JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Inside a hollowed-out former railcar wheel plant Friday, Rep. Ro Khanna gathered local political leaders, a powerful labor boss, environmentalists and “Made in America” advocates to help him roll out new legislation to construct modern iron and steel plants in deindustrialized, storied towns like this one.
The event capped one of the most stunning weeks in Democratic Party history — Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and party stalwarts began rallying behind Vice President Kamala Harris — but Khanna made no mention of either during his 50-minute news conference.
Skipping over that tectonic shift is surprising, given that just days before, Khanna, one of the leading progressive voices in Congress, was a Biden-Harris surrogate who served on the campaign’s national advisory board. Now, he’s a Harris campaign surrogate.
But in an interview after the event, Khanna explained that some policies, like saving and bringing back steel manufacturing jobs — especially here in the heart of Trump country — need to be bipartisan, free of the sniping and finger-pointing that defines today’s politics. He joined three Zooms in support of Harris this past week and will host plenty of other Harris campaign events, he said, including in early September in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Khanna was raised.
“We had a lot of Republicans working on the legislation … and I didn’t want to politicize this,” Khanna said at a table in a back room of the Boulevard Grill, where he hosted a separate roundtable with steelworkers after the news conference. “This is something that is about good jobs and national security and modern steel, and we’re going to need the country to come together to pass it. And I want it to pass with Republican support.”
Khanna’s visit to Johnstown, which was rebuilt after a devastating flood in 1889 and which the congressman hopes can bounce back from America’s manufacturing decline, is less about winning over Donald Trump voters for Harris in November and more about building the legs of Khanna’s national economic platform for the future.
He’s made no secret of his political ambitions. Khanna, 47, has openly flirted with a possible presidential bid of his own — in 2028 or 2032, positioning himself as the progressive heir apparent to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for whom Khanna served as national campaign co-chair in 2020. And if Harris defeats Trump this fall, Khanna says he’d be open to serving in her Cabinet.
“Whether it’s in Congress, whether it’s in the Cabinet, whether it’s in some other role, understanding the country and understanding factory towns, rural America, Black and brown communities, HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, just makes me a more effective public servant,” said Khanna, who served as a deputy assistant secretary at the Commerce Department in the Obama administration.
“I think more people should do that out of Congress, get out of their own district, get out in the country and learn from places which they may not represent. And I think we’d have a better Congress, a better government,” Khanna said. “So it’s certainly helped my economic policy. It’s certainly helped my understanding of America. And I think it’ll help me no matter where my ambition takes me.”
Asked about that ambition, Khanna is unapologetic: “Ambition is great, ambition fuels America.”
It’s a balancing act for Khanna: making the case, at first, for a second Biden term and now a Harris presidency, while at the same time methodically introducing himself to voters and forging allies in early primary states and swing states like Pennsylvania that will be key to a potential presidential bid in four or eight years.
In February, Khanna met with Arab American leaders in his personal capacity in Dearborn, Michigan, and listened as they voiced anger about the war in Gaza. In May, he appeared on a panel about democracy in Reno, Nevada. And on Sept. 30 at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Khanna will partner with Biden appointee Jennifer Clyburn, the daughter of Democratic power broker Jim Clyburn, to host a summit with Apple, Google, Nvidia and Microsoft and up to 40 historically Black colleges and universities to promote scholarships and credentialing programs for Black students and graduates.
Bringing tech to steel towns
Khanna represents a Silicon Valley district — home to Apple, Nvidia, and Intel headquarters, Google offices and a Tesla plant — with more than $10 trillion in market capitalization, making it the wealthiest in America by that measure. The host of tech issues alone — from artificial intelligence to chip manufacturing to social media safety — would keep him busy.
But Khanna, the son of Indian immigrants, has spent his eight years in Congress figuring out how he and the Democratic Party can aid and appeal to white, rural, working-class voters in the Rust Belt and beyond whose manufacturing jobs have been decimated by globalization. Johnstown, an hour-and-a-half drive east of Pittsburgh, is just the latest stop on a nationwide tour — Paintsville, Kentucky; Beckley, West Virginia; New Castle, Indiana; and Clarksdale, Mississippi — where Khanna is trying to connect high-tech innovation with rural workers.
