But he is hoping to carve out the lane Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio might have filled had Brown chosen to run: the left-leaning populist who can speak simultaneously to an increasingly liberal Democratic base and to the Midwestern workers who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016.
Here’s a brief look at where Ryan stands on some prominent issues.
— Economic policy
Job creation and the “dignity of work” — a phrase Brown frequently uses and, on Thursday, encouraged Ryan to focus on — are almost certain to be the centerpiece of Ryan’s campaign. In an interview a few hours after he announced his candidacy, Ryan said he wanted to address the “economic disorientation” caused by the decline of traditional manufacturing.
Ryan said he had decided to enter the race in part because of the recent closing of the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which is in his district. In places like Ohio and Michigan, where the auto industry was long the cornerstone of the economy, he said he envisioned jobs in electric vehicle construction and other renewable energy industries.
— Climate change
With its focus on electric vehicles and renewable energy, Ryan’s economic agenda ties in neatly with combating climate change. He said his policies would go well beyond that but has not yet outlined how.
He said Thursday that he would recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement, which President Donald Trump has vowed to abandon, but added that it was “not anywhere close to what we need to do.”
And while he supports the restoration of Obama-era regulations that Trump is reversing, he added that he wanted to pursue consensus policies that would not be reversed or defunded if partisan control shifted. But it is far from clear what such policies would look like in a political reality in which many elected Republicans have denied the established science of climate change.
— Health care
Ryan is generally aligned with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing on health care. He is a co-sponsor of Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s “Medicare for all” bill, though he has argued in the past against the term “single-payer” health care because he doesn’t believe most Americans understand what it means.
On Thursday, he criticized the United States’ current health system as being “focused on disease” at the expense of preventive care. He also touched on mental health care, noting the prevalence of suicide among military veterans.
— Guns
A recreational hunter, Ryan used to have an A rating from the National Rifle Association. But his stance began to change after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.
He broke fully from the NRA after the Las Vegas massacre in 2017, taking the roughly $20,000 the organization’s political action committee had given him over the years and donating it to organizations that promote stricter gun laws. He now supports universal background checks, raising the minimum age for certain gun purchases, barring people on terrorist watch lists from buying firearms, and ending the federal ban on funding for research on the causes of gun violence.
— Abortion
Ryan used to oppose abortion rights but has since shifted, an evolution he explained in a 2015 op-ed. He now has 100 percent scores on his voting record from Planned Parenthood and Naral Pro-Choice America.
He noted Thursday that he had grown up in an Irish Catholic community where “being pro-life was just kind of in the culture.” As a congressman, he spoke with many women who had abortions and concluded that “there’s so many complexities to pregnancy that federal laws cannot account for,” he said. “It needs to be between the woman and the doctor.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.