Opinion | A California lawmaker with a message for working-class Wisconsinites

Insurgent presidential campaigns don't start in Washington. They begin at barbeques with the New Hampshire Young Democrats, in meetings with frustrated local officials in Indiana factory towns and at UW-Whitewater's Rock County campus in Janesville.

Maybe the prospective candidate writes a book that gets good reviews and then amplifies the book's arguments as part of a campaign to reframe the discourse of a nation that's ready for a new conversation. That sounds a lot like what U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna has been doing this summer. The progressive California Democrat has maintained one of the busiest schedules in American politics.

Khanna, 45, is quick to say that he's not running against Joe Biden. Asked in July, at a point when the president's poll numbers were low and speculation about 2024 was spiking, Khanna waved away the prospect of a primary challenge. "If he runs, he has my full support, and I fully expect him to run," said Khanna.

So why has the congressman been trekking across the country this summer to the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire and to Midwestern battleground states such as Wisconsin? Why has Khanna maintained a nonstop schedule of media appearances that have made him a regular not only on MSNBC and CNN but on Fox News, where he has batted away challenges from conservative commentators with a smooth, professional style that seemed, well, presidential?

Khanna is ambitious, in the way Democrats should be ambitious. He rarely talks about his own political prospects, but he talks a lot about how to renew the party in places where it's been falling behind. If Biden decides to forego a bid for a second term, it is Khanna's determination to expand the party's reach — on policy and on the ground in purple and red states — that makes him a uniquely appealing presidential prospect.

A veteran of the Obama White House, where he focused on expanding exports from the U.S., Khanna taught economics at Stanford before challenging a Democratic incumbent and, in 2016, winning a House seat representing the Silicon Valley. The son of immigrants from India and the grandson of a union activist who was jailed with Mahatma Gandhi, Khanna worked closely with Rep. Mark Pocan, D-town of Vermont, to stop U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen and to end abuses of the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force. He wasn't cautious about ripping "neoconservative hawks" and calling for "forming a new foreign policy consensus in the United States that rejects militarism and interventionism and is rooted in restraint, diplomacy, and human rights." Khanna struck up a working relationship with Sen. Bernie Sanders as a House co-sponsor of several of the Vermont senator's legislative initiatives. He went on to serve as a co-chair and tireless surrogate for Sanders's 2020 presidential bid.

Khanna recognizes that, no matter what happens in 2024, the Democratic Party needs to get better at defining itself in ways that make sense in working-class communities such as Janesville, a historic union town in a region where Trump and other Republicans have been making inroads.

Talking up arguments outlined in his 2022 book "Dignity in a Digital Age," Khanna makes a case for a more equal distribution of the wealth and work associated with new technologies, and for a "new economic patriotism," which employs planning and government investment to strengthen traditional American industries, develop new ones, and revitalize small towns and cities where workers feel they've been forgotten.

"There's a way to talk about economic patriotism that doesn't come off as xenophobic and driving toward a new Cold War," said Khanna. "I think that the most destabilizing thing would be for us not to become a thriving multiracial, multiethnic democracy — and that's very hard to do if we don't have much more of a sense of prosperity in places that have been deindustrialized or left out."

Khanna believes that the way to unify the country is by spreading prosperity to places on the map where workers feel the federal government has failed to address the fallout from factory closures and the collapse of Main Street businesses. He argues that it is vital to merge a critique of economic disparity with a plan to renew communities where people are hurting and believe that policy makers in Washington have forgotten them. "I do think that the hollowing out of the industrial base and the supply chains hit both factory towns and some of these rural communities," he explained to me after meeting with workers and local officials in Janesville, where 14 years after the closure of a huge General Motors plant people are still asking about what comes next. "Economic patriotism gets that. It's not deviating from Bernie's message about jobs having gone offshore, plants having closed because of trade policies that didn't take these towns into account. But it's adding a focus on next-generation industrial policy and then linking social progress — providing child care, health care, education — as part of that narrative of building America."

Making this connection, by assuring that federal policies and investments focus on aiding regions of the country that have experienced economic neglect and instability, is central to Khanna's vision. He's worked with tech companies to move work to rural communities such as Jefferson, Iowa, and he's been in the forefront of efforts to bring microchip production back to the U.S. — and to make sure new plants are located in communities that have suffered deindustrialization.

"If Democrats are the party of economic renewal, of economic patriotism," he said, "I really do believe we can connect with people all over this country."

That's an optimistic vision, to be sure. But, as Khanna knows, Democratic presidential candidates who win big — like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama — tend to be optimistic.