Inside the skeleton of the former Bethlehem Steel wheel plant, which shut down 40 years ago, Khanna gathered a cadre of stakeholders to unveil his Modern Steel Act, which would build high-tech plants to make near-zero emissions iron and steel in historical iron, steel and coal communities. Among the attendees were: David McCall, the president of United Steelworkers; Scott Paul, head of the Alliance for American Manufacturing; state Rep. Frank Burns, a Democrat; former Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, a Democrat and the grandson of steelworkers; and representatives from the Sierra Club and BlueGreen Alliance, both environmental groups.
Khanna plans to officially file the bill this week.
“Here’s my commitment: Until I leave Congress, this is going to be the issue that I fight for, until this thing becomes the law,” Khanna told union workers attending the news conference, adding that shifting steel and other manufacturing from places like China back to the U.S. will bolster national security.
Tim Telenko, a business manager with the Construction & General Laborers Local Union 910 in Johnstown, was heartened by the gathering — and the fact that Khanna kept politics out of it.
“I love hearing the word bipartisan to where we’re going to do what’s the best for the country,” Telenko said.
Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, praised Khanna as part of a new generation of leaders in Washington who believe industrial manufacturing should be a pivotal piece of U.S. economic policy in the future.
“Ro Khanna is able to communicate the industrial policy vision better than almost anybody else out there. I think that’s what makes him particularly effective,” Paul said in an interview at the wheel plant. “He’s been immersed in it. He has an academic background, he has the Silicon Valley background, and he has his public service career in the Commerce Department that provide him with a lot of lines of sight into it.”
Later, at a roundtable lunch with local steelworkers, Khanna — miked up with a campaign videographer in tow — makes his pitch for the steel bill but is mainly there to listen and learn. One steelworker tells Khanna that workers understand that technology will help America stay competitive but are “fearful” of losing their jobs to automation.
Khanna replies that modern steel plants may employ fewer workers than in the past, perhaps 1,000 rather than 4,500. “My view is it’s better to get a new plant with 1,000 new jobs than zero jobs,” the four-term congressman said.
Jeff Weir, 62, a fire chief who comes from a family of coal miners and steelworkers, said he used to watch thousands of steelworkers pour out of the Bethlehem Steel plants in Johnstown as a kid. Main Street had 26 bars catering to the workers back then, he said; today there are none.
Weir, who attended the lunch with his daughter, Lianna, who works at St. Francis University, said he’s heard a lot of false promises from politicians and corporations vowing to bring new jobs to Johnstown. But with Khanna, he said, it feels different.
“I think he has a lot of interest in this area, interest in bringing steel back,” Weir said in an interview. “I think he cares about the people and wants to help get this area and Pennsylvania back on the map for steelmaking.”
Big ambitions
It’s almost unheard of for House members, especially in modern times, to find any success in presidential politics. But Khanna has spent his entire career rubbing shoulders with men and women who have either made it to the White House or come close.
While a student at the University of Chicago, he worked on Barack Obama’s first campaign for Illinois state Senate. Khanna interned for then-Vice President Al Gore in the White House, then interned at Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center in Georgia. After serving as Sanders’ campaign co-chair in 2020, Khanna joined the Biden campaign team in 2024.
He first met then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris more than two decades ago when she helped him get media coverage in what would become his failed 2004 primary challenge against then-Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif.
“No elected official would meet with me, and she agreed to meet with me, and I said to her, ‘District Attorney Harris, none of the newspapers are even covering my run,’” Khanna recalled. “And she made a call and she said, “Well, you deserve to be covered.’ And some reporter called, and I got a story, and so I’ve known her ever since.”
In recent weeks, as many of his Democratic colleagues and big donors were calling on Biden to step aside, Khanna defended the president’s re-election plans until the bitter end — even dismissing a Biden exit as an Aaron Sorkin episode of “The West Wing.”
In Johnstown, Khanna concedes: “Well, that turned out to be wrong. I don’t think ‘The West Wing’ could have conceived this plot line.”
“I thought he earned the votes and I just thought from a process point of view, it should be his decision. I also thought he’s such an incredible president, a decent president, that too many people were stabbing him in the back way too quickly,” Khanna told NBC News. “That’s a part of careerism and opportunism I don’t like in politics — I’m a loyal guy.
“I signed up to support his campaign, and I was going to be there until he made a decision not to,” he said. “That’s just my character.”
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