Ro Khanna takes economic message on the road. Will it lead to White House?

PENNSYLVANIA, OHIO and MICHIGAN — U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna was riding shotgun in a black Chevrolet Suburban hurtling down an Ohio highway. His mind was on the economy. 

“I do think I have the right economic vision for this country,” Khanna, D-Calif., told CNBC, taking a break from answering one of the hundreds of text messages he receives each day. “The question is just whether I will get behind someone who can help adopt it, or whether I’ll do it myself.”

The Silicon Valley representative had just left Magnet, a nonprofit industrial consulting firm and talent incubator and a stop on his three-day tour through the Rust Belt. He was speaking to the question that many were asking here: whether the former co-chair of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign would mount his own bid for the White House in 2028. 

“It’s a natural question, and the truth is that I’ve said I’m going to consider it after the midterms,” he said when CNBC asked whether he ever gets tired of reporters asking him if he’s running. 

The question has become more natural lately. Khanna, a progressive long seen as ambitious in Washington circles, has found himself joining the list of potential 2028 hopefuls in the eyes of oddsmakers after his successful push to release the Epstein files, which exploded into the biggest news story of 2025. He’s turned that win into a populist bazooka, railing against the “Epstein class” as he calls for progressive, populist policies that could reshape the U.S. economy.

Khanna has a liberal track record and endorsed self-described democratic socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. But in the industrial U.S., he talked more middle-of-the-road economic issues and pitched well-worn Democratic ideas such as cutting defense spending and finding money to pay for social programs by targeting waste, fraud and abuse.

While recent polling suggests he’d be a long-shot candidate, Khanna’s ability to champion progressive causes while representing one of the wealthiest congressional districts in the nation has not gone unnoticed. And his economic ideas could take root in any campaign Democrats run.

Despite the buzz, Khanna was not in Ohio to campaign explicitly. He was here for the “Heartland Tour,” a swing through the industrial Rust Belt for his post as the top Democrat on the House’s China select committee. Undergirding the tour was a dual purpose: pitching and honing his profile-raising platform of a “New Economic Patriotism,” a 13-point plan he says will revive U.S. manufacturing and solve the country’s economic woes, while hearing about the threats China poses to workers and businesses in this region.

CNBC rode with Khanna through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan as he toured steel mills, factories and farms. At each of the 12 stops, he was introduced to people trying to revive manufacturing in the U.S.’ industrial nerve center and shared his plan to help spur an industrial renaissance, which he said has been an obsession of his since his time in the Obama administration’s Commerce Department. 

Khanna describes his vision as a “Marshall Plan for America” — a nod to the post-World War II process the U.S. and its allies undertook to rebuild Europe’s economy. 

He, or any Democrat pursuing a presidential bid, will need this region’s voters to believe in their economic promise after years of deindustrialization and job loss that have fomented anger against the political establishment and twice delivered President Donald Trump to the White House.

“We need to offer what an economic future vision is for places like the heartland,” Khanna told CNBC. “What do Democrats stand for in terms of the building of economic opportunity in places that have been hollowed out and shafted?”

Camille Rivera, a Democratic strategist and partner at New Deal Strategies who has advised both Mamdani’s campaign and the presidential bid of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Khanna is laying good groundwork for a potential bid in a populist, progressive lane.

“Populism can be leveraged and utilized, and so I think Democratic Party nominees for president should start really thinking about how to lean in and not hedging their bets,” Rivera said. “He’s being very clear about his positioning around big corporations and issues related to foreign policy.”

Khanna’s plan to revive the nation’s industrial economy includes well-trod progressive thoroughfares that are unlikely to be successful, such as calling for universal healthcare or taxing the rich. 

But what really excites him, particularly on the road in the Rust Belt, are the pieces of the plan that he believes are critical to bolstering the manufacturing economy and fending off the China threat. 

First among those is creating a “national industrial bank.” The bank, Khanna said, would provide capital to businesses trying to build or produce things critical to the national interest, whether that’s steel, autos or energy. 

Khanna’s second stop on the trip was JM Steel in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania, a plant turning hulking steel coils into solar tracker tubes for the company Nextpower. Executives running the facility told Khanna and Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Pa., that manufacturers want and need industrial tax credits to build out their industry. 

