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Columbus, OH — It may be a new year, but the Ohio Republican U.S. Senate primary has found a way to be even more chaotic, expensive and extreme.

An expensive primary with well-funded candidates could mean a long, protracted primary fight that forces candidates to extreme positions and hobbles the eventual Republican nominee. Without positive records to run on for working families, the Republican U.S. Senate primary is already being called “Ohio’s ugliest ever,” and Fox News said the race was “fast becoming the most expensive and ugly GOP Senate contest” in the 2022 midterms.

Here’s what they are saying:

CHAOTIC:

• NBC News’ Henry Gomez: “It’s a wild ride here in Ohio and the airwaves are already jam-packed.”
• Vice Chairman Of The Ohio Republican Party Bryan Williams: “They’re trying to raise—the high dollar donations for the Republican candidates are not coming through as coordinated as they are on the Democratic side with a crowded field of 8 or more candidates on the Republican side. It’s not clear and large dollar donors don’t want to just invest in everybody or pick somebody who’s not going to win. They want a little bit clearer of a picture. So I think they’re kind of sitting on their donations.”
• Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser: “…one of the most crowded and combustible GOP Senate primaries in the country.”

EXPENSIVE:

• NBC News’ Chuck Todd: “It seems like a week doesn’t go by without some candidate writing a big check to go on TV.”
• Open Secrets’ Katherine Huggins: “While neither Democratic candidate in Ohio has self-financed at all, nearly every Republican candidate who has raised more $10,000 has in part self-financed their campaign…Self-financing is otherwise rampant among the Republicans as they prepare to face off in what is likely to be an extraordinarily competitive primary race.”
• Toledo Blade: “Courting the former president for an endorsement has not been a cheap endeavor for the candidates. Mr. Gibbons’ attack ad cost $550,000 to run and was part of a massive $10 million ad buy. Ms. Timken’s latest ad is another six-figure ad buy, according to her campaign.”
• Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser: “And in a primary race where all nearly all the major contenders have plenty of personal wealth, Dolan becomes the latest to spend big bucks to run ads.”

EXTREME:

• Cleveland.com: The Republican primary “will continue its cavalcade of intemperate, cruel, ill-judged, narrow-minded and explosive rhetoric designed to divide not unite.”
• Associated Press: “Barbara Comstock, a Trump critic and former GOP congresswoman from Virginia, warned Republicans risked nominating fringe candidates who would go on to lose in the general. ‘Republicans feel like they’re going to win no matter who’s on the ticket. And I don’t agree with that thesis,’ she said, pointing to Ohio, where Senate candidates have been trying to desperately out-Trump one another. ‘I think you really are taking a chance in blowing reliable races.’”

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Trump: “Mitch McConnell is a loser.” 

Columbus, OH — With Trump “watching Ohio very, very closely,” the GOP U.S. Senate candidates in Ohio are really in a pickle: do they go all out for Trump or support Mitch McConnell?

Just last week, Trump escalated his feud with McConnell by calling him a loser in an NPR interview. The Trump-McConnell feud creates another loyalty test to Trump and we all know Trump sure doesn’t like candidates who cross him.

Enter the Ohio GOP Senate candidates. Timken has “danced around” and “sidestepped” questions about whether she was supporting McConnell. On Vance’s “No B.S.” tour, he refused to say if he’d vote for McConnell, which sure seems like a b.s. answer.

The out-of-touch millionaires have had no problem sinking lower and lower every week to appease Trump, making this out-of-control primary “Ohio’s ugliest ever.” But when it comes to McConnell, every leading GOP Senate candidate has become tongue-tied in the hopes of keeping his network of wealthy special interest donors happy.

“GOP Senate candidates are stuck between a rock and a hard place: while they’re all scrambling to kiss Trump’s ring, they also need the financial backing of Mitch McConnell’s special interest friends to fund their campaigns. As always, in their efforts to keep Trump, McConnell and their wealthy special interest donors happy, every GOP Senate candidate is leaving the needs of working Ohioans behind,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.

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Columbus, OH — According to a new report from The Daily Beast, U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, who flip-flopped on opposing Donald Trump, also believed in white privilege.  

Now, Vance has “gone so far against white privilege” even though he “had a very different take” on white privilege not so long ago. Silicon Valley Vance’s political evolution is just the latest example of him doing or saying anything in order to be competitive in this crowded primary. 

