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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.

I've said it a bunch of times on the podcast Tim Ryan ran the best losing campaign in America in 2022.

The 10-term Democratic Congressman from Youngstown made a race out of his Senate contest with Republican JD Vance in Ohio, which once was a swing state, but now has swung decidedly red.

I sat down with Ryan recently at the Institute of Politics to talk about his life, the campaign, and lessons learned. Here's that conversation.

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Tim Ryan, it's good to see you look incredibly relaxed all of a sudden. I don't know what it is.

I have the post-congressional glow. Let me ask you about that.

Because you were there for 20 years. We scheduled this for a Monday so that you could get on a plane and go somewhere.

Because for 20 years you've been getting on a plane in flying to Washington. Most of your life, that's been your public identity. And now, your Tim Ryan citizen.

I'm having a ball. Honestly, I'm coaching my, it's been weird. The transition has been weird because you're always so geared up towards a campaign or what, you know, it was on the Appropriations Committee.

So where are the bills and where they at and what do we have in them and like, you're home, you know, and the honey do less gets a little longer.

I'm coaching my eight year olds basketball team and flight football team. That's been like a who just to kind of be there with him. It's just been a lot of fun. It's been a whole new thing.

I'll ask you in a bit about what you see next, but I'm sure you must have glanced at the festivities when the new Congress was sworn in.

I spent many hours sitting on a stool in CNN studios watching that stuff. What was your sense of what happened there?

And what does it portend for the next couple of years? I mean, you know all these people very, very well.

Yeah, I was actually in Florida on like a break. And I was like, well, I'm not checking my phone, but I had to check it once a day.

I just had to see what was going on. Well, Disney World has nothing on this. I had to see the shit show.

And so yeah, I think it's just going to be a continuation of kind of what we think is going to happen. It's the debt ceiling. It's the appropriations process.

It's what lever can we pull to cause chaos? And that'll happen through the committee process with Hunter Biden and that whole thing.

And now now that files the classified material. And then the big stuff on the house floor will, you know, it'll be it'll be conflict and it'll be chaos.

I think. Yeah, I want to ask about McCarthy, but just as since you raised the documents thing, what's your what you read on it?

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