Congressman Pat Ryan
speaker
72 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Congressman Pat Ryan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
That is the mood, certainly in my district, especially in any purple or competitive district. You talk to members of Congress, House members, which is where I just, you know, by virtue of where I'm sitting, tend to have the most conversations within my party is like, regardless of what like traditional caucus or group you belong to, progressive or moderate or blue dog.
The common theme is an economic populist set of policies and rhetoric that is just grounded in actually listening to voters, understanding that, like in my community, for example, wages for 20 years have been flat and costs are just piling up on everybody. Neither party has actually solved that. And Trump was kind of the first one to actually channel that and get that and speak to that.
And shame on us for not understanding having a better, more constructive set of solutions and rhetoric around it to give a case that people can trust and believe in around solving those problems.
Well, by the way, I'm not saying I'm certainly right here. I'm just at a moment where I think we have to be willing to take risk and, you know, kind of say what we're hearing and then we see where it goes. So I'm not saying I have this all figured out by any means. But what I think the moment we're at as a party is I actually think exciting.
where I'm a big believer in, yes, you have formal official titles, but leadership to me is not about that. Good leadership is about by power of example or by power of taking action and seeing people respond to it, you can set direction for... any organization or group.
And there's a lot of folks in the Democratic Party right now tend to be relatively younger, although that's a low bar, and newer, and many of whom were mobilized by Trump's election in the first place. uh, term by the way, myself included to come into politics, who I think have a different theory of change and are willing to be out there and kind of pushing.
And I think that's healthy at a moment, like we're in, and we just, sometimes leadership is creating formal leaders, creating a space for that innovation and nudging and pushing. is what's needed.
And I think we're going to start to see that bear out here in a way that's actually will ultimately in the medium and long term be healthy for the party, especially as you look ahead to 2028 and a presidential primary where we'll really choose who's our next national leader.
But in the meantime, I don't mind letting House members and local elected officials and senators see what's working and connecting. And it really requires us to go back to listen to voters and not just talk to Dems, but talk to everybody and see what helps rebuild this sort of patriotic coalition. And I think from that, we're going to come through this okay.
as long as we just bring intensity to that process.
Yeah. I mean, especially in New York specifically, I'm a data person. If you look at young voter registration in New York, my district is one of the highest of this actually in the state and in the country. Young voters are registering, which is great, but they're increasingly registering unaffiliated. In New York, that just means you don't choose either party. We don't have like an
independent label. You just registered but unaffiliated. That's a growing, growing... That's now the second biggest group in New York. Democrats, number one. Unaffiliated, number two. Republicans are third. And that's mirrored across a lot of countries. So I think for a lot of good reason, trust in both parties is at historic lows.
And figuring out how to speak to those Americans and those voters in a way that's still grounded in
values but doesn't come with the typical like partisan purity tests and and framing and you're either fully on this agenda or not like that's not how anybody lives their life in the real world we focus on the area where we have common cause you build a coalition around it that's clearly affordability in the economy and that's the space we're going to have as each day trump fails to do anything to fix the number one problem of the american people
folks are smart. They will see that and feel that. And he's talking about invading Gaza and sending American troops instead of bringing down egg and food costs and bringing down rents and housing costs, bringing down prescription drug costs and health care costs. So that's the one, even in early polling, that's the one place that American people are already seeing and feeling like, huh,
He said he was going to do this. Instead, he's doing a lot of other stuff, some of which I might agree with. But that's not my core problem that I elected you to focus on.
Yeah, very quickly, I think the case which we should make every chance we get is that my life was changed by military service and exposing me to a bunch of people I wouldn't have otherwise met, forcing me to work together with them towards a common mission and showing me that like the greatest sort of reward and joy in life is accomplishing something for a cause greater
than yourself with a group of people. And I think that's a big part of the answer, by the way, to the problem that young people are feeling to our prior conversation where they want to be part of something, but they don't see those options right now.
So one of my big legislative priorities is a national service push, which has been really hard, sadly, to get moving through Congress, even though it's such a bipartisan idea that everybody you talk to is like, oh, that sounds great. But when it comes time to fund it, generally, Republicans, unfortunately, don't want to put up the money.
Like, for example, even if we just funded every person, every like if we doubled the slots in some of our existing national service programs where you have more qualified applicants than you have slots, that would double the number of people in the country doing service. The cost is very, very low compared to many other things we invest in. And the return on that is just transformational.
Showing 41–60 of 72 · page 3 of 4
← Previous
Next →