Democrats under the Biden administration legislated a set of tax credits in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to spur industry to build clean energy in the U.S. Only some of those credits survive after Trump and Republicans took a knife to them in the 2025 tax and spending bill, and the credits largely failed to excite voters, raising questions about whether credits are a policy that can survive political pendulum swings in the long run.

On the way to the next stop, a Tenaris steel plant that produces pipes for drilling oil and gas wells, Khanna suggested his industrial bank would be less vulnerable to political attacks that undermined some of the tax credit regimes that came before. He also argued that projects the bank would fund should be technology-neutral, after many of the 2022 law’s tax credits were doomed to the dustbin of climate politics after Trump returned to the White House.

The dynamic came up again after a visit to Ultium Cells, a mammoth factory in Warren, Ohio, where General Motors and LG Energy Solution are building batteries for electric vehicles. Some of the state-of-the-art factory now sits idle due to EV demand cratering after Trump and Republicans revoked consumer tax credits for the cars.

“It’s transforming the economy of this area. It’s gotten people moving back, going to restaurants, going to support local business,” Khanna said after leaving the factory. “[Now] it’s idled precisely because of the big ugly bill that took away the EV tax credits.”

The EV slowdown in the U.S. comes as China is on the march in the electric vehicle and renewable energy sectors.

The industrial bank has some support from experts in industrial policy.

“I think the idea is a very good one that we need to explore and experiment with as a country,” said Elisabeth Reynolds, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former special assistant to President Joe Biden for manufacturing and economic development.

The country needs “to be strategic and have a long-term perspective. We need durability in our policies, and we want a range of policy tools,” she said. “We know that if we leave it to the market, maybe we’ll get some of what we want, but, frankly, I don’t think we have the luxury right now to wait and see.”

Of course, standing up an industrial program — and a bank — would cost money, and the U.S. government is already close to $40 trillion in debt, exceeding the U.S. gross domestic product for the first time in early March. Khanna says he has a plan for that, too. 

To pay for his programs, Khanna said, he would start by siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars from the annual defense budget. That money could be sent to the industrial bank to fund an entrepreneur starting a business to build a product that is critical to the national interest.

Khanna met one of those entrepreneurs in Ohio during the visit to Magnet. Michael Canty is the CEO of Alloy Precision Technologies, which makes steel bellows used in machines such as natural gas-fired turbine engines. Canty said he’s unable to procure a certain type of thin-walled seamless tubing for his products from the U.S. and would start a business making it if he had the capital.

“I’d start one, and I’d steal all the business from overseas,” Canty said on the tour. “That would create a lot of jobs.”

Khanna said he would also fund the program by introducing a tax on billionaires, a proposal he has made in Congress, prompting attacks from some of his longtime tech industry backers. If he can’t get that, he said, he’d step up the estate tax, look at a financial transaction tax on Wall Street speculation and increase the corporate tax rate. 

Khanna said he would also look at a novel tax that he thinks would hit pay dirt: A levy on artificial intelligence tokens, the units that AI companies use to charge for each chunk of text and data processing. 

It’s an idea that leans on Khanna’s Silicon Valley prowess — he said he had discussed the idea with “Dario [Amodei] at Anthropic, Jensen [Huang, at Nvidia], and people at OpenAI, Chris Lehane.”

“They’re open to that kind of taxation on enterprise software, a token tax,” he said. “Right now, we are taxing workers more than we tax AI; like, why shouldn’t we tax AI more than we tax workers?”

He says the result would be worth the costs and could help address some of the country’s social tumult as well as the economy.

“You have a lot of people who are angry at the system, shafted by the system, who feel a resentment,” Khanna said. “If they see economic hope coming back to their communities, economic activity coming back to their communities, I think they will be more hopeful about America, less angry about America, less angry about government and wanting to tear down all the institutions.”

Khanna, 49, was raised in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His father was a chemical engineer, which he said instilled in him the value of manufacturing jobs. 

“I always had a sense of making things mattering, and obviously [it] gave my own family a middle-class life,” he said. “I didn’t have to lack for things growing up. I had healthcare, I was able to play the Little League sports, I was able to have a comfortable life, and I saw that directly tied to manufacturing.”

He also saw what he called the deindustrialization of Bucks County, recalling a manufacturing plant closing “right when I was graduating high school.”

“I saw the impact of that,” he said.

