I Was Right, as Mike DeWine, Jon Husted, and JINOs Were Spectacularly Wrong. That’s Bad for Ohio. Does It Matter?

I simply cannot do it alone even when I’m right.

I’m pissed. If you are easily offended, I suggest you stop reading. I shouldn’t be pissed about being right, but I am because being right is bad news for Ohio and its people. I’ve dedicated the last seventeen years of my career trying to make Ohio once again the great state it was. I’ve poured over the data again and again on Ohio and the other forty-nine states to identify the simple policies to enact that would give Ohio the chance to shine again. I promoted those policies across every medium I could—from meeting with policymakers to creating compelling videos, from leveraging social media to publishing reports and charts, from going on television to speaking the truth on radio every week, nothing has worked. Hell, I even explored a run for Ohio Governor for nine months to see if grassroots Republicans would finally snap out of their sychophantic ways and stop supporting Establishment career politicians like Mike DeWine and Jon Husted.

Mind you, not once in seventeen years has a policymaker or his dull-witted straphanging minions ever refuted my work or shown why what I was saying wasn’t right. Not once have they proven that I somehow overstated or embellished my case. Not once has DeWine or Husted had the guts to debate me because they both know I’d eviscerate them with undeniable facts and data.

At the same time, the pathetic excuse for what Ohio calls journalist (I call them JINOs — Journalist In Name Only) fail to ever take the irrefutable data I publish every month and ask DeWine or Husted so much as one tough question about how in God’s name Ohio does so poorly year-after-year when it comes to creating private sector jobs when so many other states crush it. How a bullshit entity like JobsOhio can have so much money and so little accountability and after over a decade produce such piss poor results. Not the Columbus Dispatch. Not the Cincinnati Enquirer. Not the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Not the Toledo Blade. Not the Akron-Beacon Journal. Not the Dayton Daily News. Not ABC. Not NBC. Not Fox. Not Ohio Public Radio. Not Ohio Public Television. These left-wing hack JINOs know that no Democrat can win the governor’s office so do everything they can to make sure moderates like DeWine and Husted retain power instead of a true conservative willing to enact policies that will make Ohio great again…and redder than ever.

Seven months ago I published a column on my The Patriot Mind Substack titled, “Why Is It So Hard for Politicians to Shoot Straight With Ohioans About Our Systemically Underperforming Jobs Economy?," in which I wrote:

As Mark Twain famously said, there are “lies, damn lies, and statistics!” I understand elected officials want to take credit for good news (“I did that!!”) and ignore or deflect bad news (“Joe Biden did that!”), but the constant dishonesty about the state of Ohio’s jobs economy can be grating. When comparing how Ohio is doing to the other forty-nine states that all face the same headwinds from Washington, D.C., the results are simply ugly. 

…

With the release of the July preliminary data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the DeWine-Husted folks were at it again. They yelled from the mountain top that Ohio’s employment had hit a record high (4.857.7 million jobs—I screen out government jobs because those are funded via our taxes) all due to their amazing leadership. Again, that is true (the record, not their leadership), but (there it is again) the complete picture tells a different, far less impressive story.

First, the July BLS figures are preliminary, not final, numbers. As someone who has literally looked at this data every month for the last fifteen or so years, it is often dangerous to base job claims on preliminary data. BLS will make the July data final next month, but even then final doesn’t actually mean final. A report on Tuesday noted experts think 500,000 jobs will disappear from the BLS data when BLS does its next revision. You see, every February, BLS shuts down for a month to scrub the data from the previous years. Every March, BLS releases what most would consider to be the final figures. In past years, I’ve seen Ohio’s annual private sector job total drop from over 100,000 net jobs to far fewer. Think about it, we are an enormous country with over a hundred and fifty million jobs, so subtracting monthly job losses and adding monthly job gains, including part-time workers, can be tricky. Thus, the constant revisions. 

Don’t expect to see a press release from the DeWine-Husted folks acknowledging they were premature in their claim if BLS’s revisions push Ohio’s new record back below the previous March 2000 record high. 

Next, the record Ohio’s private sector just broke had stood for 23.3 years, which, frankly, isn’t the type of record worth having. No, that isn’t a typo. Waaaaaaaaay back in March of 2000, Ohio’s private sector hit a peak of 4.856 million workers. Facing the same headwinds as every state faces, the failure of Ohio’s elected officials to do the tough stuff to make Ohio the most pro-prosperity, pro-business, pro-worker, and pro-family state in America kept undue burdens on its private sector. The severe DeWine-Husted pandemic shutdown also obviously didn’t help, as it devastated our businesses, schools, and the mental health of so many Ohioans. I’ve previously noted that Ohio was the 39th state to finally get back all of the jobs lost from the DeWine-Husted pandemic shutdown. As a result of so many bad policy decisions and the DeWine-Husted pandemic shutdown, it sadly took Ohio until last month to finally preliminarily surpass the March of 2000 peak.

Finally, did Ohio really get back to the March of 2000 peak? It did as a raw number, but, remember, the peak of 4.856 million jobs was hit when Ohio had 390,000 fewer people. As a percentage of Ohio’s population in the private sector, the March of 2000 peak employment figure is really 42.7%, which represents the number of Ohioans actually working. The number hit last month means 41.3% of Ohioans are working. To get back to the 42.7% peak accounting for population growth, Ohio’s private sector still needs to add 159,550 jobs, or hit 5.017 million total jobs. It is like hitting a record for how far you can hit a golf ball in Columbus, then hitting it the same distance in thinner air at 9,000 feet in Colorado. You have to adjust for how much farther a golf ball will go in thinner air, so 300 yards in Columbus should be 330 yards in the mountains of Colorado. Thus, hitting the same distance in Colorado really isn’t matching the record (and why the Colorado Rockies baseball team performs worse on the road than at home).

