Pat Ryan’s Very Cordial Class War

NEW PALTZ, New York — The strip-mall health clinic was just one of 1,700 sites operated nationwide by primary-care provider Optum, but to the Democratic representative representing this upstate New York college town its recent change of ownership — from a locally owned company to a national behemoth — represented a parable of corporate consolidation.

“We have seen the biggest health care company in the world, UnitedHealthcare, gobbling up what used to be a community-centric thing,” Pat Ryan said in the clinic’s parking lot one day earlier this summer, as community organizers and health care workers gathered around him. One by one, former patients at the clinic recounted their travails since the 2022 purchase by Optum: the missed cancer diagnoses, difficulty finding appointments, and, in one instance, a botched biopsy that left a woman bleeding on the exam-room table.

Ryan told the roughly two dozen attendees that health care mergers were “an issue that transcends all of our current partisan divides.” Then he earnestly asked them to “please spread the word” about a bill he had introduced in the Republican-controlled House that would ban health insurance conglomerates from owning and acquiring practices like the New Paltz clinic through subsidiaries like Optum.

“In pursuit of essentially endless profit, we’ve seen United come in here,” said Ryan, wearing jeans, sneakers and a baby blue button-down with the sleeves partly rolled up to survive the sweltering day. “It’s been deadly already in our community and will only get worse.” It was a notable rhetorical target for Ryan, a 44-year-old decorated former Army captain from a purple district who likes to say “people are good” and that a central element of political leadership is “care.”

Two years ago, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in Midtown Manhattan, barely 70 miles from where Ryan stood, in an act fueled by vigilante rage at a health care system that had become unbearably unaffordable, according to a manifesto prosecutors allege was written by Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting Thompson. As Mangione prepared to face trial on murder charges, Ryan was pointing the finger at some of the same business practices that had led to the executive’s killing. “If we don’t give people a constructive place to channel the pain and the anger that they’re feeling, some people — not that I condone it — will do really horrible things,” Ryan told me before the rally. “What that guy did, whatever his name is, is horrible, and we should condemn it. What leaders need to do to stop that kind of stuff, though, is give people an actual outlet to give some hope that we can actually fix their problem and improve the system.”

For his four years in the House, Ryan had been attempting to strike a careful balance between uplifting calls for bipartisan unity and industry-rattling demands for corporate crackdowns. As a co-founder of Congress’ Monopoly Busters Caucus, Ryan pushed bills that targeted industries across sectors: meatpacking, cable television, energy utilities, youth sports, housing. He has been able to safely carry a district Kamala Harris won by just three points by focusing on “billionaires and big corporations making record-breaking profits,” he wrote in a social media thread after Harris’ defeat, while also holding a belief “that this is the greatest country in the history of the world.” Ryan calls that synthesis “patriotic populism,” a guiding mantra he has adopted in hopes of building a political movement from his success. But what is notable is what Ryan leaves out of his vow to “clearly tell folks who’s at fault”: any desire to malign the entirety of what Bernie Sanders grew famous calling “the top one percent.”

“We have to build a politics that takes on that billionaire and corporate class without exception, and that is the future of the Democratic Party,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of Justice Democrats, founded by alumni of Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. “These are the people who are cutting our wages and exploiting our labor. What are we talking about? This is who we are unifying against.”Division is an essential component of any populist politics, and ascendant members of Ryan’s party have rushed to confrontation with the country’s top one percent this year. The front-runner in next week’s Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary is promoting a “Tax the Rich” plan — a slogan Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once had scrawled in incarnadine red across the back of a white Met Gala dress — to “make the super-rich and big corporations pay their fair share.” Mayor Zohran Mamdani cheerfully promoted a new “pied-à-terre” tax on million-dollar-plus second homes in New York City, filming a video to promote the proposal from the sidewalk outside Citadel investment-fund CEO Ken Griffin’s apartment building. And a California health-care workers’ union is pushing a ballot measure that would impose a one-time wealth tax on the assets held by billionaires, including “the Rembrandt and the diamonds,” as Elizabeth Warren put it when she proposed her own wealth tax during the 2020 presidential campaign.

