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Timothy John Ryan was born on July 16, 1973 in Niles, Ohio (the birthplace of President William McKinley). Ryan's parents divorced when he was seven years old, and he was raised by his mother. Ryan graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in Warren, where he played football as a quarterback and coached junior high basketball. Ryan was recruited to play football at Youngstown State University, but a knee injury ended his playing career. He transferred to Bowling Green State University where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1995. After college, Ryan joined the staff of Ohio Congressman Jim Traficant. In 2000, he earned his law degree from the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire.
From 2000 to 2002 he served half a term in the Ohio State Senate. After Jim Traficant was convicted on criminal charges in 2002, Ryan declared his candidacy for the 17th District. The district experienced significant redistricting following the 2000 census, and now included much of Portage County and part of Akron. Ryan was initially seen as an underdog in a six-way Democratic primary, but he won the primary. In the November 2002 general election, one of his opponents was the man he used to work for, Jim Traficant, who ran as an independent from his prison cell. Ryan won the election with 51 percent of the vote. When he took office in January 2003, he was the youngest Democrat in the House, at 29 years of age. He has been reelected five times. In every election except for 2010, Ryan has won at least 67 percent of the vote. His district was renumbered as the 13th in 2012, and was pushed westward, absorbing most of Akron.
Ryan was a member of the "30 Something" Working Group, a Congressional caucus that includes those members of the United States House of Representatives who are Democrats and had not yet reached the age of 40. It was organized by the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to engage younger people in politics.
Before the 2004 presidential election, Ryan spoke on the House floor denouncing the Bush administration’s denial of a draft reinstatement. In September 2006 he gave another heated speech accusing the Bush administration of trying to distract the public from key issues like the war in Iraq and the economy. In 2010, Ryan introduced the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act, which sought punitive trade tariffs on countries like China that were engaging in currency manipulation. It passed the House overwhelmingly but never made it to the floor in the Senate.
Ryan initiated a bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as House Minority Leader on November 17, 2016, following the 2016 presidential election. After Pelosi agreed to give more leadership opportunities to junior members, she defeated Ryan by a vote of 134–63 on November 30.
While in Congress, Ryan took up the cause of Adi Othman, an illegal immigrant in Youngstown, Ohio, who had lived in the United States for almost 40 years. Othman operated several businesses in Youngstown, was married to a US citizen and had four US-born children. Ryan repeatedly presented a bill to Congress to help Othman to stay in the United States. But in February 2018, Othman was deported after President Donald Trump directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to increase the number of arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants. Ryan condemned the deportation, saying "To watch these families get ripped apart is the most heart-breaking thing any American citizen could ever see."
Ryan is a member of a number of Congressional committees, including the Committee on Appropriations, the Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch (a subcommittee he chairs), the Subcommittee on Defense and the Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies. He is a member of the Congressional Addiction, Treatment and Recovery Caucus, the Congressional Manufacturing Caucus, the United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus, the Sportsmen's Caucus, the Congressional Arts Caucus, the Ohio River Basin Congressional Caucus and the Afterschool Caucuses.
In February and March of this year, Ryan traveled to early primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. On April 4, 2019, Ryan announced his candidacy for President of the United States. He announced his candidacy on the TV show "The View", in which he said, “I’m a progressive who knows how to talk to working-class people. At the end of the day, the progressive agenda is what’s best for working families.”
In an interview with The New York Times later that day, Ryan said that he was better positioned than any other candidate to address economic distress in American communities. He also discussed the potential of electric vehicles and other renewable energy industries to create jobs for people displaced by the decline in manufacturing.
For much of his career, Ryan was opposed to abortion, citing his Catholic faith as the reason for his position. But in 2015, he wrote an op-ed for The Akron Beacon Journal in which he said that after speaking with women about their reasons for choosing to have abortions, he had “come to believe that we must trust women and families, not politicians, to make the best decision for their lives.” He also reversed his position on gun control after the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017, breaking publicly from the National Rifle Association.
Ryan told the Times that he believes that there is an opening in the race for a Midwesterner who can focus on winning back the voters who flipped to President Trump in 2016, and who can bring states like Michigan and Wisconsin back into the Democratic column. He said, "Who can win western Pennsylvania? Who can win Ohio? Who can win Michigan, Wisconsin? I think I’ll be as well if not better positioned than anybody else to be able to win those states. I think somebody from the Midwest could be a healing candidate in the sense that we’re so divided. You can have a great 10-point plan, but if we don’t figure out how to come together, then we’re not going anywhere.”
Thus far, Ryan's campaign hasn't caught fire. He places 13th in Real Clear Politics' aggregate polling numbers, polling at 0.7%.