“The only consistent thing about Silicon Valley Vance is that he will do the bidding of his wealthy Big Tech donors and sell out Ohioans in order to further his own ambition,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party. 

Daily Beast: Take a Trip Back in Time and Meet Woke J.D. Vance

Roger Sollenberger 

January 14, 2022

• Multimillionaire venture capitalist J.D. Vance has put issues of race and white privilege front and center in his Senate campaign. In fact, he’s gone so far against white privilege that he’s claimed people should be able to sue businesses that tell people they need to “deconstruct their privilege, or they need to sacrifice or repent of their whiteness.”
• But—like Vance’s flip-flop on his past criticism of Donald Trump—the Silicon Valley veteran had a very different take on white privilege not so long ago.
• In a 2017 interview published two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Vance told Ezra Klein that there are “obviously still advantages to being white” and that “there are still disadvantages to being black.”
• Vance was replying to Klein’s question about how Vance’s much-ballyhooed book, Hillbilly Elegy, addressed the notion of white privilege. Specifically, Klein wanted to know what Vance’s response would be to white people who, confronted with this idea of privilege, might respond, as Klein put it: “Fuck you. Nothing about my community says to me that I’m privileged and should be at the back of the line for getting some help here.”
• After pointing out the disproportionate support Trump received from the Scots-Irish community, Vance addressed the issue.
• “But to connect it to the conversation about white privilege, I think it’s always important to note that there are obviously still advantages to being white, there are still disadvantages to being black, even when you control completely for class, income, and so forth,” he said.
• Vance later added in his response that he understood that “most of the people” making arguments about white privilege are not being “reductive,” but “a lot more sophisticated in what they’re saying [about] how privilege operates along different dimensions in our society.”
• Vance’s problem, he said, was that it “appears reductive” to other people—specifically white people, perhaps less worldly than himself—who lack the “cognition” to process the concept that Black Americans are historically disadvantaged in a number of ways that white Americans are not.
• Notably, Vance—who left his blue-collar Ohio hometown for Yale Law School and then San Francisco investment firms—made it clear that, unlike his hypothetical coal miner’s son, he himself had the brains to navigate this issue.
• Vance even once acknowledged the very example he gave in that interview—that the Obama family, who made it all the way to the White House, first had to overcome hardships predicated specifically on race, while the Trumps did not. In 2016, the self-styled champion of Appalachian poor “liked” a Twitter photo mocking Melania Trump’s famously plagiarized GOP convention speech, captioned, “It wasn’t easy growing up a black woman in Chicago, but I believe the world is safer for my 2 girls, Sasha & Malia.”
• But Vance’s own words today paint a very different portrait of a race-baiting pugilist, who discusses white privilege with little, if any, admission of nuance or sympathy for minorities.
• Last March, as the Silicon Valley veteran began dusting off his blue-collar bona fides, he gave a Breitbart interview that resulted in the headline, “J.D. Vance: Narrative of ‘White Privilege’ Is ‘Disgusting.’” Vance inverted the failure to grasp the nuances of the privilege debate, criticizing liberals for the same failure that had evoked his sympathy when applied to the West Virginia kid.
• “There is a narrative in our country, right now, that if you’re white, you’re privileged, and the idea that there is a family that is white, that is working-class, that is struggling in ways that are identifiable to a lot of non-white Americans—and a lot of white Americans, too—is just not something the current cultural zeitgeist is comfortable with,” Vance said.
• He also blamed this ideology for the milquetoast reception given the movie adaptation of his book. “That’s not what [those] people want to hear,” Vance said. “This moment met the identity politics—the hyper-woke white privilege moment—and the movie suffered from that, too.”
• In another interview over the summer—in which the author again complained that criticism of white privilege harmed the reception of his movie—Vance bemoaned that “the liberal narrative” is “to assume every black person is disadvantaged and every white person is privileged.”

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For Immediate Release:

Friday, January 14, 2022

“This is gerrymandering. It’s cheating, and it poisons everything.”

Columbus, OH — In case you missed it, Ohio media outlets wasted no time this week taking the Ohio Republicans to task following the Ohio Supreme Court ruling overturning blatantly gerrymandered and unconstitutional legislative maps. Ohio Capital Journal editor David DeWitt eviscerated Republican justices on the Ohio Supreme Court following their dissents on this week’s ruling :

“Three Ohio Supreme Court justices have also shamefully abdicated their responsibility to the Ohio Constitution and the voters. Either they don’t understand the court’s critical role to check partisan politicians who cheat voters with gerrymandering, or they don’t care and are themselves engaged in a partisan political power quest rather than constitutional jurisprudence,” writes DeWitt.