Ryan is trying to find a path between the gleefully revolutionary tone of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and the pro-business bent of the establishment at the center of both parties. In the in-between, Ryan thinks he can return economic and political power to the masses while also bringing the country together.

“At a time when there’s a lot of performative anger going around in the party, he’s somebody who can land a knockout punch and do it with a smile,” said former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an ally of Ryan’s. “People want a fighter, and he’s definitely that, but he does it in a way that doesn’t lack for warmth.”As he looks toward a higher political office he is candid about wanting but unwilling to name, Ryan will test the limits of this angry moment: What does populism look like if you don’t rush to conflict with flesh-and-blood enemies?

Ryan has the résumé of a dream Democratic candidate from a different era. The son of a public-school teacher and descendant of a Hudson River tugboat captain, Ryan graduated from West Point. He deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2007, eventually earning the rank of captain, where he disarmed roadside bombs and dodged mortar fire and was awarded a Bronze Star Medal for each deployment. While earning a master’s from Georgetown, Ryan founded a security technology firm; after graduation, he went to work as a business executive in the field.

He leaned on his professional background at firms like Dataminr when he decided to run as a Democrat for Congress in 2018, arguing he had a proven record of creating jobs and fighting terrorism. The career experience also drew criticism, especially after reporting from The Intercept revealed that Ryan tried to pitch his company’s surveillance technology to a business group hoping to monitor labor activists.

Ryan lost the congressional primary that year, but was quickly presented with an unexpected opening for Ulster County executive, which oversees the county’s roads and bridges, public health and housing services, and economic development across a 183,000-person area studded with small-city, suburban and rural communities. Ryan won the office in a special election and was then elected to a full term, vowing to bring military values of “selfless service” into the government job.

“I didn’t feel like when I sat down, I sat down with ‘Captain’ Pat Ryan,” said Chris Kelly, who served as a deputy county executive under Ryan as the two managed the county’s 1,300-person workforce through the pandemic. “We all knew his background, we all called Pat Pat at his request.”

In 2022, the House seat went vacant in the middle of the term, and Ryan launched another bid to win it. During the nationally watched special election, Ryan focused on the impact of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision and zeroed in on Ulster County’s utility company for raising prices. He filmed an ad in which — from the raised bucket of a worker’s utility truck — he touted his record of holding “greedy corporations accountable” through an investigation of the utility, Central Hudson. (A spokesperson for the company said at the time that Ryan was doing a disservice by using “rhetoric that divides people.”) Ryan narrowly won the special election, and then a full term that November after another close contest.

He found a seat on the Armed Services Committee, where he advocated for strengthening ties with Taiwan and military aid to Ukraine and fiercely opposed President Donald Trump’s decision to wage war in Iran. He also emerged as a strong supporter of Israel during its war in Gaza, traveling to Israel in 2023 with the American Israel Education Foundation, a nonprofit affiliated with AIPAC, and resisting pressure from protesters in his district to call for an immediate ceasefire. Last year, he recorded a video for AIPAC’s social media accounts where he said it’s “so important that we celebrate and value and double down on our alliance with Israel.”

He joined the pro-business, center-left New Democrat Coalition, which attempts to find a middle way between two more established factions within the party’s House minority: the Progressive Caucus to its left and the moderate Blue Dogs to its right.

Ryan is six-foot-three, broad-shouldered and disarmingly baby-faced, with salt-and-pepper hair that is still more pepper than salt. A youthful energy and habit of swearing distinguish him in an aging Congress. And in speeches and one-on-one conversations, he speaks more with the tenderness of a dad of two boys than the sternness of an Army captain who did two deployments in Iraq.

That accessibility has helped Ryan strengthen his hold on the district to a point where many national Republicans quickly stopped seeing his seat as winnable. As I stood with him in Optum’s strip-mall parking lot, I saw a high-school-aged worker stop collecting supermarket shopping carts and rush over to inform Ryan, “My economics teacher loves you!” Earlier that day, at Kingston’s public library, I met a senior citizen who had struggled to find housing and then drove 30 minutes to Ryan’s monthly constituent-services office hours to thank him in person.

