We Cannot Move the Needle Without Your Generous Support

We will use any tax-deductible, charitable support you send to grip that needle with both hands and push as hard as our strength allows.

With voters delivering Ohio another supermajority in the Ohio General Assembly in the 2022 election, we at Opportunity Ohio felt strongly that we needed to redouble our efforts to advance some of our key policy ideas. In the last two years, we’ve ramped up our outreach on some key issues to see if we could move the needle despite the intraparty dysfunction.

Our outreach proved fruitful when we were asked by representatives to provide policy ideas for an alternative budget and budget amendments. We identified several of our key policy reforms that fit nicely within their budget strategy. Specifically, we shared with them our work on controlling spending in order to map out a plan to eliminate the state income tax, our approach on eliminating John Kasich’s budget-busting Medicaid expansion, our bucket of ideas on empowering parents and protecting kids in school and on sports pitches, and our spending analysis and recommendations to rebalance how Ohio funds higher ed versus tech/trade opportunities for its high school graduates.

Another representative reached out to us about our policy initiative to eliminate the failed JobsOhio entity and use its funds for key infrastructure projects like building a world-class airport in Ohio to facilitate travel for Ohio and its businesses, as well as creating a hunting-fishing-golf-leisure travel destination hotspot in Southeast Ohio focused on The Wilds animal safari that would provide good jobs to an area of Ohio desperately in need of them. Based on our ideas, he began the process of holding JobsOhio accountable for its failures and laying the groundwork for ending it.

Lastly, we also heard from a top senator about similar policy reforms in the Ohio Senate. As I’ve said repeatedly, with a supermajority in the legislature and Republican governors over the last thirteen years, Ohio should be farther ahead on enacting conservative policy ideas than it is. Yet, too many vital reforms fall to the wayside and too little gets done session-after-session. With our renewed outreach efforts, we aim to change that narrative and do what we can to push Ohio forward. Fortunately, our weekly radio interviews and expanding social media megaphone are allowing us to reach more Ohioans on a routine basis, thereby enabling us to push our ideas more aggressively than ever. Hopefully, these efforts will bear fruit in 2025 and beyond.

Due to our weekly radio spot on The Bruce Hooley Show on 98.8FM (Columbus)/94.5FM (Cincinnati/Dayton) The Answer, we are reaching huge numbers of Ohioans in the Greater Cincinnati, Columbus, and Dayton areas every single week with our key messages. For roughly twelve minutes every Thursday over the last two years, Bruce and I cover two-to-three key issues facing Ohio and America. After each episode, we then push the segment far and wide on social media. Based on market analysis, we are reaching nearly 500,000 Ohioans each week!!!! Though many will be repeat listeners, for 2024, we have hit roughly 12,000,000 listeners – and it hasn’t cost Opportunity Ohio a penny to do so. We know people are listening because we get emails and social media hits every week after doing my weekly segment thanking Opportunity Ohio for using our voice to push key Ohio and national issues. We’ve added new donors to Opportunity Ohio because of our weekly radio segments.

During the Summer, Salem Media asked me to fill in for Mr. Hooley for his Friday, two-hour segment. The show went well, with feedback from Salem executives being highly favorable. It is our hope that I will be asked to fill in for Mr. Hooley whenever he is absent in the coming months. Such an opportunity allows Opportunity Ohio and its work to be featured prominently and without cost.

We will hit even more issues into 2025 and through 2026 and 2027 such as the importance of work study programs and the trades in lifting more Ohioans out of poverty, as well as why policymakers should embrace right-to-work for Ohio given our consistent bottom ten ranking in private sector job growth. Critically, my weekly segments with Bruce aren’t just being listened to by 500,000 Ohioans. Policymakers are tuning in, as well!! After we repeatedly covered the transradical agenda and named names on the radio, the Ohio General Assembly not only passed key pieces of our proposed legislation to protect kids medically and girls/young women on the sports pitches, but the Ohio General Assembly overrode Gov. DeWine’s terrible veto of that legislation. The fact that the American College of Pediatricians has adopted our position shows how out-of-touch Gov. DeWine really is.

With the increase in activity focused on pushing our reforms, we need to amplify our work even more and move the needle in the right direction. To that end, we’d greatly appreciate any support you can provide us. We’ve always worked extremely hard to leverage every dollar we received from loyal supporters like you. With continued funding, we could significantly raise the volume of our communications to not only hit policymakers more, but also to grow our grassroots supporters who can supplement our policy work with good old fashion citizen pressure.

In addition to the weekly radio work, we continue to generate easy-to-understand visual reports every month. These one-to-two pagers keep policymakers and citizens informed about the state of the Ohio economy, our job market, state spending and revenue generation, the ever-growing Medicaid program, and more. For thirteen years, Opportunity Ohio has aggressively engaged in this battle of ideas against the Left and, in some cases, our own allies on the Right who sometimes go astray. Over those years, we have published 1,600 items on our website promoting solutions to shape the debate in Ohio and America on a whole range of issues including taxes, regulations, free markets, jobs and unionism, immigration, crime, energy, the environment, national security, and sovereignty.

Lastly, we added yet another platform to our megaphone by cross-posting our work on the Substack page, The Patriot Mind. Through that platform, we’ve reached another 60,000+ citizens who we know forward our posts to their networks, as the analytics allow us to see the details on how many people view their forwards. We’ve often been the lone voice pushing data-driven policies to make Ohio and America better or opposing wrong-headed ideas that would weaken Ohio and America. We rarely, if ever, get credit for our work, but we know it influences policymakers because they tell us so in private or you see them change course after we’ve pushed a certain policy.

As always, thank you for the years of support you’ve given to Opportunity Ohio. As we plow ahead in our thirteenth year, we truly couldn’t have gotten this far without the friendship of Ohioans like you who believe so strongly in the power of ideas to drive renewal, growth, and prosperity. In my more than two decades in the public policy arena, I’ve never seen a greater opportunity to make change than the one in front of us over the next four years.

In the coming years, we will continue to use our voice to shape the debate in Columbus and America on key issues. We also will continue to persuade Ohioans that our policies both for Ohio and America are the right policies and the only way to get those policies in place is to demand accountability in Columbus and Washington, D.C. With Donald Trump’s win, we must help craft the policy case for Ohioans on why Americans must support the policies of the Trump Administration and its efforts to make America great again.

How will we do that? By continuing to harness the power of our weekly radio segments and producing our common sense one-pagers that boil the issues down to the simplest level.

Though we continue to operate in a lean and mean way, it still requires funding to do all of the great work we get done. On a very tight budget of $250,000, we produce far more work in a year than competitors three-to-four times bigger and we get real results. We will continue to monitor the various metrics we use to gauge the impact we are having. From audience size and penetration to social media coverage, from policymaker engagement, feedback and action to productivity measures, we constantly strive to ensure the precious funds you provide us achieve the biggest bang possible.

Together, we can and will make a difference in the lives of millions of Ohioans, their businesses, and their families. The needle is moving, but it can be moved so much farther. We will use any tax-deductible, charitable support you send to grip that needle with both hands and push as hard as our strength allows. Thank you!

P.S. If you prefer to send us a check, you can do so to the following address: Opportunity Ohio, P.O. Box 98, Dublin, Ohio 43017. Again, thank you for any support you can provide us!!