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September 24, 2021

Happy Friday and welcome to another edition of “Buckeye Brawl,” a weekly newsletter from the Ohio Democratic Party highlighting the nasty, chaotic, and expensive Republican primary for Senate. The out-of-control primary is making conservatives “deeply worried” about the prospects of Republicans losing this seat.

As the Republican Senate primary continues to sink lower and lower, these GOP candidates are injecting even more nasty personal attacks, more chaos, and more money into this race. We’re here to help you keep track of all of it. Here’s what you may have missed:

WHAT IF… DOLAN’S ENTRANCE WAS AN ATTACK ON THE ENTIRE FIELD? This crowded primary got even more crowded with the entrance of millionaire Matt Dolan into the GOP Senate primary. In his announcement video, Matt Dolan asks questions that slam the entire field. His video asks, “what if our next Senator didn’t pander about reducing government… but already did it?” Another question Dolan’s announcement video asks is what if Ohio’s next Senator “didn’t offer empty talk about boosting skilled trade…?” Who is Dolan referring to here – J.D. Vance, Josh Mandel, Jane Timken, Mike Gibbons, or Bernie Moreno? Or is he referring to all of them?

MANDEL MOCKS TIMKEN AND VANCE AMID GONZALEZ RETIREMENT. Josh Mandel decided to remind everyone of what Timken and Vance did after Anthony Gonzalez voted to impeach Trump. Josh Mandel skewered Timken, saying she was “pro-impeachment” and “having a candlelight vigil for her bud Anthony Gonzalez.” He mocked Timken, by sarcastically impersonating her, tweeting, “Um, do I need to change my pro-impeachment stance now? Or should I poll it first?”And he lambasted J.D. Vance, claiming Vance had been “completely silent on Gonzalez’s vote to impeach Trump.”

BUT TIMKEN ALLIES SAY JOSH MANDEL IS “THE DEFINITION OF A FRAUD.” Responding to Mandel’s tweet mocking Timken, Timken ally Bernard Kerik flew to her defense, tweeting, “Josh Mandel is the definition of a fraud.” Timken Communications Director Mandi Merritt boosted Kerik’s tweet. Timken ally Kerik wasn’t finished attacking Josh Mandel though, tweeting, “You [Mandel] were anti-Trump then, and faking it today. You need to stop.” Yikes, these candidates can’t stop lambasting each other over who is the Trumpiest candidate.

VANCE SHADES TIMKEN OVER CHINA? In an interview with Spectrum News, J.D. Vance was asked what makes him different from the rest of the crowded Republican Senate field and seems to take a dig at Timken, saying, “So you know, we have for the past 30 years and this has unfortunately been a bipartisan decision, shipped a large amount of our manufacturing base off to China.” As a reminder, Timken’s family steel company grew operations in China while they cut jobs in Ohio.

A “NEVER TRUMPER” FORMER CNN EMPLOYEE. Following a report from CNN, Josh Mandel took the opportunity to go after J.D. Vance, saying “JD Vance’s former employer CNN is attacking me. CNN and J.D. Vance are Never-Trumpers of the worst kind.”

TRUMP DENIGRATES DOLAN ON DAY ONE. Not even a day into his Senate campaign, Dolan found himself on the receiving end of a scathing Trump statement. Trump scorched Dolan for his family’s baseball team changing their name and said, “In any event, I know of at least one person in the race who I won’t be endorsing. The Republican Party has too many RINOs!” Mike Gibbons joined in, slamming Dolan in a tweet, saying, “President Trump is 100% right. Go Tribe!”

MORENO STARTS MILLIONAIRE FAMILY FEUD. Following Trump’s lead, millionaire Bernie Moreno decided to add more salt to Dolan’s wound. Moreno revealed that he offered $1 billion to Matt Dolan’s family in order to prevent the name change of the family’s baseball team. Moreno echoed Trump, saying the name change was a “classic example of the kind of cancel culture woke-ism that’s affecting our nation.” Welcome to the nastiest Senate primary in the country, Matt!

