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Columbus, OH — In case you missed it, the Columbus Dispatch’s Anna Staver broke down the increased interest in November’s elections following the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Women in Ohio are out registering men by more than a 10-point margin following the Dobbs decision, and organizations like the Ohio Democratic Party are seeing a massive increase in grassroots interest. Ohioans know that reproductive rights are on the line this November, and they’re not going to allow politicians like J.D. Vance and Mike DeWine to take our state backward.  

As a reminder, J.D. Vance compared abortion to slavery and Mike DeWine promised an anti-abortion group that he would ‘go as far as we can’ to rip away reproductive rights in Ohio. 

“‘The relentless decades-long attack on women’s rights in this country has borne fruit, and now we’re pissed,’ Walters said. ‘Women in Ohio, women in this country are pissed, and they are going to come for a reckoning.’” ODP Chair Elizabeth Walters told the Dispatch.  

Read more from the Columbus Dispatch here and below:

• Katie Paris knew something was up when more than 5,000 Ohioans registered for a weeknight Zoom call before she even advertised it. The Cleveland Democrat’s organization, Red, Wine and Blue, targets suburban women in battleground states, and since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal abortion protections interest “has been incredible.”
• Volunteers also poured into the Ohio Democratic Party all summer.
• “We had 3,000 volunteer sign-ups between the rally we did at the statehouse and the two weeks following the overturning of Roe (v Wade),” Ohio Democratic Party Chair Liz Walters said. “That’s a huge number for us in a very short amount of time.”
• Women out-registered Ohio men by an 11-point margin in the two months after the June 24 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, according to an analysis of voter data by TargetSmart. These women are younger (under 35), live in urban areas and likely to vote Democratic.
• In Kansas where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats almost two to one, voters rejected a ballot measure in August to restrict and/or eliminate abortion access 59% to 41%.
• Democrats also overperformed in special Congressional elections this summer in Nebraska, Minnesota and New York.
• “The relentless decades-long attack on women’s rights in this country has borne fruit, and now we’re pissed,” Walters said. “Women in Ohio, women in this country are pissed, and they are going to come for a reckoning.”  
• [Mike] DeWine has a longstanding record of opposing access to abortion. He signed the “heartbeat bill” that now bans most abortions in the state after six weeks. And he told Ohio Right to Life his administration would “go as far as we can” once the Dobbs decision came down.
• But DeWine has been more circumspect on the issue since the June 24 Supreme Court decision. His campaign removed a paragraph on its website touting his pro-life accomplishments. 
• But Walters, Paris and Bonier all saw it differently. “What a great indicator of the liability they see in it,” Bonier said.
• Paris suspected it might be part of the reason DeWine hasn’t agreed to a debate against his Democratic opponent Nan Whaley.
• Whaley is the first woman ever nominated for governor by a major party. Since 1978, the only election for governor that has not had a debate was when John Kasich refused to debate Democrat Ed FitzGerald in 2014.
• “The one thing people used to know about Mike DeWine was he acted reasonably in the beginning of the pandemic,” Paris said. “Now the one thing they know is he signed a law that sent a 10-year-old rape victim to Indiana.”
• Paris said she has personally spoken to dozens of women who voted for DeWine in 2018 but now want to volunteer for Democrats because “while they disagreed with their extreme positions on abortion, they thought Roe v Wade was there.”
• “They can’t imagine their daughter, their friends’ daughters being forced to carry a rapist’s baby,” she said. “They feel urgent about correcting that, and they feel upset they helped put people in office who made that the law.”
• Since the Dobbs decision, Bonier says new registrations of Ohio women are +15 Democratic — a complete reversal from 2020 models that put female registrations at +5 for Republicans.

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Vance: “I think that the idea that we’re gonna bring back hundreds of thousands of coal jobs in Appalachia is probably, almost certainly, in fact, not true… coal is just not as economically viable of a fuel source, as an energy source in the era of natural gas and all the renewables”

Columbus, OH – A new American Independent report highlights J.D. Vance’s latest political reinvention, changing his position on the “viability” of the coal industry and whether climate change is real. Vance also rails against electric vehicles and calls them a “scam,” putting himself at odds with Mike DeWine and other Ohio Republicans who are currently urging Honda and LG to build a $4 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Ohio and have recently celebrated major announcements of new investments into this growing industry around the state. 

