Politics is rife with double-edged swords in which something you say or do cuts both ways. That happened last week when J.D. Vance made a comment at a campaign event in support of voters sticking with Republicans nationally instead of putting Democrats back in charge given what they did during the Joe Biden tenure. Vance isn’t wrong about keeping Hakeem Jefferies’ and Chuck Schumer’s hands off the tiller of government. All those men will do with power is use it to go after Donald Trump, Vance, and anyone who supports them. They most certainly won’t work with Trump and Vance to keep the economy going in the right direction it is going, with the notable exception of the mess Trump’s “I’m going to bomb them to the Stone Age one day, they want a deal so no bombing the next day” vacillation has created in Iran/Middle East that is crushing oil/gas prices.
In his speech, Vance pleaded: “Give us another couple of years. Do you want to reelect the people who have made substantial progress, accepting there is still a lot of work to be done, or do you want to go back to the people who caused the problem in the first place?” Applying Vance’s plea to Ohio, it cuts the exact opposite way for Ohioans. We are not living in a state that is thriving with booming population and job growth in which Ohioans are looked at by people in other states with envy. Ohio has become the butt of jokes on social media.
The most damning data point of Ohio’s stagnation under Mike DeWine, the supermajority Republican legislature, and JobsOhio came out on Friday when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the jobs data for August. Since DeWine took office in January 2019, Ohio’s private sector has netted a mere 117,200 jobs in that nearly eight year span of time. Over those ninety-one months, Ohio has averaged a net 1,288 private sector jobs per month. In a state of 11.9 million people, that total is utterly pathetic (it 1/100th of 1% for those keeping track). Anyone who tells you otherwise is a charlatan, dupe, or idiot. Ohio’s recovery from the pandemic has been the 37th best in America. It goes beyond DeWine’s tenure, as John Kasich’s private sector economy got weaker over his eight years, also backed by a supermajority Republican legislature.
I could spit out a ton of other data points on the economy, wages, education, government dependency, immigration fraud, and the like, but you can find that data in previous columns. After nearly sixteen years in charge with a supermajority Republican legislature, very little has gotten better in Ohio no matter what has happened in Washington, D.C. That isn’t the case in lots of other states like Florida, Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah (look at the chart above ranking all fifty states). So, circling back to Vance’s plea, does it make any sense for Ohioans to put Republicans back in charge of state government given the problems that they haven’t fixed? An intellectually consistent Vance would tell you “absolutely not!!!” Vance may be smart, but no one has flipped on more issues over the last decade than Vance, so consistency isn’t his strong suit.
Vance et al. essentially have one argument in support of keeping Ohio Republicans in charge: IT COULD BE WORSE!!!! Literally that is all they can hang the record they’ve built (or not built) over the last sixteen years.
Ohio voters, however, may be doing exactly what Vance asked them to do; namely, they may be stiff-arming the Republicans who caused their problems here in Ohio and giving Democrats a chance to fix things. Democrat Amy Acton is smart to constantly state she will reach across the aisle to work with Republicans. Even though Vivek Ramaswamy hasn’t been in charge and Jon Husted is a U.S. Senator now, Ramaswamy’s refusal to expressly criticize DeWine, Husted, and the Ohio legislature tacitly means he agrees with what they’ve done/not done and Husted isn’t seen so much as a U.S. Senator than as DeWine’s right-hand man for most of his wasted tenure and a guy who has lived in Capital Square his entire life. Ohioans see both men as Establishment Republicans carrying the torch of failed Ohio Republicanism. Ramaswamy should have run against the Left AND the Establishment Right. Instead, he alludes to all of the problems he needs to fix as if the Left has been in charge.
Two polls out last week reiterate that fact. In the BGSU/YouGov poll, Acton leads Ramaswamy by 3%, with Acton winning three of the four age groups. She also is securing 96% of Democrats along with 5% of Republicans, as Ramaswamy only nets 87% of Republicans and just 2% of Democrats. In fact, 17% of Trump voters are not voting for Ramaswamy. He only wins voters without a college degree by 9% while losing those with college degrees by 20%, as he wins men by 6% (far less than Trump did) and loses women by 11%. Husted’s numbers against Sherrod Brown are very similar though he loses women voters by 13%. When it comes to favorability ratings, Brown was +1, Acton was -1, and Husted and Ramaswamy were both -11. That’s called likability, so Ramaswamy and Husted are losing the likability contest, which is deadly politically. Medical experts like Acton were +45, as billionaires like Ramaswamy were -41. That is why his ads against her aren’t working, but her ads against him are working. They didn’t test “career politicians,” but since both Brown and Husted are such things it wouldn’t matter much.
One other interesting data point that is problematic for Ramaswamy’s property tax plan are the responses to the question on who they trusted more when it comes to using tax dollars appropriately. Only 8% said the federal government does (which is mindboggling given Democrats love federal spending) and 26% said state government. In stark contrast, 66% of Ohio voters believe that local government can be trusted using tax dollars wisely. So, should Ramaswamy win and should he push his property tax plan to cut local taxes back to 2020 levels thereby taking revenue away from local governments, he will face enormous opposition from Ohioans who think local government is the only level of government worth funding.
The Trafalgar Group released a U.S. Senate poll last week, as well. That polling entity has been among the most accurate in America since 2016, so I wouldn’t dismiss their results. They found Brown leading Husted 45.4% to 41.5%. Brown won every age group except the 65+ group, which is a positive note for Husted given their voting propensity. Brown won women by neatly eight points, but only lost men by 0.3-percentage points, which is the union voter flipping back to the Democrats. I’ve not seen gubernatorial results from Trafalgar yet. In both races, polls over the last four months have mostly shown the Democrat candidates ahead. Polymarket has both Democrats favored to win, as well. With early voting starting in less than two weeks, the time to turn things around for both Ramaswamy and Husted is rapidly closing.
P.S. Last week, I was one of the few on the Right with the guts to criticize Donald Trump Jr. for allowing a Russian oligarch to fund part of his wedding celebration. It was disappointing that bigger name influencers like Mollie Hemingway and Miranda Devine, who made lots of money slamming Hunter Biden for grifting, said nothing about Trump Jr.’s grifting. Beyond it being pathetic that a guy worth $300 million with a wife whose family also is wealthy took money for his wedding, Trump Jr.’s stupid decision did little more than feed the Left’s corruption allegations against the Trumps, add wood to the Russia Collusion hoax fire, undermined the broader Republican cause, and made Hunter Biden look like a petty cash grifter. There have been too many instances during Trump’s second term in which the appearance of grifting by his kids has occurred. It needs to stop. Thankfully, Trump Jr. got the message and repaid the oligarch.
With a super majority the Ohio House and Senate could have overturned many of DeWine's vetoes proving that we need new leadership in these legislative bodies. All we get out of Columbus is management of problems never solutions