When Democrat Pat Ryan got elected to New York’s 19th – a largely rural district in upstate New York that swung for Trump in 2016 and only narrowly elected Biden in 2020 – people were surprised.

His contender in the August special election, Marc Molinaro, was a well-known local politician who entered the political arena when he was just 18, becoming the mayor of Tivoli, which is in the district, at 19. Molinaro was the favorite to win: leading in the polls, by as much as 10 points, right up to the moment Ryan claimed victory.

The special election was watched with bated breath, as a tight race in a swing seat that could be a harbinger in the midterm elections, where Democrats are fighting to keep a slim House majority come November. Now, people are looking at Ryan’s campaign as a political playbook for how to win other tight races across the country.

Many credit Ryan’s win to seizing the political moment around the fierce fight for abortion rights in the US.

Just hours after the constitutional right to abortion was dismantled by the US supreme court on 24 June, Ryan, a US army vet, released a campaign ad making his stance clear. In a surprising twist, the video tied his military service to the attack on abortion.

“How can we be a free country if the government tries to control women’s bodies? That’s not the country I fought to defend,” he said in the ad.

It was a much-needed balm at a time when the Democratic party was being criticized at the national level for lacking a sense of urgency in responding to the fall of Roe v Wade, the landmark decision that had protected abortion rights in the US for several generations.

“I think what is missing in our politics right now is just speaking from the heart, rather than poll testing,” Ryan told the Guardian when asked why he thought that message on abortion resonated.

Then, a few months into Ryan’s campaign, the Republican senator Lindsey Graham introduced a bill that would ban abortion at the national level, after 15 weeks. The bill never would have had enough support to pass, but it didn’t matter: after months of the Republicans saying abortion rights should be put to the states, Graham appeared to have revealed his party’s hand in pushing for a national crackdown.

“They showed themselves to be extremists. Suddenly, we saw the new Republican platform was wanting to criminalize abortions at the national level,” said Ryan.

His special election win gives him just a few months representing New York’s 19th before he has to run again in the midterms. And the abortion message is one he continues to campaign on.

“There was just another set of horrific reporting out of Ohio, where at least two teenage women under the age of 18 were raped and forced to fly to other states, just to get reproductive health care. That’s just as barbaric. And that’s not who we are as a country,” he said.

Adding that he thinks the Democrats will hold the house and the Senate, he continued: “We absolutely have to restore those decisions back to women, and away from politicians, frankly.”

Ryan just introduced a bill to make abortion medication legal at the national level. If it passes, it will undermine states’ attempts to ban abortion, considering that more than half of US abortions are completed using medication.

His pledge is again a foil to the national party’s mostly lackluster attempts to curtail the destruction of abortion rights across the US, with Joe Biden’s own abortion bill coming under fire precisely because it failed to make it easier for Americans to access abortion pills.

It may seem strange that a candidate like Ryan – who wants to pass gun control laws, raise taxes on the wealthy and make abortion pills nationally accessible – would win in a district that elected Trump.

But it’s the way he ties together seemingly progressive ideals under the banner of freedom thats seems to resonate. He talks about seeing voters in his own district on the campaign trail. Whether in some of the most rural and conservative parts of his district, at events with small business owners, or speaking to younger people, he says abortion rights came up over and over.

So to him, the playbook is simple.

“All we have to do is show Americans that we understand how existential this fight is. The fight for reproductive freedom; for voting rights; the fight against gun violence; the fight for our democracy. We need to draw attention to how un-American it is to take away these freedoms,” said Ryan.

Does he feel it is contradictory, to stand for the rights of American women, or children at threat of being gunned down in American schools, when he participated in a war and occupation that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians?

“I have said publicly that the decision to go to war in Iraq and the way we conducted it – there’s an awful lot we should have done better,” he said.

“I personally had to wrestle with seeing my fellow soldiers and innocent civilians – whom I had built relationships with – put at risk. Seeing war very close and personally, you see the darkest and the most evil in human nature come forward. We need people in Congress who understand the seriousness of sending our young men and women into combat. War has to be our absolute last resort,” he said.

And with this call for unity he hopes he can win in November.

“We’re so divided. And for a long time politicians have pitted people against each other, but we showed in the special election that we can take so-called ‘wedge issues’ and remind people that we actually share these values in common – things like reproductive freedom. This is a moment where we have to be clear-eyed about the stakes,” he says.

“Authenticity, and just being a normal human being – that is something that is in short supply right now in our politics.”