“The only consistent thing about J.D. Vance is that he is a phony who will say anything to get elected – including lying about coal jobs coming back to Ohio,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.

American Independent: In another flip-flop, Ohio GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance says there’s no climate crisis

Josh Israel

September 1, 2022

• In 2020, Ohio Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance said, ‘We of course have a climate problem in our society.’ Now he says there isn’t one.

• Ohio Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance has spent the past several weeks attacking clean energy infrastructure investments and lying about whether climate change is a problem. But a just-announced $4.4 billion electric vehicle battery facility in Ohio and his own previous comments undermine his latest claims.

• Vance, a millionaire venture capitalist and author with a history of flip-flopping on political issues, has repeatedly criticized his Democratic opponent, Rep. Tim Ryan, for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act last month. That law will make $369 billion available for energy and climate change infrastructure, make health care and prescription drugs more affordable for millions of Americans, and reduce the federal budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars.

• In an interview on the right-wing “Clay Travis & Buck Sexton” radio talk show on July 28, Vance dismissed both climate science and electric vehicles.

• After Sexton said that he did not believe there really is any climate crisis, Vance concurred:

• No, I don’t think there is, either. And even if there was a climate crisis, I don’t know how the way to solve it is to buy more Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles. The whole EV thing is a scam, right? So set to the side these questions about, you know, how much carbon drives the climate change situation. Look, I’m with you on this. I do not wake up in the morning thinking, [We’ve got] a climate crisis we need to destroy the economy to deal with.

• “I gotta say, Stu, this Inflation Reduction Act, which is a ridiculous name for this thing, what it basically does is subsidize rich people to buy electric vehicles at the expense of the Ohio automotive industry. It’s gonna put a lot of Ohioans out of work,” Vance told Fox Business’ Stuart Varney on Aug. 8, calling the Inflation Reduction Act “a joke of an economic program.”

• But it appears that Ohio workers will actually benefit from the Democratic majority’s clean energy investments: The Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included billions of dollars to support electric vehicle-related manufacturing in the United States, are helping to spur new jobs in the state.

• On Monday, electronics giant LG and car manufacturer Honda announced plans to build a $4.4 billion electric vehicle battery production facility in Ohio. Construction is expected to begin in 2023 and production to commence by 2025.

• Back in February 2020, Vance acknowledged that climate change is real, dangerous, and caused by humans.

• In a speech at a conference hosted by the Center for Ethics and Human Values at The Ohio State University, Vance lamented that technological progress on many fronts has slowed in recent years. “Think about energy,” he said:

• We of course have a climate problem in our society, one largely caused now by unrestrained emissions in China. Part of the reason we have that problem is because we’re not generating energy much cleaner than we used to 30 or 40 years ago. In fact, the biggest improvement in emissions is solar energy, which can provide a substantial amount of our power, but can’t provide anything like 50% of our power. Definitely not 100% of our power, and through, sort of, our increasing reliance on natural gas, which of course is an improvement over dirtier forms of power but isn’t exactly the sort of thing that’s gonna take us to a clean energy future.

• Vance has also flip-flopped on his position on the viability of coal as a source of fuel.

• At DePaul University’s Chicago Ideas festival in October 2019, he observed:

• I think that the idea that we’re gonna bring back hundreds of thousands of coal jobs in Appalachia is probably, almost certainly, in fact, not true, that the big reason that coal has become so much less of a significant employer, or the two reasons are, one, you can produce a lot more coal with a lot fewer people because mechanization has been very successful in increasing productivity in the coal industry, and also, coal is just not as economically viable of a fuel source, as an energy source in the era of natural gas and all the renewables that you just talked about.

• But on July 29 of this year, Vance tweeted, “All of this ‘bring American manufacturing back’ from the Democrats is fake unless we stop the green energy fantasy. Solar panels can’t power a modern manufacturing economy. That’s why the Chinese are building coal power plants, something Tim Ryan’s donors won’t let America do.”

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Columbus, OH — Ahead of the Intel groundbreaking ceremony next week that will create thousands of jobs in Ohio, Ohio Democratic Party (ODP) Chair Elizabeth Walters held a virtual press conference to highlight the work of Ohio Democrats that made the project possible. 

Despite Republican obstruction, Ohio Democrats were able to pass the CHIPS Act, which helped make the Intel project a reality and prevented Intel from moving jobs overseas.