“I was homeless for several years, and I went to every politician up and down the seaboard, from New York up to Albany, and I got no help,” the man, Steven Kornbluth, explained. “I didn’t get any help from anyone until I called Congressman Ryan’s office.”

In 2024, Ryan became one of Joe Biden’s loudest critics within the party, calling on him to secure the border as nearby New York City became overwhelmed by migrants and then for the president to drop his reelection campaign following a dismal debate performance against Trump. (Ryan was the eighth Democratic member of the House to do so.)

After running 11 points ahead of Harris in his district that fall, Ryan publicly credited his success to an emphasis on economic policy. He argued in a triumphalist post-election social media thread that his success was partly due to his focus on the “billionaires and big corporations making record-breaking profits,” as he put it. “I told folks exactly who it was that was ripping them off, and I grounded it locally.” That has included New York City’s transit authority, over implementation of a congestion toll on drivers entering downtown Manhattan, and local utility company Central Hudson, which Ryan has continued to battle, now from the House floor.

He has introduced bills that would ban food conglomerates from controlling the marketplace for more than one type of meat, force cable companies to issue rebates after broadcasting blackouts, and bar private equity firms from investing in youth sports. (None has progressed in the Republican-controlled House.) He has also advocated for legislation that would cap utility company profits and demanded an investigation into private equity’s “out-of-control monopolistic practices” in the housing sector, as he wrote in an August 2024 letter to Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

“I don’t see a ton of daylight between him and a lot of the other populists on what really counts, which is taking on entrenched corporate power and using the law to try to slow down and reverse the affordability crisis in this country,” said Douglas Farrar, a Democratic operative who served as Khan’s director of public affairs at the time. “I appreciate that he wants to run on a positive message, but I don’t for one second think he would pull a punch because someone’s a billionaire if he believes they are a greedy and malign influence on their fellow Americans.”

Farrar specifically noted Ryan’s willingness to take on Optum, whose consolidation Ryan says has worsened his constituents’ health care quality while raising costs. The company responded to the former Optum patients’ claims at Ryan’s rally with a statement in which Optum spokesperson Katherine Wojtecki said, “Our teams across New York are focused on making health care simpler, more affordable and easier to access, resulting in a better patient experience.”

Ryan boasted that “some of the biggest battles I’ve picked and fought and won in the district are with some of our hospitals,” including those represented by the Greater New York Hospital Association, the powerful lobbying group for which his wife Rebecca works on federal advocacy. (The congressman said he follows all ethics rules when their jobs overlap.) He noted he has stood on picket lines with health care workers fighting unfair wages and went to “near war” with a local hospital when it moved to eliminate 40 mental health patient beds, a decision that was scaled back after his advocacy.

After the 2024 election, Ryan sought out Democratic colleagues who shared his interest in “rigorous enforcement of our antitrust laws,” citing pandemic-era corporate price-gouging that continued during periods of high inflation. The ideologically varied mix of members formed a group that called itself the Monopoly Busters Caucus.

Amid the wreckage of Democrats’ 2024 performance, the junior House backbencher dove into the party’s internal debate over where things had gone wrong. That November he began telling journalists his political project now had a “working title.” Patriotic populism, as Ryan explains it, represents an uplifting alternative to the zero-sum class warfare promoted by others in his party and could end up strengthening public confidence in regulated free markets and existing institutions.“The hero, and this is the big difference and the important difference, has to be the American people,” he told New York Magazine. “Scrappy, hungry innovators are the hero of the story. To me, they are the patriots.”

Ryan, who considers himself a “huge nerd” with a passion for his country’s history, says he draws on that past when thinking about the nature of patriotism. “Revolutionary War history is, like, my jam,” Ryan said. “I have a whole book dedicated to the Great Chain at West Point, which is embarrassing, but I’ll admit it.”

The country’s founders, he argues, believed in a “much different conception of patriotism” than today’s self-described conservatives, one that is reflected in the Declaration of Independence. He rejects the idea that embracing the language of patriotism could turn away some Democrats.

