporting abortion rights. His detractors point out that in his 14 years in the House, he has won passage of just three minor bills.

But Ryan is an interesting character, a former high school quarterback who drinks at the Open Hearth bar on Steel Street in Youngstown and is the author of books on the benefits of meditation and healthy eating. And this Rust Belt politician’s central critique of his party is correct: A populist economic message was secondary to cultural issues in the 2016 election and during much of the Obama presidency.

Ryan, who won 68 percent of the vote in a district where Clinton underperformed relative to Democrats in the past, explained that Trump’s blue-collar voters “are the guys I drink beer with. These are my buddies I watch football with. I don’t need to run a focus group.” His bar-stool focus group tells him that voters didn’t love Trump but wanted to say “go screw yourself” to the establishment.

In his telling, he has no policy differences with Pelosi. “I can’t think of one, other than emphasis,” he says. And that emphasis is squarely on economics.

His solution: “Get rid of the perception that we’re tied to Wall Street, that we’re coastal elites and that we’re more concerned with the donor class than the working class.”

His specific remedies are less clear, a scattered assortment of employee stock ownership plans, wind turbines and hydraulics, with some salty, steelworker language mixed in.

In Tim Ryan, I hear a pragmatism that is typical of his generation (and mine). He finds Trump’s racial politics “appalling” but finds Democrats’ “slicing the pie up” between working-class white, black and Hispanic Americans to be idiotic. Of the other Ryan, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, the Democrat attests: “I like him. … He’s a nice guy. I don’t demonize him.”

Nor would Republicans, after years of demonizing a San Francisco liberal, find it as easy to demonize this son of Ohio. “At least make them do it again to someone else,” Ryan says. “Hey, why not me?”

Dana Milbank is a columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group. Email: dana.milbank@washpost.com.