“When Mitch McConnell and D.C. Republicans in Congress made deliberate efforts to block this urgently-needed legislation from moving forward, you didn’t hear a peep from Mike DeWine or J.D. Vance. They were more interested in protecting their jobs than the jobs of thousands of Ohioans. Because of the leadership and work of Ohio Democrats like Sherrod Brown, Tim Ryan, Marcy Kaptur and others, Ohio is going to get this historic investment that will help us compete with the rest of the world,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chair Elizabeth Walters. 

Thanks to Ohio Democrats, working families in our state will directly benefit from this critical workforce investment that will make Ohio a worldwide exporter of semiconductor chips and reduce our reliance on other countries for the technology. 

With less than 70 days until Ohio’s election, Ohio Democrats are clearly showing voters who’s on their side. While Republicans want to take our state backward, Ohio Democrats are moving our economy forward.

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Columbus, OH — As debate season starts to ramp up in the closing weeks and days of the election cycle, Mike DeWine has continued to duck committing to debates across Ohio with Mayor Nan Whaley, even as the Mayor has already publicly agreed and challenged DeWine to a number of debates. DeWine also dodged a debate with his primary opponents earlier this year, signaling that he is scared to defend his record to Ohioans, especially since he’s debated political opponents in the past. It’s ‘DeWine Debate Watch’ Day 4, reminding Ohioans that DeWine won’t even try to make his case to them as he seeks re-election to the highest statewide executive office. 

“Mike DeWine clearly knows his record over the last four years of selling out working families in favor of the wealthy and well-connected is not going to be popular with Ohio voters. If DeWine can’t even muster the political courage to tell Ohioans why they should re-elect him, he doesn’t deserve the job and should be held publicly accountable for his cowardice,” said Ohio Democratic Party spokesperson Matt Keyes. 

Ohioans deserve answers from DeWine on a number of key issues, including his promise to ‘go as far as we can’ to rip away reproductive rights, his broken promise to ‘do something’ to combat gun violence in Ohio, his connections to the largest public corruption scandal in state history and his role in the failed redistricting process that produced GOP-gerrymandered maps and cost Ohioans millions of dollars. 

Read more from Ohio Capital Journal here and below: 

Ohio Capital Journal Commentary: Healthy Public Debate is The Essence of Democracy

David DeWitt

September 1, 2022 

•  [I]n America, we obviously have a Constitutional Republic — a form of representative democracy — where the people vote for their representatives to public office theoretically in service of constituents and their interests.

• In either or any form, healthy, robust debate is critical to the functioning of small-d democracy.

• Those who would presume to be the embodied representation of the interests, needs, and desires of millions of people owe it to voters to subject themselves to the intellectual rigors of honest debate.

• The independent Ohio Debate Commission announced earlier this week that it has scheduled debates for Ohio’s 2022 General Election. This election will decide representation for the interests, needs, and desires of more than 11.7 million Ohioans, and includes every statewide executive office including governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and auditor; as well as Ohio Supreme Court races for the chief justice and two other justice seats; and Ohio’s next U.S. Senator.

• But thus far, only the Democratic candidates have agreed to participate. While Democrats Tim Ryan, running for Senate; Nan Whaley, running for governor; and Jennifer Brunner, running for chief justice, have all signed on, Ohio voters have gotten no such commitment from Republicans J.D. Vance, Gov. Mike DeWine, or Sharon Kennedy.

• DeWine, meanwhile, has done just about everything to say he doesn’t want to directly debate Whaley, without explicitly saying he doesn’t want to directly debate Whaley.

• My estimation is that DeWine doesn’t want to directly debate Whaley because he and his campaign feel the governor has little to gain but much to possibly lose by open public intellectual challenge to his record when it comes to, say, access to abortion, Ohio’s FirstEnergy Corp. political bribery scandal, or his participation in the unconstitutional gerrymandering of state legislative and congressional districts.

• Insofar as they may want to avoid talking about their positions and records on issues that do not poll well for them, presumably they are confident in their own arguments on the issues and that their ideas on, say, immigration, the economy, inflation, or gun laws may be persuasive for many.

• Nevertheless, they do not want to stand up and make their cases to the public in an independent, statewide public forum of tête à tête with their opponents.

• Healthy public debate is the essence of democracy. The free exchange of ideas is a touchstone of a free and open society.

• To cower before that challenge on the rostrum of the American Pynx is an open intellectual insult to the more than 11.7 million people they seek to represent.

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