Add another name to the crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates, VOA news <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/ohio-democrat-tim-ryan-announces-bid-for-president/4863026.html">reports</a>.
Moderate Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan announced Thursday he is joining the race.
&#8220;I&#8217;m a progressive who knows how to talk to working-class people and I know how to get elected in working-class districts,&#8221; Ryan said on ABC television&#8217;s The View. &#8220;Because at the end of the day, the progressive agenda is what&#8217;s best for working families.&#8221;
Ryan, 45, has represented northeastern Ohio — an area that voted for President Donald Trump — since 2002. Ryan was barely known nationally until 2016, when he challenged Nancy Pelosi for the key position of House Democratic leader, saying it was time to bring new blood to the party.
He says his representation of a blue-collar district gives him an understanding of the effect that lost manufacturing jobs has on people. Ryan accuses Trump of failing to keep his promises to bring back such jobs and says he will make new technology, such as wind and solar power, and electric cars, a priority.
There are 16 announced Democratic candidates running for the 2020 nomination. Polls show former Vice President Joe Biden — who is expected to run — would have the best chance of beating Trump next year.

large_0-135.jpg

medium_0-135.jpg

small_0-135.jpg

thumbnail_0-135.jpg

0-135.jpg

Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan Announces Bid for President

How many ways can you measure the first quarter of the year? For Democratic presidential candidates, it&#8217;s 300-plus events, 24 states and hundreds of voter questions, VOA news <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/by-the-numbers-democrats-posting-big-campaign-stats/4858179.html">reports</a>.
The Iowa caucus is still 10 months away, but the Democratic primary campaign is already an all-out sprint — passing eye-popping markers for campaign activity and voter engagement. Voters in Florida and Ohio may not see it, but weekends in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — not to mention a handful of select states — are a blitz of candidate rallies and local meet-and-greets.
For some candidates the frenetic pace is the message, a way of casting themselves as tireless and willing to take every last question. Elizabeth Warren and Beto O&#8217;Rourke are trying to make an ambitious schedule and accessibility part of their brands, but Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand have done their parts to keep up with several dozen events each, most in early-voting states.
It&#8217;s far from clear that the candidate who holds the most events, whether leaping onto tables or addressing big rallies, will emerge as the candidate with the most votes. Still, Democrats watching the display from a distance say the engagement, the activity and the enthusiasm bode well.
&#8220;Broad picture: This is incredibly good for the Democratic Party,&#8221; said Jim Messina, who managed President Barack Obama&#8217;s re-election campaign.
The Democrats&#8217; contested 2008 primary and the GOP&#8217;s packed 2016 field showed &#8220;that enthusiasm in primaries becomes very important in a general election,&#8221; Messina said. That&#8217;s because engaged backers are &#8220;more likely to do two things you need them to do&#8221; in order to win, he said: donate money and help persuade their social networks to vote.
For all the recent upheaval in politics, the 2020 campaign so far shows some things haven&#8217;t changed. Retail campaign stops are still essential to breaking through in early-voting states that will play a central role in choosing the nominee. They are, perhaps, even more important in the social media era. One live-streamed rally that goes viral on social media can reach more voters than dozens of smaller events.
Even though no one metric can predict success, a look at the campaigns&#8217; tallies of on-the-ground engagement shows how the some busiest road warriors are faring at the end of the first quarter.
