NILES, OHIO Its just past 9 a.m. at the Ryan home in this Trumbull County suburb in Ohio, and the three kids are off to school for the day: the older two in high school and the five-year-old off settling in for his first week in kindergarten. He goes to the same place where his mother works as a second grade teacher.

Tim Ryan is nibbling on the fresh cinnamon muffins his wife left on the kitchen counter. Outside the window, a trampoline, a swing set, a basketball hoop, and a scattering of toys serve as a reminder that this guy is pretty much like any other suburban dad in Northeast Ohio, except that he serves in one of the most unliked professions in this country: Congress. Also, he's running for president.

And despite not having a presence on the national debate stage for the past two spectacles, he says with good reason, he has no plans to drop out now or any time before the first contests early next year.

Do you think I would be away from my family if I didnt think I had a chance? he says after explaining the Sunday family tradition of cooking sauce all day (he is half-Italian), hanging with the family, and watching the Cleveland Browns lose, as they did this past Sunday in their home opener.

He's showing the same healthy stubbornness he showed when ran against Nancy Pelosi for minority leader in 2016 after the Democrats lost the presidency, the Senate, and the House.

His critics were right, and he did lose. Still, Ryans repeated warning and consistent message of being more inclusive to moderate voters and running more pragmatic candidates in swing districts is exactly what the Democrats copied to win back the House two years later.

I am the only Democrat who could win this race who people dont know enough about yet, he says of not just his low name ID, but also his more moderate approach to things like fracking. Exactly how do you go tell someone who's making $100,000 a year in the states like Ohio and Pennsylvania that on day one, you're going to put them out of work? Because in their minds, that's what they see and that's what they hear, he says of the parade of Democrats following Bernie Sanders' and Elizabeth Warren's pledge to ban fracking.

My thing is: Let's have car plants where we're building electric vehicles, we're building solar, we're building wind, we unionized those jobs so they pay as much as the jobs they have what with they're doing now. Then you say we're going to wean ourselves off of this or get technology to make sure that we [are] capturing all the carbon. We also have an agriculture agenda that's going to be sequestering carbon. Talk to people like adults. Like, we're going to phase out of this and phase into this, but you're going to have your job until we make sure there's one there for you that pays as much as you're making now, he says of alternatives.

But we don't have the other jobs lined up yet, he stresses.

(Justin Merriman for the Washington Examiner)

In the latest RealClearPolitics averaging of polls, Ryan is polling at 0.5%, the same as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio before he dropped out and just a smidge below Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former housing secretary Julin Castro, who both made the debate stage in Texas last week.

Ryan was one of the 10 who did not make the stage in a race dominated by former Vice President Joe Biden and liberal darlings Sanders and Warren. His appeal, he says, is similar to Biden's in his understanding of the forgotten men and women. And he's not just talking about the Rust Belt.

What I've learned for the last couple years is it's not just this area. I mean you go to New York City, and there's people that are forgotten there. You can go to L.A., and there's tent cities of people who are homeless. So the system is not working now across the board. My whole idea is that if someone from an area that is always seen as being left behind can unite the people of the country who have been left behind, that you have a coalition to actually do something about it, he said.

Even the vaunted Acela Corridor, that Amtrak line that connects Washington to New York, isnt exactly the playground for the elite, he says, if you just bother to look out the window as you pass through Baltimore; Wilmington, Delaware; Philadelphia; or Newark, New Jersey.

It doesn't look much different than when Bobby Kennedy's body got brought from New York to D.C. It's very similar. There's structural problems that need structural solutions, but it's got to be framed in a way that it's for those people, he said.

Ryan says the people he listens to dont see their problems as ideological. They see it as a community problem, and they're open for total, absolute, complete common sense," he said. "People think you have to have a snappy saying. Of course, you're trying to penetrate the masses. You have to have some brand, but I do think this campaign in particular is going to be a lot like 1992, when the Berlin Wall fell and globalization was just happening and the world was changing and a governor from Arkansas announced he was going to run late in the game because he understood people were hungry for change."

Ryan has no slick operation. A staffer is waiting in his dining room for him to make calls; no one is waiting in his driveway in a large Suburban to escort him anywhere. Ha. No. For God's sake, I had to bring the garbage cans down and empty them. My wife's, like, Tonight's garbage night, he says.

Ryan said he had a choice to make to push for a place on the stage, but that involved playing games. Are we going to keep going after the 130,000 low-dollar donations where you're paying $50 to $70 for a $1 contribution? Which, by the way, most people sitting at home will sit there and say, That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Who does that? he said.

I don't think it is how you ultimately get elected either, he said, adding you also dont have a quick rally, shake a couple hands, snap some selfies, and go home.

We stay for a few days. We have lunch with the key leaders. We go to church. We've probably gone to six, seven African American churches, he said of his visits to South Carolina, the first early primary voting state where blacks have a decisive influence in the election results.

I'm listening to them. It's not about talking. It's not about big speeches. It's about listening. So you sit, and you go to lunch for an hour and a half with key leaders, and you listen to what their needs are. Then I'm talking about jobs and wages and healthcare and investments in these communities. What I have, I think, that some of the others don't have is I can go in the community and say, 'I come from a community just like this,' he said of places he represents like Youngstown, where the black population slightly edges out the white population in that working-class city.

On the working class, Ryan is the rare candidate who, when he had an opportunity to be on the national debate stage, talked about the union working families. The inattention from others bewilders him.

I don't know if it's intentional, but they [the candidates] don't spend enough time understanding these people. After the Trump election, somebody from California, elected official, who will remain nameless, said to me, I'd really like to come in Ohio and meet some of these people. I thought, We're not a petting zoo. We didn't take everyone's teeth out so you can feed them and have an experience with your kid. These are the people that have built this country, and you need to understand what they're going through, he said.

My strategy is I'm going to go where the people are, I'm going to listen, and I'm going to campaign like I did 20 years ago when I ran for the state Senate and ran for Congress. I'm going to go the bingo halls. I'm going to go the bowling alleys. I'm going to go to the bars and have a beer, have lunch, have breakfast. Literally, I'm in New Hampshire walking through the breakfast joint shaking hands, meeting people, he said of his constant trips to Iowa, the Granite State, and South Carolina.

He knows the race will not be won on Twitter discussions between journalists.

There's no reason for me to drop out, we're raising enough money to keep going. We're hearing from people that they're interested in supporting us. So for me, it's September. Im the long-shot candidate and I am OK with that, he said.

If I go to places and nobody shows up, and if no one's endorsing me and I don't have any money, then thats when I call it quits and I'm going to come to my kid's football game," he said.

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Tim Ryan is at home in the presidential race - Washington Examiner