Former New York State Democratic Party executive director Basil Smikle likened Ryan’s emphasis on patriotism to the way other rising Democratic stars — like Texas’ James Talarico or Georgia’s Raphael Warnock — speak about faith on the campaign trail.

“I think Ryan is doing something very similar, which is to talk about what it is to be an American, to talk about citizenship and patriotism in a way that embraces Democratic values,” Smikle said.“A lot of progressive candidates may believe that the institutions don’t work, and we should kind of start from scratch,” he added. “I think he, in many ways, is still defending the institutions, but acknowledging they need substantial change.”

Over deli sandwiches in his Kingston office earlier this summer, Ryan portrayed “patriotic populism” as a unifying cause for a party disillusioned with its leaders and unsure of its direction. The affordability crisis, wrought by large corporations squeezing the consumer, demands a new brand of politics, he argued.

“The old way of liberal, progressive, moderate, conservative, just is outdated and doesn’t make sense increasingly,” Ryan said. “It’s more an axis of, are you on the side of working class, middle class, hardworking people and willing to fight and call out the bad guy villains who are the rich and powerful?”

Ryan has specifically attacked Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but generally steers clear of the name-and-shame approach to the wealthy that is increasingly popular among Democrats or those with the worldview articulated by a former Ocasio-Cortez adviser that “every billionaire is a policy failure.”

But many of those who consider themselves populist, on both the left and right, describe themselves as baffled by Ryan’s reluctance to take on a sharper-edged style as he eyes his next job.

“The wealthy to a degree have to get demonized because the wealthy’s dug in and they don’t want any changes,” said on-again-off-again Trump adviser Steve Bannon, citing the country’s vast wealth inequality and high rates of household debt. He said he had pushed the Trump administration to include populist policies like no taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, limited versions of which all became law.

“I’m trying to give them a wake-up call. Say, ‘Hey, look, you’re going to have either Mangione or Mamdani. You take your pick.’”Bannon, who prescribes a populism marked by protective tariffs, tight immigration policies and limits on corporate power, especially in the tech sector, said Ryan represents a sort of “phony” corporate Democrat that, despite self-appointed claims to populism, is “getting the table run on them by the socialists.”

Ryan has developed a political apparatus that at times sets him up for conflict with the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats as they push the party leftward. His primary vehicle is a state political action committee he had founded as county executive to recruit “people who’ve actually walked the walk on service,” including veterans, firefighters, police, nurses and teachers. Last year, Ryan resuscitated the committee as Patriot PAC, and went on to endorse over 80 candidates across the state, including for offices as small as sheriff and town council.

A parallel federal committee has given Ryan an opening to expand his reach beyond New York, as well. He has doled out contributions to Democratic congressional candidates nationwide and announced endorsements even in far-flung districts where it is likely few voters know his name. One of those Patriot PAC-funded candidates, Missouri Rep. Wesley Bell kept his seat this week against a spirited challenge from former congresswoman Cori Bush, a DSA member endorsed by Sanders.

This March, Ryan walked out onto the stage of the Wood Theater in downtown Glens Falls, a small upstate city in a district north of Ryan’s. Hundreds of upstate supporters filled the theater seats, and, after heeding Ryan’s request to recite the pledge of allegiance, he passed the microphone to someone much farther from home: Ocasio-Cortez.

On the final stop of a three-city tour of New York state, Ryan and Ocasio-Cortez sat around a small roundtable, sharing intimate details about their lives before Congress. She told her origin story as a working-class waitress who couldn’t afford a blood test because she lacked health insurance, he recalled being a young military officer writing a letter to his parents to be opened in the event he died in combat. The two jeans-clad, ambitious young Democrats found an unexpected chemistry.

The first time they had taken a stage together, it was a much bigger leap for Ryan. In 2024 he had invited Ocasio-Cortez to his district for a day of events aimed at promoting Hudson River cleanup after “corporate polluters” contaminated it decades ago. The two rode a solar-powered boat to a press conference, where they made a point of warmly greeting one another again in front of cameras.

