Uncategorized

For Immediate Release:
Friday, May 19, 2022

Columbus, OH — Today, the Ohio Democratic Party launched the “Workers First Campaign,” the coordinated campaign of community organizers who will work to elect Democrats up and down the ballot this year – from the U.S. Senate to statewide offices to county and local offices. The Workers First coordinated campaign will work in tandem with candidates at all levels to tell the story of how Democrats are fighting for working families and to turn out the vote for Democratic candidates this fall.

Since November 2021, the Ohio Democratic Party has had organizers on the ground working in their communities to talk with Ohioans, hear their stories and show them that Democrats are on their side. Over the coming weeks the Workers First Campaign will be working to register voters and build volunteer teams. Then, ahead of the November election, the coordinated campaign will work to turn out voters for Democrats.

“We’re not taking any community for granted as we look to show Ohio voters we’re on their side and elect Democrats up and down the ticket come November. We’re investing in organizing earlier than ever this cycle, and we’re grateful for the support of our Democratic candidates as we work together to get boots on the ground early, put Ohio workers first and turn Ohio blue,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chair Elizabeth Walters.

The Workers First Campaign is made possible by critical investments from Ohio Democrats at the top of the ticket, including Tim Ryan and Nan Whaley.

“This election is about building up our state, rebuilding our middle class, and cutting workers in on the deal. I’m proud of our team’s early investment in the Workers First Campaign, and I look forward to doing everything I can to help elect pro-worker candidates up and down the ticket and in every corner of Ohio,” said Ryan.

“I’m excited to be a part of building this innovative statewide campaign that will elect new leadership from the working class and for the working class. Together, we’ll set Ohio on a path to making sure that every family, no matter where in the state they live, has the opportunity to thrive,” said Whaley.

Ohio Democrats are also committed to a coordinated campaign that reflects the diversity of the Ohioans we’re working to represent. The Workers First Campaign is made up of a diverse group of Ohio organizers that has extensive experience working in the state.

“I’m so proud of the strong, diverse team we’ve put together with the experience necessary to show Ohio voters we’re on their side and put working families first. Come November, we’re going to hold Republicans accountable for the ways they’ve betrayed Ohio voters and elect Democratic leaders who are going to put our state back in the hands of workers, rather than the wealthy and well-connected,” said Hilary Barrett, Coordinated Campaign Director.

###

Columbus, OH — This week, California Vance earned wall-to-wall coverage for promoting the dangerous “great replacement” conspiracy theory that radicalized the Buffalo terrorist. Since launching his U.S. Senate campaign, Vance’s rhetoric has echoed the deadly white supremacist rhetoric identified in forums across the internet, according to experts on hate speech.

“J.D. Vance will do or say anything to get elected and does not care about the risks of promoting deadly fringe racist conspiracy theories. Vance’s statements are disqualifying and show he is unfit to serve in the United States Senate,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.

Associated Press: Republican Senate candidates promote ‘replacement’ theory
Steve Peoples
May 17, 2022

• Several mainstream Republican Senate candidates are drawing on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory once confined to the far-right fringes of U.S. politics to court voters this campaign season, promoting the baseless notion that there is a plot to diminish the influence of white people in America.
• In some cases, the comments have gone largely overlooked given the hard-line immigration rhetoric that has become commonplace among conservatives during the Trump era. But a weekend mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that may have been inspired by the racist theory is drawing new attention to the GOP’s growing embrace of white nationalist creed.
• And in Ohio, Republican Senate nominee JD Vance accused Democrats of trying to “transform the electorate.”
• Warning of an immigrant “invasion,” Vance told Fox News Channel that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”
• Five experts on hate speech who reviewed the Republican candidates’ comments confirmed that they promote the baseless racist theory, even though the Republicans don’t mention race directly.
• “Comments like these demonstrate two essential features of great replacement conspiracy theory. They predict racial doomsday, saying that it is all part of an orchestrated master plan. It’s only the language that has been softened,” said American University professor Brian Hughes, associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. “The basic story they tell is the same one we see in white supremacist chats across the internet: An enemy is orchestrating doom for white Americans by plotting to fill the country with nonwhites.”
• Vance told Breitbart News last month that Democrats are trying to give 15 million immigrants in the country illegally the right to vote. “They are trying to transform the electorate of this country,” he said.
• He made similar comments days later at a town hall in Portsmouth, Ohio.
• The Vance campaign declined to comment.