WVXU-FM political reporter Howard Wilkinson didn’t mince word either, noting he expected Republican justices to cave to their own party and “play dead” but showing how in the end, the Ohio GOP “got what it deserved,” thanks in part to the swing vote of a Republican justice:

“In both cases, the statehouse Republicans tried to pull a fast one on the Ohio Supreme Court. And in both cases, they failed miserably.” writes Wilkinson.

Read more below:

Ohio Capital Journal: Supreme Court dissenting justices on redistricting mock Ohioans’ rights to judicial review

David Dewitt

• The argument of the three Republican supreme court justices dissenting against the anti-gerrymandering opinion issued by the court 4-3 Wednesday appears to be: Republican politicians are allowed to rig the game in their favor against the wishes of Ohio voters and in violation of the Ohio Constitution, and the Ohio Supreme Court has no authority to stop them.
• In 2015, 71% of Ohio voters amended the state constitution for Statehouse redistricting reform demanding an end to partisan gerrymandering.
• Nevertheless, in September, Ohio Republican politicians awarded themselves continued supermajorities.
• This is gerrymandering. It’s cheating, and it poisons everything.
• But three Republican Ohio Supreme Court justices would throw away the judiciary’s power to hold politicians responsible for following the Ohio Constitution and the voters’ demands to end gerrymandering.
• Saying the Ohio Supreme Court “does not have license” to uphold the Ohio Constitution on such a fundamental question of democracy for our Republic, when the maps were created jointly by the two other branches of government, is an odd and absurd argument to come from some of the highest members of the state’s judicial branch.
• And now three Ohio Supreme Court justices have also shamefully abdicated their responsibility to the Ohio Constitution and the voters. Either they don’t understand the court’s critical role to check partisan politicians who cheat voters with gerrymandering, or they don’t care and are themselves engaged in a partisan political power quest rather than constitutional jurisprudence.

WVXU-FM Cincinnati: Commentary: Ohio GOP got what it deserved from the Ohio Supreme Court

Howard Wilkinson

• It really boggles the mind that the five Republicans on the Ohio Legislative Redistricting Commission and their GOP pals in the legislature thought they could get away with it.
• Drawing and approving a four-year map for Ohio House and Senate districts and a separate map for Ohio’s 15 congressional district that were so skewed to favor the GOP that anyone with a lick of sense could see the maps were blatantly unconstitutional.
• Now, because they couldn’t find it in themselves to draw a congressional district map that was not only fair but constitutional, the legislature will have 30 days to try again.
• In both cases, the statehouse Republicans tried to pull a fast one on the Ohio Supreme Court. And in both cases, they failed miserably.
• Following the law was apparently too much to ask of a hyper-partisan Republican super majority in the legislature, who routinely puff out their chests and strut about the House and Senate chambers, in the sure knowledge that they can get away with anything they want. Well, not this time.
• With four Republicans and three Democrats on the Ohio Supreme Court, you might well have thought that a majority of the court would have rolled over and played dead when an assortment of voting rights groups marched in and filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of both the state legislative maps and the congressional district map. But that’s not what happened.
• [Chief Justice Maureen] O’Connor is no fan of partisan gerrymandering, whether done by Republicans or Democrats. In her written opinion Wednesday, concurring with the majority, she said something rather extraordinary:
• “Having now seen firsthand that the current Ohio Redistricting Commission – comprised of statewide elected officials and partisan legislators – is seemingly unwilling to put aside partisan concerns as directed by the people’s vote, Ohioans may opt to pursue further constitutional amendment to replace the current commission with a truly independent, nonpartisan commission that more effectively distances the redistricting process from partisan politics.”

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For Immediate Release:

Friday, January 14, 2022

Columbus, OH — Today, Ohio Democratic Party Chair Elizabeth Walters released the following statement applauding the Ohio Supreme Court ruling that blocks the GOP-gerrymandered congressional maps from moving forward.

“Once again, the Ohio Supreme Court did what the legislature refused to do – listened to the will of Ohio voters. Any map that further rigs our state in favor of one party over another is unacceptable and we’ll be watching closely to make sure any new maps reflect the fair representation that Ohioans overwhelmingly called for.”  

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