Warren and O&#8217;Rourke are logging mileage in areas their party hasn&#8217;t always traveled to early on and underscoring their appetite for grassroots interaction, a style Pete Buttigieg is also cultivating. Warren took more than 200 questions from voters and O&#8217;Rourke answered more than 350, according to their campaigns&#8217; first-quarter estimates.
That&#8217;s a notable feat for O&#8217;Rourke, who only entered the race last month. The former Texas congressman has logged 55 first-quarter events in nine states where he publicly took voter questions, according to his campaign. Gillibrand held 59 public events in eight states since launching an exploratory committee in January, according to the New York senator&#8217;s campaign. Buttigieg has held 35 events in 11 states since the South Bend, Indiana, mayor started an exploratory committee that same month.
California Sen. Kamala Harris has emerged as a top-tier contender despite fewer public events than some opponents, clocking in with 26 public first-quarter events in eight states since launching her campaign in January, according to an AP estimate. Harris&#8217; campaign said Monday night that she took more than 100 voter questions during first-quarter events, where total estimated turnout has topped 37,000.
Warren, a former law professor whose campaign is keeping detailed statistics, took questions at 48 events in 12 states over all three months, according to the Massachusetts senator&#8217;s campaign. Her aides measure her commitment to voter engagement partly in selfies — estimating that she&#8217;s taken more than 12,000 with voters so far. The tally of extra time after events is itself a strategic move, an argument that availability can win the day while other candidates spend time on the high-dollar fundraisers she&#8217;s sworn off.
Other Democrats are consciously mixing up their number and types of public events. Booker is holding a bigger kickoff of a national tour soon after holding smaller events. The New Jersey senator&#8217;s campaign estimates that he has held more than 50 public events in seven states since he jumped into the race in February.
A handful of other candidates have lagged behind in their total number of first-quarter events. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar logged 18 events in nine states since forming her campaign in February, according to an AP tally, with former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee each holding 12 events. Former housing secretary Julian Castro has held more than a dozen of his own over the first quarter.
All of these candidates tend to fall behind Bernie Sanders in early polling of the Democratic field. Sanders, the runner-up in 2016, has held 17 major events in eight states and Washington, D.C., since declaring his candidacy in early March.
Not all of Sanders&#8217; events — nor those of other candidates — feature the sort of real-time voter questions that are a fixture of Warren&#8217;s and O&#8217;Rourke&#8217;s appearances. But Sanders&#8217; crowds illustrate his formidable ability to engage voters on his own terms: The Vermont senator&#8217;s campaign projects a total turnout of 74,000 people for all of his events so far.
President Donald Trump famously upended the traditional calculus of campaigning in 2016 by making fewer retail visits as he powered past more than a dozen GOP rivals. Whether anyone in the Democratic field can repeat that model remains to be seen.
&#8220;We want to fall in love like we did with Barack Obama,&#8221; Messina said of Democratic voters, &#8220;and to do that, you need to do the retail part of this.&#8221;
Several candidates have made a point of veering off the beaten track, hoping a stop outside the early states will earn them some extra media attention and voter good will.
O&#8217;Rourke crossed six states in one week on his post-announcement road trip. Warren has made unexpected trips to Puerto Rico and the Deep South, eager to find a way to set herself apart from the pack.
When the Massachusetts senator touted her &#8220;not traditional&#8221; choice to visit Alabama during a rally there last month, a voice from the audience chimed in to note that &#8220;Obama did it.&#8221;