After graduating from Council Rock High School, Khanna attended the University of Chicago and Yale Law School. He later moved to Silicon Valley and saw what he calls the economy of the future. He was appointed deputy assistant Commerce secretary by President Barack Obama, holding the post until he took a job at a Silicon Valley law firm in 2011. 

He first ran for Congress in California unsuccessfully in 2004. Ten years later, he tried again, taking on longtime Democratic Rep. Mike Honda in 2014 and losing. His second try against Honda, in 2016, was successful, and he defeated Honda by more than 20 percentage points. 

Khanna’s wife is from Cleveland, and he was married there. On the trip, he visited the Port of Cleveland with Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, noting his “Cleveland roots” and that he has to listen to refrains that the Cleveland Browns “are going to win every year.”

His background, he said, gives him “an economic credibility.”

“I’ve spent 10 years representing Silicon Valley,” Khanna said. “I’ve seen the future, but I want to make sure that economic future is possible for the kids I grew up with, the families I grew up with, the families my wife grew up with.”

Rivera, the political consultant, pointed to Khanna’s willingness to take risks by endorsing progressive candidates across the country, which would gain him allies in a potential presidential bid. Khanna has endorsed a number of liberal candidates in the past year, including Mamdani, Rep. Analilia Mejia, D-N.J., Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer.

“It is pretty clear that he is doing the work to ensure at least that there are allies in every single city that he feels he needs, so that he can win the primary,” Rivera said.

Khanna’s talk on the economy has also caught the attention of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. After Khanna appeared on Fox News recently, Trump lashed out at him in a set of Truth Social posts. He called Khanna a “Sleazebag, Radical Left Congressman from the failed State of California.”

“He is similar, but worse than [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries, only with a somewhat higher IQ,” Trump said. “This morning he tried, on behalf of the Dumacrats, to take credit for the Steel Industry pouring back into the U.S., knowing full well that the Dumbs virtually destroyed it, and I SAVED IT, through strong Tariffs.”

After the visit to Magnet, Khanna’s caravan left Cleveland and headed southwest toward Toledo. He was on his way to deep-red Shelby County, where the land begins to get flat, the rows of corn extend over the horizon, and Trump 2024 flags still fly. 

Specifically, he was headed toward the farm of Chris Gibbs, the Shelby County Democratic Party chair. Gibbs, who was once chair of the county Republican Party and defected to the Democrats in 2019, was hosting Khanna for a dinner with the Ohio Farmers Union.

A farm is not exactly Khanna’s home turf. He arrived at the Gibbs farm in a navy blue suit and black penny loafers, a getup more appropriate for a boardroom than a corn, soybean and 75-to-100-head cattle operation. 

The event, like the whole trip, was officially apolitical. But it was here, in a barn filled with some 50 farmers that could have been mistaken for a stop on the campaign trail ahead of the Iowa caucuses, that Khanna delivered his most complete pitch for his economic plan. 

“How many people here want to live in Silicon Valley?” Khanna asked the room, after decrying the “hollowing out of industry after industry and broken promises” that followed China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. 

Nobody raised their hand. 

“People want to live in the communities they grew up in, and we never did anything to bring economic opportunity for the communities that were devastated,” he said. “The question is, are we going to have a nation that has islands of economic prosperity and seas of stagnation and despair, or are we going to be a nation that has economic success and independence in every community for every family?”

He closed his remarks with the two lines he seems to be eager to foist into the political lexicon: The “Marshall Plan for America” and “New Economic Patriotism.”

“I say we need a Marshall Plan not for Europe, we need a Marshall Plan for the United States of America,” he said, to nodding heads and a few cheers. “If we understand the frustration and danger for many Americans who just want economic security and dignity, if we come together across divides to build an economic renewal strategy for America, what I call economic patriotism, I believe we can bring this country together around a new national focus.”

Khanna then engaged in a lengthy question-and-answer session with the assembled farmers, who shared with him their fears about low crop prices, failing export markets due to tariffs, and the high price of running a farm in today’s economy.

Gibbs, the night’s host and emcee, in an interview after the event, said he was impressed.

“He was very well received here,” Gibbs said, emphasizing that the night was not a political event but designed to help Khanna hear from farmers to “help the congressman as he goes back to Washington to formulate policy.”

Asked about Khanna himself, however, Gibbs was less circumspect.

“Ro Khanna is a thought leader,” he said. “And I think he’s going to do more.”