Voters replaced Mansfield-born Brown (first elected to the Senate in 2006) with GOP challenger Bernie Moreno, a highly successful entrepreneur.
Issue 1 was defeated by its complexity but largely because of deceptive double-talk crow-barred into Issue 1′s ballot wording by Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, of Upper Arlington, and two confederates. Ohio’s framework for drawing legislative and congressional districts, left in place by Issue 1′s defeat, is deliberately designed to favor one party (currently, the Republican Party) over an opposing party. It’s a Statehouse con. And it works.
Net result of Tuesday’s tallies: Whatever Democratic clout remains in Ohio is in the city halls of Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati. But mayors, rather than being Big Deals statewide, or even at the Statehouse, are realty housekeepers – collecting trash, plowing snow, filling potholes.
The election demonstrated that the Ohio Democratic Party, whose last good days seem to have been in the 1980s, during Cleveland Democrat Richard F. Celeste’s governorship, needs a top-to-bottom shakeup.
Except for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 Ohio presidential victories, Democrats have been slipping as a political force in Ohio since the disastrous 1994 gubernatorial candidacy of Tuscarawas County’s Rob Burch, who drew only 25% of the statewide vote against then-Gov. Voinovich.
On another front Tuesday, Ohio voters, joining Trump voters nationwide, positioned Sen. J.D. Vance, a Cincinnati Republican, age 40, to become Trump’s eventual successor. (When Trump, age 78, takes office, he’ll be the oldest person to have become president.) Vance’s promotion will stoke Ohio chit-chat over whom Republican Gov. Mike DeWine will name to Vance’s Senate seat.
Tuesday’s tallies benchmark the heady rise of Vance, who went from a blue-collar boyhood in Butler County’s Middletown to Yale law school, best-selling authorship, personal wealth, then the U.S. Senate. He’s been, and likely will remain, a Washington proxy for Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarian billionaires. Vance is also, as his campaign demonstrated, economical with the truth.
Democrats pried two Columbus-area Ohio House districts from Republicans, pruning the House’s GOP margin to 65-34. Big deal: Democrats’ last House majority was elected 16 years ago (53 Democrats to 46 Republicans) for 2009-10.
In Ohio’s Senate, GOP-run for 40 years (this session it has 26 Republicans to seven Democrats) will gain two Democrats: now-state Rep. Willis Blackshear Jr., a Dayton Democrat, won an open Senate district that includes much of Dayton. The district’s incumbent senator, Republican Niraj Antani, drawn into Democratic areas by GOP enemies, opted not to run again.
In theory, one check-and-balance on an out-of-control legislature is, or can be, Ohio’s Supreme Court, now 4-3 Republican. But to the likely delight of banks, insurance companies and electric utilities, voters unseated Greater Cleveland Democratic Justices Michael P. Donnelly and Melody J. Stewart, making the high court 6-1 Republican, with ex-Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner its lone Democrat.
Voters yearning to pull Ohio into the 21st century may think Tuesday’s outcome was just a bad dream, a blip, a one-time stumble. No: It’s reality. Until Ohio Democratic insiders understand that they’ve been seeing a state that no longer exists, its industrial-union heartland since hollowed out by one-sided trade deals, nothing will change in Ohio politics. Nothing.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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