At the time, the partnership might have appeared perplexing from Ryan’s perspective. Ocasio-Cortez was perhaps the most famous self-identified “Democratic Socialist” in America, and he was fighting for reelection in a district with a near-even partisan split. Ryan joked it was inevitable that images of their hug would end up “in an ad somewhere” paid for by Republicans.

“I just respect the hell out of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez,” Ryan said that day. “Are we going to actually do something to protect our water, or are we going to give into this very cynical, ‘Let’s focus on what divides us, let’s focus on, mostly made up, areas of disagreement?’”

“Actual leadership,” Ryan went on, “is leaning into and doing the work to find the commonality, and then reminding the community we actually do share some pretty foundational things.”

The two New Yorkers had both first run for Congress in 2018, presenting what appeared to be different ends of a party seeking its identity after Trump’s first election. But since then, Ryan had seen his party move left — on specific issues like the Gaza conflict and health care and in the emergence of once marginal left-leaning groups now capable of toppling giants in the House.

By the time they embraced again two years later in Glens Falls, it was clear that the party’s strongest gravitational pull was coming from the left wing led by Ocasio-Cortez. In some of the most closely watched Democratic congressional primaries, Patriot PAC-backed incumbents Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat lost their seats to progressive challengers criticizing them for being too closely aligned with corporate special interests and pro-Israel donors.

But Ryan was not looking to resist that leftward pull. Last year, he endorsed Mamdani over former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral general election, and after his ally Goldman’s defeat this year, Ryan rushed to embrace the victor. Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a Mamdani ally who trounced Goldman by harnessing voters’ anger with Israel’s war in Gaza, was invited to be one of Ryan’s five featured speakers at his campaign kickoff rally last month.“I’ve known Pat for 10 years, and I hate to say this,” said one Democratic official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about their colleague. “But I couldn’t tell you a single thing that he genuinely, sincerely cares about or believes in, other than advancing his own political career.”

This summer, Ryan also reversed his position on aid to Israel, when he joined nearly half of House Democrats to vote for an amendment sponsored by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie that would halt the funding. Ryan explained that his vote “does not represent an abandonment of the state of Israel or the Jewish people” and instead calls for a “reset,” but said separately that he expects AIPAC to withdraw its support for him in future elections and that, “frankly, I don’t want their support.”

“Pat Ryan has his eye on higher office, and he knows he can’t get there without the radicals in the DSA,” Jackie Auringer, the Republican challenging Ryan for his seat this November in an uphill battle, said in a campaign press release. “He’s making himself useful to the people who can get him his next job.”

Insiders in New York’s political world often speculate where Ryan wants to take his political career next. Some see him developing a profile as a potential future Cabinet secretary, especially if an ally like Buttigieg, Ocasio-Cortez or Maryland Gov. Wes Moore wins the presidency. Yet Ocasio-Cortez stands in the way of Ryan’s clearest path to statewide elected office, the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose term ends in 2028. Those cynical about Ryan’s motives speculate that his best odds at a quick political promotion in New York rely on Ocasio-Cortez running for the White House. When I asked Ryan about that, he told me that while he collaborates with Ocasio-Cortez on a host of issues, the two haven’t spoken about either of their political futures, and how they may or may not intersect.

“All that conversation work has always been about how do we build a bigger, broader, stronger coalition, it’s never centered on either of us individually, which is one of the things I most respect,” Ryan said.

From the strip mall in New Paltz, at a fast-food burrito joint next door to the Optum clinic, I sat down with Ryan for one more conversation before I hit the road.

As we discussed his future, I went back to the social-media thread he had written in the wake of his 2024 victory. As I did, I described his political brand as “anti-billionaire.” Ryan stopped me.

“I think I said greedy,” Ryan said, careful to correct that it was greedy billionaires he opposes. “I actually think it’s very important to say there are good, very generous, and patriotic, and selfless wealthy people.”

I went back afterwards and checked. The word “greedy” appeared nowhere in his posts. The distinction Ryan was making appeared to be a new one.

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