Well, yesterday, BLS released its massive scrub of the jobs data going back over 2023. Guess what happened? Just as I said would happen, BLS revised Ohio’s private sector in 2023 by making 36,000 private sector jobs DeWine and Husted had taken credit for and promoted from the highest mountains TOTALLY DISAPPEAR!! It turns out, contrary to what DeWine and Husted said, Ohio’s private sector was substantially WEAKER in 2023 than what they claimed. In fact, Ohio DID NOT break the record raw number peak of private sector jobs last July; rather, that March 2000 peak record of 4.853 million jobs MAY HAVE BEEN BESTED last month by a scant 800 jobs IF AND ONLY IF BLS DOES NOT REVISE THE FEBRUARY PRELIMINARY JOBS NUMBERS DOWN next month. In total, Ohio’s private sector only added 44,000 jobs in all of 2023. 

You should be asking yourself why any politician would brag about it taking twenty-four years for Ohio to GET BACK TO the number of jobs it had in March 2000. Twenty-four years by the way when Republicans were in total control for all but four years. Over the course of their five years in power from January 2019 to January 2024, Ohio only added a net of 53,700 private sector jobs, or just 10,740 jobs per year. Even worse, after recovering from the severe DeWine-Husted pandemic shutdown, Ohio’s private sector has only netted 38,800 jobs since 2019. Let me repeat that: less than 40,000 net jobs since 2019!!!!

As a point of comparison, the chart above lists the results in eight other states for the same period of time. As you can see, those eight states include other “cold” northern states, as well as two states bordering Ohio. In all eight cases, Ohio gets beat badly ranging from Texas and Florida adding roughly 1.4 million and 1.0 million, respectively, to Idaho and Utah adding 105,200 and 200,900, respectively. Even Indiana and Kentucky best Ohio by tens of thousands of jobs. What is the difference between Kentucky and Indiana and Ohio? Those states are right-to-work states. In the coming days, I’ll release charts comparing Ohio to the other states, including on recovering from the pandemic. Those charts will be ugly, as they will show Ohio in the back of the pack again and again and again.

The industry specific numbers under DeWine and Husted aren’t much better. Specifically, over the last five years, Ohio has on net LOST jobs in manufacturing and information (i.e., IT) — so much for the BOOM the much-heralded (but now stalled) Intel project was going to create or all of the IT jobs those Amazon warehouses and energy- and water-sucking Google server farms were going to bring to Ohio. So much for the absurdly named Silicon Heartland we’ve been promised for so long. Government and the taxpayer-funded education and health services industries grew over the last five years of course. A few other industries added jobs, but not at a pace needed for Ohio to truly climb to the top of the jobs rankings.

I’m left wondering if Ohio Republicans are so brainwashed that they think DeWine and Husted are strong, successful leaders. County Republican leaders will fall over themselves to get one of these mental midgets to headline their annual Lincoln-Reagan Day dinners where they will fudge the data to claim victories that did not happen, with attendees applauding the whole time. Large donors whose names we all know will max out to Husted’s campaign for governor and his PAC despite such a shit jobs record (among many failures). One has to wonder how these highly successful business leaders did what they did in the private sector yet are so gullible when it comes to politics. Vivek Ramaswamy, allegedly close to Husted, will mouth off endlessly about Joe Biden’s terrible record, but is eerily silent about the trainwreck DeWine-Husted jobs record. It sure would be nice if Vivek joined me in castigating Ohio’s Republican Establishment career politicians instead of cozying up to them. Same goes for Bernie Moreno. And Jim Jordan. And J.D Vance. Why am I the lone voice in the wilderness pointing out what should be obvious to anyone willing to just look at the economic data over the last five years? Where are my think tank brethren here in Ohio and at The Heritage Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, Americans for Prosperity, and CPAC in highlighting Ohio as the textbook case on what NOT to do?   

How many more years will Ohioans tolerate mediocre-to-poor results before they stop supporting such failed men? Will the Ohio Democrats remain so useless and woke driven that they’ll never figure out how to make the case to give them a shot given how badly the Republicans have done? Will Ohio’s JINOs ever do their damn jobs? In the coming days, I’ll publish the easy-to-understand charts racking and stacking all fifty states to show just how bad Ohio is doing in the laboratories of competition system established under our Constitution. When you look at the charts, look to see if there is another state that has had Republican governors and Republican supermajorities in the state legislature for the last thirteen years that has performed as badly as Ohio. 

I’m pissed alright, but I won’t quit fighting for Ohio and its people. As a fifth generation Ohioans raising the sixth generation, I’ll fight so long as donors continue to believe the work we do at Opportunity Ohio is the only thing stopping Ohio from being in even worse shape and that the policies we stand as the lone bright beacon of light on must continue to be pushed until Ohioans finally put in office men and women brave enough to stop doing what hasn’t worked and start doing the things that have worked brilliantly in other states.

But for the love of all that is good in this world, don’t sit by idly while DeWine and Husted drive Ohio farther into the ditch over the next three years (and God forbid, eight more under a Husted-Who Cares Administration). Help me spread the word by getting as many people as you can to subscribe to this free newsletter and to help me raise Ronald Reagan’s banner of bold colors. If you have any extra money after the one-two punch of the Biden-DeWine/Husted economy, consider supporting the work we do at Opportunity Ohio by making a tax deductible contribution today. 

I simply cannot do it alone even when I’m right.