WHO HAS REALLY CREATED JOBS IN THIS FIELD OF MILLIONAIRES? Bernie Moreno swiped at the entire Republican field’s record on job creation, saying, “I’m the only candidate in this race who has a successful track record of creating jobs and putting Ohioans first.” Mike Gibbons Senior Advisor Michael Biundo wasn’t having it and simply replied, “Fact: LOL.” Moreno responded, “Political consultant and Twitter troll: where are most of your client’s employees? Chicago or Cleveland? Maybe you should have asked that question.” I’ll let this terrible GIF response speak for itself.

Thanks for reading along – that’s all for the Buckeye Brawl this week. If you have questions, my email is [email protected]. Have a great weekend!

Columbus, OH — Today, the Ohio Democratic Party released the following statement on the resignation of Dan McCarthy, Mike DeWine’s Legislative Director with deep ties to FirstEnergy and connections to the largest public corruption scandal in state history. McCarthy worked as a FirstEnergy lobbyist and helped found Partners for Progress, a dark money group that FirstEnergy funneled money through to politicians they were trying to secure the support of as part of the scandal.

“The end of Dan McCarthy’s time in state government is long past due, but this is only the beginning. The connections between Mike DeWine and the largest public corruption scheme in state history continue to deepen, and he can’t hide behind staff and continue to duck accountability. He must provide a full accounting of what he knew about the $60 million bribery scheme and when, and give Ohio voters the transparency they deserve,” said Matt Keyes, spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.

Earlier this year, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio outlined various ways that DeWine is connected to the scandal, including top-level staff with direct ties to the scandal that DeWine continues to stand behind. DeWine has tried to avoid answering questions on his ties to the scandal and what he knew and when, but Ohio voters deserve full transparency and accountability.

DeWine’s chief of staff, Laurel Dawson, has admitted to knowing about a $4.3 million payment to Sam Randazzo and hiding this fact from DeWine for several weeks. Dawson had also pushed for Randazzo to be nominated as Chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, ignoring concerns raised about his close ties to the industry and the possibility of his corruption.

The connections between DeWine and the scandal run deeper, however, as he also took more than one hundred thousand dollars from FirstEnergy and even more from executives tied to the scandal. He also took part in a private meeting with FirstEnergy executives in both Oct. 2018 and Dec. 2018, two meetings which he has not discussed the contents of publicly. He also solicited campaign donations for his daughter’s Greene County Prosecutor’s race, and appointed individuals directly connected to the HB 6 scandal to high-level state positions, including Michael Dowling, a former FirstEnergy VP, and Matt Borges and Juan Cespedes, both of whom were charged in the case.

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Columbus, OH — In case you missed it, Ohio Capital Journal editor David DeWitt today took Mike DeWine and Frank LaRose to task for once again breaking their promises to Ohio voters as they bowed to political pressure and voted to pass unconstitutional statehouse maps. DeWitt looked back on past statements from DeWine and LaRose that prove that they know better than to pass these unconstitutional maps that fly in the face of what Ohio voters repeatedly called for, they just don’t care.

“DeWine had a vote. So did Frank LaRose. Instead of a 5-2 partisan vote for gerrymandering, it could’ve been a 4-3 bipartisan vote for fair maps. That’s exactly what voters wanted, bipartisan and fair maps. DeWine and LaRose could’ve voted for and gotten representative maps, but they gave Ohio voters more rigged maps. Their actions scream so much louder than their hollow words,” writes DeWitt.

Both LaRose and DeWine are scared of primary challengers and know they are hemorrhaging support within their own party. So instead of showing any sort of courage and doing the right thing, they backed down once again to extreme members of their party (read: the Republican legislature) at the expense of the rule of law.

