It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump stunned the world, defeating Hillary Clinton with a surge of white Rust Belt votes, and Tim Ryan is back home for Thanksgiving week in one of the districts that made it happen. The seven-term Democratic representative from Ohio is holding forth at a conference on building healthier communities. But there’s something else on everyone’s mind, and it comes blurting out of the audience early in the question-and-answer session. “Do you have a death wish?” asks an elderly guy dressed in Sunday-best sport coat and tie.

Chuckles work through the luncheon crowd, about 200 strong on a Monday morning—social workers, school administrators, health advocates, and small business owners. Outside the ballroom’s huge windows, the rolling lawns ringing the conference center glint with a fresh half-inch of snow—the first for Northeast Ohio this fall. The speaker clarifies: “About your campaign.”

Ryan, the seven-term lawmaker from this blue-collar congressional district pressed up against the Pennsylvania border, doesn’t need the nudge to understand what campaign he means. A lopsided grin slides up his big, square, boyish face. “No, I do not have a death wish,” Ryan says. “I am Irish, so I do like a good fight every now and then.”

Even back home, Ryan can’t get away from the Washington palace intrigue currently focused on him. Not that he seems especially eager to. He brings it up himself, in fact, just a few minutes later, after a middle-aged woman takes the microphone and says: “Congressman, I don’t have a question, I just have a comment. You’re really awesome.” After the laughter and applause, Ryan, looking slightly embarrassed, quick-draws a quip: “I don’t think Nancy Pelosi thinks so.”

Ryan’s pitch is straightforward: “I’m the 43-year-old from the Rust Belt who understands what we’re doing wrong.”

The week before, Ryan had announced what most members of the House of Representatives’ Democratic caucus would look at as a political suicide mission: only the second bid to remove Nancy Pelosi as Democratic leader in her 14 years steering the caucus. “Somebody’s got to do something,” Ryan tells later me later in the day, when we sat down for a conversation between appearances and media hits. “And I’m the 43-year-old from the Rust Belt who understands what we’re doing wrong.”