Ohio Secretary of State Candidate Marcell Strbich Should Do Better

I would love nothing more than to notch a win or two against the Establishment, but those wins should come from candidates who shoot straight with us when it comes to asking us for our money.

Look, I don’t know Marcell Strbich who is running for Ohio Secretary of State against Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague. I don’t know Sprague either. People have told me both men are decent guys. Sprague is deemed to be an Establishment guy who never cast a tough vote or pushed a tough issue against the Republican Establishment grain, whereas non-Establishment Republicans believe Strbich is “one of us” and knows voter integrity issues like the back of his hand. Clearly, Strbich is a military veteran who served our country honorably for twenty years. I thank him for that impeccable service. He appears to have arrived on the Ohio political scene sometime in 2024. Federal and state campaign finance records show he has donated four times—all in 2025—twice to Vivek Ramaswamy and two other times to two other state campaigns. Thus, Strbich’s involvement in Ohio politics is very recent.

Those facts aren’t what bother me about Strbich. It is his use of embellishment beyond what I deem appropriate.

We all know that politicians embellish things in their runs for office. They take credit for things they had little to do with (and disown those things they did do that aren’t positive). They make claims about levels of support that aren’t accurate. Hell, when I explored a run for governor in 2023, I often used adjectives about crowd sizes and reactions to my speeches to try to make my campaign look stronger than it was. That is politics. We all get political bluster. I draw the line when it comes to asking people to write you checks knowing that many of those people are on fixed incomes and are struggling in their own lives. When you make claims that simply aren’t true about how much you raised in a plea to potential donors, you are crossing a line in my book.