large_Democrats-Posting.jpg

medium_Democrats-Posting.jpg

small_Democrats-Posting.jpg

thumbnail_Democrats-Posting.jpg

Democrats-Posting.jpg

2020 by the Numbers: Democrats Posting Big Campaign Stats

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg is riding in the back of a rented minivan to his last event of the day in South Carolina, munching on cold french fries and critiquing his stage performance so far, VOA news <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/unlikely-candidate-gaining-traction-in-us-2020-race/4848511.html">reports</a>.
The enthusiastic crowds of hundreds who&#8217;ve packed his first two stops have been much larger than the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and his team expected. It&#8217;s “wonderful,” he says, but the cheering and prolonged applause are messing with his delivery. Sometimes he neglects to pause, and his next words are drowned out. Other times people start clapping when he doesn&#8217;t expect it.
“I need to relearn the timing of my stump speech,” Buttigieg says. “I&#8217;ve been used to a format where I go in, there&#8217;s 50 people, I do my little spiel and then we have some Q&amp;A and hopefully they walk away impressed. Now every one of these things we put on the calendar as a meet and greet is turning out to be a rally.”
Buttigieg, a veteran and Rhodes scholar, was the longest of long shots when he announced a presidential exploratory committee in January. No mayor has ever been elected president, much less one from a community of roughly 100,000 people in the middle of America, and Buttigieg is barely old enough to be eligible for the job.
But his underdog bid is gaining momentum, and the clean-cut guy known to most people as “Mayor Pete” can feel it. Now he has to figure out how to turn one of the first surprises of the nascent race for the Democratic nomination into a full-fledged presidential campaign — and one that isn&#8217;t remembered as a mere quirk.
“The buzz helps,” Buttigieg says. “But you want to make sure that you have enough substance and enough organization that any kind of flavor-of-the-month period is something you can outlive.”
Besides the crowds and the cheering, Buttigieg has seen increasing national media attention, from Fox News to MSNBC and his second appearance on ABC&#8217;s “The View.” After a breakout performance in a CNN town hall earlier this month, Buttigieg&#8217;s team says he raised roughly $600,000 from 22,000 donors in just over 24 hours. He has now received enough individual contributions to qualify for a spot on the Democratic debate stage this summer.
But there&#8217;s still plenty of work to do, starting with raising money and hiring staff. Buttigieg said his goal early on was to raise $1 million by the end of the first quarter on March 31, adding, “We&#8217;re definitely there.” He&#8217;s fairly confident they&#8217;ll have the funds needed for a healthy operation, at least in the early stages. But he also wants to “show well” when all candidates&#8217; first-quarter totals become public — the first time this cycle that campaigns are required to file campaign finance reports.
“I think we benefit from the fact that it&#8217;s graded on a curve,” Buttigieg said. “No one is expecting us to raise as though I were a senator from Florida or from a big city. But we&#8217;ve got to show that we can compete at this level.”
Buttigieg also plans to double the size of his roughly 20-person team in the new few weeks, in preparation for an official campaign launch. He doesn&#8217;t have an advance team &#8211; those campaign staffers who coordinate events on-site before the candidate arrives, hang campaign signs and ensure someone is capturing emails and phone numbers for every person who walks in the door.
Volunteers and local Democratic officials handled most of those duties during Buttigieg&#8217;s swing Saturday through South Carolina, site of the South&#8217;s first primary. Instead of professionally printed banners, someone hung poster boards with messages handwritten in black marker urging attendees to tweet photos and video using several different hashtags and Twitter handles. When Buttigieg took questions from the crowd in Rock Hill, there were no microphones for people in the audience, forcing him to ask a woman at the back of the gymnasium to shout her question — twice — so he could hear.
None of that seemed to bother voters. After his event in Columbia, Christina Goodwin, 32, called Buttigieg “exciting” and said he&#8217;d moved into her top three list, along with Sens. Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, despite her misgivings about supporting another white man for president in 2020.
Goodwin, like other voters, said she&#8217;s been picking up bits of intriguing information about Buttigieg through social media that have piqued her interest. That he learned to speak Norwegian, for instance, so he could read more books by a Norwegian author, Erlend Loe. Buttigieg, who speaks seven languages, demonstrated some of his language skills when a Norwegian media crew showed up to ask questions after the Columbia event. (He also speaks French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Dari and Maltese, the language of his father&#8217;s home country.)
Buttigieg also plays piano and has been known to join local performers on stage in South Bend — video of which sometimes pops up on social media. When he was applying to his alma mater, Harvard, he won the Profiles in Courage essay contest with a piece about an independent then-congressman from Vermont whom he admired: Bernie Sanders. They would speak years later, when the senator called in 2017 to encourage him to drop out of the race for Democratic National Committee chairman, which Buttigieg later did.
Buttigieg believes he&#8217;s gaining support because people are looking for something different and a more hopeful message to combat President Donald Trump.
The openly gay former lieutenant in the Navy Reserve uses his stump speech to talk about how political decisions have shaped his life, and how much is at stake in 2020.
He recalls writing a letter to his family before he deployed to Afghanistan in 2014 so they could read it if he didn&#8217;t return. He also talks about his marriage to his husband, which “exists by the grace of a single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court” &#8211; a line that generated some of his biggest applause during his trip through South Carolina.
Friends Catherine Paquin, 36, and Jonah Burrell, 37, attended Buttigieg&#8217;s stop in Greenville wearing “Mayor Pete 2020” T-shirts they bought off Amazon.com.
Burrell, who is gay, said it&#8217;s “really cool” to have an openly gay man in the race, but it&#8217;s not the main reason he&#8217;s supporting Buttigieg.
“That calm demeanor, the way he speaks is smart,” Burrell said. “You can tell he thinks about all his answers. He&#8217;s done his research.”
And those doubters who say Buttigieg doesn&#8217;t stand a chance?
“I think they underestimate him,” Paquin said.
Wrapping up his remarks in Greenville, Buttigieg noted that&#8217;s happening less these days than it did a few months ago, when hardly anyone knew his name.
“I don&#8217;t know whether we can pull this off, but I&#8217;m feeling pretty good about it,” he said.