Chronicle-Telegram: Editorial: A poison in our politics
May 18, 2022

• President Joe Biden got it right Tuesday when he called white supremacy “a poison.”
• That venom coursed through the American political bloodstream until it reached an 18-year-old who opened fire in a Buffalo supermarket Saturday. He killed 10 people and wounded three others. Eleven of the victims were Black.
• An unhinged manifesto allegedly written by the white gunman made clear his hatred for Blacks and other minorities. Based on his writing, in which he called his victims “replacers,” it’s apparent that the gunman subscribed to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that white Americans are being systematically replaced by people of color.
• Another is author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, who recently won the Ohio GOP primary in the campaign to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Cincinnati.
• The AP reported that Vance warned Fox News of an “invasion” of immigrants.
• The point is not only that Vance says horrible, untrue things, but that he won the GOP primary in spite of them.
• Or, worse, because of them.

Columbus Alive: Local Politics: J.D. Vance and the mainstreaming of the great replacement conspiracy
Craig Calcaterra
May 17, 2022

• On Saturday, a teenage gunman opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black. Just before he went on his murderous rampage, the shooter posted a manifesto rife with racism and xenophobia in which he claimed that white Americans are under siege and are being replaced by non-whites, non-Christians and immigrants.
• But it’s not just a conspiracy advanced by mass murderers. It is, increasingly, one endorsed by putatively mainstream political figures. People like the man favored to be Ohio’s next senator, J.D. Vance.
• Vance has spent a great deal of time of late giving voice to some of the central talking points of the great replacement conspiracy, particularly as it relates to immigrants “invading” the United States and voting for Democrats. In an early April debate, Vance, on the defensive for dismissive comments he made regarding the war in Ukraine, said that Ukraine was “not our fight,” but rather, that it was a “massive distraction” from the “border invasion” occurring in the United States. The day before that debate, Vance dropped an ad in which he lamented “Joe Biden’s open border,” which will lead to “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
• The extent to which extreme-right concepts such as the great replacement conspiracy have entered mainstream political discourse is shocking. That they are embraced by the Republican nominee for Ohio’s open senate seat is appalling. That this nominee, J.D. Vance, has yet to talk about any of this, at least as of this writing, is telling. If, as I expect, he refuses to repudiate these toxic views, it is disqualifying.

Washington Post: Opinion: How Elise Stefanik and the GOP sanitize ‘great replacement’ ugliness
Greg Sargent
May 16, 2022

• The extent to which “great replacement” ideas have migrated from the fringe into something more routine among Republican lawmakers appears new. As many have noted, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has relentlessly promoted versions of the idea, and numerous Republican officials have done the same.
• Or take J.D. Vance, the GOP Senate nominee from Ohio. He recently claimed that President Biden’s “open border” will ensure “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
• But once again, for the same reasons that Carlson and Stefanik cannot be permitted to get away with this scam of feigning racial neutrality, none of these Republicans can pretend to be warning only of electoral consequences.
• This sort of trickery works on still another level: It recasts racist conspiracy theorizing in a more acceptable form. As Gorski puts it, the talk about new voters is really a “fig leaf to hide white supremacy.”

###

For Immediate Release:
Wednesday, May 18, 2022

“The DeWine administration has already seen its share of ethics struggles.”

Columbus, OH — Today, the Ohio Democratic Party released the following statement after the Ohio Capital Journal revealed that Mike DeWine has a financial stake in Intel but won’t reveal how much stock in the company he owns or whether his financial interests in Intel played a role in the deal. It’s another example of DeWine playing by a different set of rules than the rest of us and then trying to ‘no comment’ his way out of accountability.

“If Mike DeWine – already a multimillionaire – is profiting off the Intel deal he had intimate knowledge of, voters deserve to know. For too long, DeWine has tried to dodge accountability when faced with questions about the controversies and corruption running rampant in his statehouse. Voters deserve answers and they deserve them now,” said Ohio Democratic Party spokesperson Matt Keyes.

