YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO — Dressed in a grey sweater, jeans and white sneakers, Tim Ryan looks more like the college-football star he aspired to be than a man about to take on the most powerful woman in Washington, DC.

Tall, lanky and fit, the seven-term congressman still retains the slim build from his days as a stand-out quarterback from John F. Kennedy High School in Warren, Ohio. “I work out in the same gym as Paul Ryan. I definitely have the better six-pack,” he says of the speaker of the House, who also hails from a Midwestern Catholic background.

But this Mr. Ryan is a Democrat, and the man who wants to topple Nancy Pelosi from her House leadership position, a role she has held for 13 years — three of them as minority leader, followed by four as speaker running a historic majority, and the last six spent managing a massive decline in Democratic representation that has led to a historic minority.

“I didn’t aspire to do this until I watched the results come in on election night,” Ryan said, as he relaxed on a couch inside the Covelli Center, a civic building at the heart of this Rust Belt city.

Even so, he admits it will be a Herculean effort. “I just know I have to try. No one stepped up from my caucus to challenge failure, so I could see no other choice but to do the right thing,” said Ryan, who is married to Andrea, a school teacher at Seaborn Elementary just west of Youngstown. They have one child together, a 2-year-old son named Brady, and two others, Bella and Mason, from her previous marriage.

‘I cannot look my kids in the eye and say I stood on the sidelines when my party needed me and did nothing.’

“I cannot look my kids in the eye and say I stood on the sidelines when my party needed me and did nothing,” Ryan said.

Ryan, now 43, was raised by his mother, Rochelle, along with his older brother, Alan, after his parents divorced when he was 10. His grandmother and grandfather, who worked at a steel mill in town, lived a couple of blocks away.

“We were a very tight-knit family. We didn’t have much, but I never noticed that,” he said. “When you have that you kind of don’t realize you are missing out on material things.”

Ryan is proud of his family’s background; it’s one of the reasons he is so frustrated by losing those voters to Republican candidates.

“We are the party that is going to help working-class people, and yet no one got that message,” he said, noting that people of every color, gender and sexual orientation are all part of that coalition.

“We didn’t tell them in a meaningful way that we have a plan to grow their wages or instill economic security for them or their communities. When we don’t talk about economic security, we lose elections.”

The people who live here are deeply connected to their roots and traditions; many still aspire to work with their hands as their ancestors did before them.

“They are the people who abandoned my party in this election, and honestly the same people who have been abandoning my party since 2010,” he said of the midterm election year that Democrats began shedding working-class support.

“Or better yet, we have abandoned them because we stopped listening to them.”

With Pelosi as the head of House Democrats, the party has lost over 60 House seats — but no one has ever meaningfully challenged her position except former North Carolina Rep. Heath Shuler in 2010. Shuler received just 43 votes from his fellow members against 150 for Pelosi.

Ryan’s challenge to Pelosi is remarkable in that despite his seven terms in Congress he has always been considered a backbench member. Typically, to aspire to leadership, a member needs to demonstrate a particular savvy to network with other members to get them on side, which requires a decent amount of skill and personality to pull off.

Ryan has the personality, he has yet to show the skill.

It is unclear who is supporting his bid to unseat Pelosi. It’s a tricky situation: Anyone who votes against Pelosi will have to face her disapproval — and the consequences — if Ryan doesn’t win.

But Ryan’s biggest challenge is also his best attribute; he is everything 76-year-old Pelosi isn’t. She is the progressive liberal from San Francisco, an affluent cosmopolitan city; he is the moderate New Deal Democrat from Youngstown, a former industrial giant trying to recover from decades of decline. She is a very wealthy political dynamo, he is upper-middle class at best and a novice.

Pelosi is a woman, Ryan is not.

This last difference was underscored in a recent tweet by justice editor Ian Millhiser at the left-wing Web site Think Progress: “This thing where an obscure male backbencher thinks he deserves to replace the most accomplished woman in Congress is how sexism works,” he declared.

What works for Ryan is that he is not Pelosi. That he represents the very area where his party got lost in the wilderness, with a huge swing of Obama voters to Trump, while still being re-elected to his own seat, could mean he holds the key to the party’s future.

Ryan stresses it’s not personal. “I like [Pelosi]. We’ve always gotten along. I just think we need some fresh new ideas and messages for voters to rally around. Now I might be the most unlikely person to do that, but someone had to,” he said.

Pelosi’s response was indirect but blunt; she sent a letter to House Democrats and the press stating she was once again running for her leadership position and that she already has the support of two-thirds of the caucus.