Read more from Ohio Capital Journal HERE and below:

• The oddest part is Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine acting as though he’s somehow powerless and had no choice when he voted to rig Ohio elections with partisan, gerrymandered maps for the next four years. After all, he’s only the governor.
• In 2011 as a state senator, LaRose voted for the gerrymander-rigged districts Ohio has had for the last decade. Those lines, our current districts, were created in a secret GOP hotel room “bunker” at the downtown Double Tree in Columbus.
• Last week, as secretary of state and a member of the redistricting commission, LaRose again voted to gerrymander Ohio, this time for four years.
• This is now 14 years of rigged district lines LaRose has voted for but feels super bad about.
• LaRose told everybody all over the state in 2018 that we could count on him, but when the time came, in a critical moment for the integrity of Ohio government, he failed us.
• How about DeWine? Here’s what he said when he was campaigning for governor in 2018: “The rules are pretty clear — the voters said that the redistricting process should be done in a bipartisan way and when I am governor there will be an expectation that the new district maps honor the voters’ wishes.”
• DeWine had a golden opportunity to live up to his own expectations. It was even in his own interest. He could’ve broken the veto-proof supermajority that has overridden him on pandemic safety and stripped him of powers.
• Instead DeWine shrank from the moment, and claims powerlessness, bemoans a lack of compromise, when it was he who was in a position to compromise, he who was in a position to lead, and he who failed to do so.

• DeWine had a vote. So did Frank LaRose. Instead of a 5-2 partisan vote for gerrymandering, it could’ve been a 4-3 bipartisan vote for fair maps. That’s exactly what voters wanted, bipartisan and fair maps.
• Their actions scream so much louder than their hollow words.

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Columbus, OH — Following a new Daily Beast report that J.D. Vance called rape “inconvenient,” Ohio Democratic Party Chair Liz Walters released the following statement:

“J.D. Vance’s statement is dangerous and despicable. He is unfit to serve in the United States Senate.” 

Read the report below:

Daily Beast: J.D. Vance Defends Texas Abortion Ban, Calls Rape “Inconvenient”

In a local news interview published Wednesday, author and venture capitalist turned Senate candidate J.D. Vance suggested he would support prohibiting abortion even in cases of rape and incest—and dismissed those catalysts as “inconvenient.”

Asked by Curtis Jackson of Spectrum News 1 in Columbus, OH, whether a woman should be forced to give birth even if the pregnancy was the result of incest or rape, Vance replied that “the question betrays a certain presumption that’s wrong.”

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” said Vance, who lags behind several Republican candidates in his Ohio primary. “The question to me is really about the baby. We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have a right to life.”

The exchange came amid an extended discussion about abortion laws in light of the broadly criticized new Texas ban on the procedure, which does not make exceptions for rape and incest. Vance, a multimillionaire investor whose 2016 bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, detailed the plight of Appalachia’s poor, defended the ban, saying that “in Texas they’re trying to make it easier for babies to be born.”

He also claimed, falsely, that “the Supreme Court has upheld the Texas law,” referring to the Court’s eleventh-hour split decision last month to let the ban go into effect rather than issue an emergency injunction. Vance, a Yale Law grad, also stated that “the fundamental problem with abortion law in this country” is that it is “unsustainable and unstable.” Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling which defined those laws, was decided 48 years ago.

[…]

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Columbus, OH — In an interview with The Spectator, Silicon Valley millionaire J.D. Vance is facing more scrutiny about his “superficial” “charade” non-profit, Our Ohio Renewal. 

In the latest interview, Vance acknowledged his organization’s limited impact, saying, “Is it a massive nonprofit? No. Did we spend a lot of money? No. Did we raise a lot of money? No. And, most of the money, or at least a lot of the money, was my personal money that went into it.” 

These comments follow a Business Insider investigation that found Vance’s non-profit was a “charade” and “superficial,” bolstering himself and his personal ambitions. Business Insider found that in its first year, the group spent more money paying for “management services” provided by Vance’s top political advisor than on programs to fight opioid abuse. In a Logan Daily News interview, Vance pointed to his non-profit’s limited impact, citing only “small grants and funds…here and there,” and said that he was “doing less and less with the non-profit” as the Senate campaign ramped up and was instead “focusing more” on his own political career.   

“For weeks, Silicon Valley millionaire J.D. Vance has failed to answer what his sham non-profit has done to help Ohioans struggling with the plague of addiction. The truth is that Vance is only ever interested in helping one person: himself,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.  

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