Read more from the Ohio Capital Journal here and below: 

• As Ohio negotiates almost a $2 billion incentive package with electronic chip maker Intel, Gov. Mike DeWine owns stock in the company, according to ethics disclosures that were due on Monday. However, the governor declined to say much about the investment beyond the very general information that is required under Ohio ethics law.
• Intel in January announced that it would invest at least $20 billion in Central Ohio to build two chip plants and create about 3,000 jobs — great news in a state where the economy has lagged the national average.
• But some, including Policy Matters Ohio, have raised concerns that a $1.9 billion incentive package is front-loaded, leaving taxpayers vulnerable if Intel doesn’t live up to its promises.
• Asked in March about those concerns, DeWine Press Secretary Dan Tierney pointed out that $650 million is conditioned on job creation and won’t be paid if they don’t materialize.
• But he didn’t address what, in the event the project goes bust, the administration would do to claw back a $600 million “reshoring grant,” or $150 million from JobsOhio.
• With so much money at stake, taxpayers might want to know that their representatives at the negotiating table have only their interests in mind. But DeWine’s ethics disclosure makes it impossible to be sure.
• Under Ohio law, government officials such as DeWine every year have to disclose every company in which they owned at least $1,000 worth of stock during the previous year. But just knowing DeWine has more than $1,000 worth of Intel stock doesn’t tell you much; it could be just a nominal investment, or it could be a big play that might give him a motive to help Intel do well that conflicts with the best interest of Ohioans.
• The DeWine administration has already seen its share of ethics struggles.
  • Some of his appointees have been implicated in a $61 million bribery scandal that netted a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout for utility companies.
  • His son, Supreme Court Justice Pat DeWine, refuses to recuse himself from a case in which Gov. DeWine and other Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission have passed legislative maps that a bipartisan majority of the court have five times ruled to be unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
  • And Gov. DeWine’s Medicaid director, Maureen Corcoran, has refused to disclose just how much stock she owned in two health care giants last year as she awarded them billion-dollar contracts.
• Now the governor appears to be following suit. 

###

Columbus, OH — Ahead of an expected vote in the Ohio House tomorrow to distribute more than $420 million to local communities across Ohio, the Ohio Democratic Party is making sure Ohioans know who is (and isn’t) responsible for the critical investments expected to come their way. The American Rescue Plan, which makes this funding possible, passed thanks to support from Sherrod Brown, Tim Ryan, Marcy Kaptur, Joyce Beatty, Marcia Fudge and Nan Whaley. Not a single Republican voted for the measure – and Mike DeWine even went on record to say he’d oppose it. 

Yet, in recent weeks, Mike DeWine has taken to traveling the state to tout spending that comes from the American Rescue Plan, trying to claim credit for everything from police funding to investments in healthcare workers that DeWine opposed from the start. So before we start to see DeWine scheduling photo ops across the state in communities that benefited from this funding, Ohio Democrats want to make one thing clear: this critical funding would never have been possible if Mike DeWine had anything to say about it.

“No thanks to Mike DeWine, Ohio communities are about to receive critical investments that will help working families recover from the pandemic and move our state forward. While we’re glad Republicans, including DeWine, have recognized how important the American Rescue plan is to Ohio’s recovery, it’s unacceptable for them to try to fool Ohio voters into thinking they had anything to do with it,” said Ohio Democratic Party spokesperson Matt Keyes.   

###

For Immediate Release:
Monday, May 16, 2022

Columbus, OH — In case you missed it, HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver took FirstEnergy and Ohio Republicans to task last night with a feature on how working Americans are paying the price for the too-cozy relationship between politicians and Big Energy. Oliver highlighted the FirstEnergy bribery scandal as the perfect example of how energy executives are too often in the pocket of politicians, like Larry Householder, or political appointees like Sam Randazzo and his friends in Mike DeWine’s office. Oliver’s feature is another reminder of just how shocking this bribery scandal is and how we still don’t have answers from Mike DeWine about what he knew and when about the largest public corruption scheme in Ohio history.

“What is very clear is that FirstEnergy was working extremely hard to influence the decision making process. They actually paid the chairman of the state’s utility commission $22 million in consulting fees in the years directly preceding him becoming their regulator,” said John Oliver while discussing the scandal.

Watch the video discussing Ohio here : 

Some of what Oliver discussed:

• In some states like Ohio, public officials appear fully in utilities’ pockets. 
• Very basically, FirstEnergy funneled $60 million to the speaker of the Ohio House [Larry Householder] to pass HB 6.
• The bill has been called the worst energy bill of the 21st century. 
• FirstEnergy worked extremely hard to influence the decision making process.
• Energy company paid the chairman of the state’s utility commission [Sam Randazzo] $22 million in consulting fees before he joined PUCO.
• Texts between FirstEnergy Chuck Jones and Randazzo the day HB 6 was passed show the coordination with Jones texting Randazzo: “F*** anybody who aint (sic) us.”
• Bottom line: Utility companies have monopolies over the system so they can make as much money as possible while passing costs along to you. 

You can watch the full segment here.

###