Phillip Naples says he has known Tim Ryan all of his life. The Golden Dawn’s crisply dressed bartender in his white shirt, black tie and trousers greets nearly everyone who enters the Logan Avenue restaurant and bar by name from behind the half-circle, wooden-top counter that has been here since 1934.

Behind him are five arched mirrors lit up with the restaurant’s name in brilliant red and green neon. It’s the kind of place that has a wooden box filled with candy for the children, does not allow cussing and has remained standing through the Great Depression, the rise and fall of steel and a city whose fortunes have seen better times.

“Tim is good people. We need people in leadership who understand that Americans want representatives who understand the heartland of the country,” says Naples, a staunch Democrat who doubles as the president of the local American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union.

Naples says he is not worried that Ryan’s career in Congress has never included a committee chairmanship or a prior desire to be on the leadership path. “That is what will probably make him more attractive, isn’t that the lesson of this election? We want change,” he said.

Any concerns among party members about sexism are exactly what contributed to the Democrats’ collapse with the middle of America, said Paul Sracic, a Youngstown State University political-science professor who teaches right around the corner from the Golden Dawn. “It presents a problem for a party who has put so much emphasis on identity politics to then have a woman challenged by a white male,” he said of their dilemma. “They don’t know how to deal with it.”

Sracic said it makes sense for someone from the Mahoning Valley to make a move towards leadership. “Look, this area was ground zero for the election. [It was] the biggest problem for the Democratic Party because it had the highest percentage of Obama voters who switched for Trump.”

Five young fraternity members from Youngstown State walk in and take the last remaining stools to sit and grab some beers and food and watch the game. All of them are within months of graduating and on the cusp of starting their careers; only one is anxious to move out of town, and they all split their votes between Clinton and Trump but supported Ryan to return to his House seat.

All of them would love to see a hometown guy in leadership.

“Classic David and Goliath,” said Kevin Lawson, who once volunteered for the seven-term congressman.

All Ryan ever wanted to do was play football. “Sure I dreamed of the NFL but I was shooting for college ball. It was a way to lift myself up,” he said. His performances as a high school quarterback in Warren got him recruited to Youngstown State by then-coach Jim Tressel.

“A knee injury took me out. I tried to work myself back, but it wasn’t meant to be,” he said.

Then along came the man who changed his life — the now-late Congressman Jim Traficant, who himself was an outstanding football player at the University of Pittsburgh in his day.

The two met during Ryan’s senior year in high school, where Traficant was the keynote speaker at the school’s football banquet. “A five-minute introduction turned into a couple of hours of listening to his stories. He loved a captive audience, and I was a fresh new one,” Ryan said.

Traficant gave Ryan a taste of Washington with a job as an aide in his Washington office after graduation from Bowling Green State University. After earning a law degree at New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce Law Center, Ryan couldn’t resist “the pull to come home, despite how bad the economy had fallen.”

An opening for a state senate seat came up in his hometown of Niles and he decided to go for it. “I figured this was my opportunity and if I didn’t at least try I would regret it, so I ran for my first public office,” he said. “It was an opportunity combined with my desire to come home and make a difference in my community.”

Before he finished his first term, an opening for a congressional seat in his hometown came up, and he won the election against two other entrenched competitors.

“I can still see him standing on a different corner every day with homemade signs jumping up and down and trying to get voters to support him,” said Sracic.

In a twist of fate, one of Ryan’s rivals was the very man who put him on the path to public service: Jim Traficant. Only Traficant was now a fallen man, running his campaign from prison after being convicted for bribery.

Ryan says they never talked before the race, during it or once he got out of jail. “We never spoke again,” he said of the late congressman who was released from prison in 2009 and died from a tractor accident in 2014.

Seven terms later Ryan is still in the House. “I’ve been recruited to run for governor and the US Senate. I’ve seriously considered it, but it has always come to the simple fact that I’ve always liked where I am,” Ryan said.

‘I just think we need some fresh new ideas and messages for voters to rally around.’

In 2006, Ryan was one of the fresh faces his party leadership leaned on to campaign for other candidates around the country, which helped the Democrats regain a House majority that year.

At the time, suburban Pittsburgh Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle said Ryan was picked because he was effective at “speaking the language of those of us who grew up in blue-collar areas.”

But now, he’s up against the leader of his own party. With the vote set for Dec. 1, Ryan has his work cut out for him.

How will he spend his next week?

“On the phone, a lot. I have to effectively make my case personally to every member that I am the right person to lead this charge. That probably means repeated calls to reassure people I am doing this for the right reason,” he said.

As Ryan stands up from the couch, he looks down from a big picture window at the local families streaming by. “I owe it to them to do the best I can.”