Dr. Acton's two biggest pulled punches, explained
Amy Acton won't be bludgeoning the Republicans over data centers or Leslie Wexner anytime soon.
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If Southwest Ohio Republicans have their way, the state’s hog voters will have a chance to ban data centers via a constitutional amendment in November.
The days of a Democrat winning with a coalition of multiple rural counties are over for the foreseeable future. But while a Democrat won’t win Miami or Marion counties this year, it’s important for the party not to get beaten by 50 points in all of those counties.
Barack Obama understood the assignment and reaped the rewards.
But Obama was aided by a robust turnout in Cleveland, which has since seen declining numbers, a trend likely to continue in this cycle.
That makes the Democratic margin game in rural Ohio that much more important, especially in a year when the Republicans will either have a bizarre jet-setting billionaire or a YouTube Nazi atop their ticket.
Other than the fool’s errand of eliminating property taxes, there is no better issue animating rural voters than the ongoing corporate colonization of data centers.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., all use shadowy LLCs to purchase farmland as stealthily as possible to evade scrutiny from residents for as long as possible.
No supporter of data centers—private politician or Facebook troll—would ever voluntarily live next to one. They’re loud, poison the local water table, heat the immediate area by more than 15 degrees, and almost assuredly be abandoned by the corporations at the earliest convenience, most likely as soon as their exorbitant tax breaks disappear.
Not to mention the colossal energy costs every Ohioan sees on their electric bill.
Unlike the coal plants, meat packing plants and factories of the 19th century that also brought noise and pollution, data centers do not offer the community-uplifting living wages (or union protections) that made those jobs something American politicians love to reminisce about even today.
Even the specter of a data center animates local politicians in formerly reliably Democratic areas like Lorain County.
From Hannah Drown of cleveland.com:
LORAIN, Ohio — When Lorain Councilwoman Mary Springowski fired off an email five years ago to Intel’s CEO urging the tech giant to consider her city for its next chip manufacturing plant, she had a vision of living-wage jobs and long-neglected industrial land getting a second shot.
What she did not envision, she says, is the controversial mega site that now sits at the center of a bitter dispute over farmland, development and the future of rural Lorain County.
“This was never what I had in mind,” she said in a recent interview. “My focus was always repurposing defunct industrial sites where the infrastructure already exists. I never wanted to impact rural areas.”
Lorain actually dodged a bullet by not landing the Intel deal, which, four years later, since Ohio’s Republican leadership soiled themselves while announcing the deal, is little more than an $800 million crater.
That money will never be recouped thanks to the contract signed by JobsOhio, the public-private “partnership” that, in reality, is an unaccountable slush fund of public money controlled by political lackeys.
Jobs Ohio, coincidentally, touts data centers at “creat[ing] positive economic momentum” in the state that brings unspecified “significant benefits to local communities.”
Last week, Amazon paid $20.5 milion to northeast Oregonians living “with contaminated ground water in exchange for no admission of guilt in polluting,” according to Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle.
The pollution is, in part, a byproduct of fertilizer-laden wastewater collected from industrial food processors and data centers at the port that is then sent out to area farms to be spread across fields.
[…]
The port’s wastewater, which a Capital Chronicle investigation found was overapplied in the winter for years, allowed excess nitrate to seep into groundwater that well-users in the area depend on. Many of those who rely on wells in the affected areas of Morrow and Umatilla counties are low-income and Latino. Overexposure to nitrates over time is harmful to infants and can lead to cancer and thyroid disease in people of all ages.
Amazon spokesperson Kylee Yonas, the company’s paid liar, said Amazon, which made $717 billion in 2025, paid the settlement to “avoid a lengthy legal battle.”
If I were advising the Acton campaign, which they will be the first to tell you that I am not, I’d want her to throw her arms around the potential of banning data centers through a constitutional amendment.
It’s clear, precise language that even the most partisan Republican can understand, and something that her likely opponent, conman Vivek Ramaswamy, an alleged billionaire, will be able to replicate in any meaningful manner.
Ramaswamy is a creature entirely enthralled by the corporate interests that Republican voters claim to hate, though maybe not more than the idea of a transgender teenager using the appropriate bathroom.
Instead, Dr. Acton’s campaign page for “reducing costs” breezes past the issue by “ensuring” that “consumers and other ratepayers” won’t shoulder “these added costs.”
Energy bills are also spiking for too many Ohioans. New data centers are causing bills to increase, and as Governor, I will ensure that Ohio consumers and other ratepayers are not the ones shouldering these added costs.
There’s nothing about the insane tax breaks pushed by the private-public “partnerships” that have an outsized influence on state and local government.
New data centers are treated as an inevitability. Compare that to Ramaswamy, who calls the “data center boom … good for our region.”
Dr. Acton cannot speak in the clear and concise terms that this issue requires, in large part due to her support from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers of Ohio (IBEW), which recently endorsed her:
Data centers are a modern-day gold rush for building trades unions, but especially electricians, plumbers and HVAC technicians.
From Nick Lichtenberg of fortune.com:
This bears a strong resemblance to what’s happening in the trades as of 2026, with electricians, plumbers and HVAC technicians commanding strong premiums, especially on data-center construction. Construction workers on data center projects currently earn an average of about $81,800 annually—roughly 32% more than those on non-data center builds.
[…]
Some electricians are pulling in $260,000 a year, with electrical work accounting for an estimated 45% to 70% of total data center construction costs. The U.S. will need roughly 300,000 new electricians over the next decade, in addition to replacing the 200,000 expected to retire.
The dirty secret is that these jobs require more labor than Ohio unions can provide, which means recruiting out-of-state union workers (usually from Southern states with fewer worker protections and lower wages) to plug the non-significant gap.
And we love that for our tradesmen, don’t we, folks?
But the problem is that building trades unions haven’t been a reliable member of the coalition.
Affiliated Construction Trades (AFT)—led by noted HB-6 prostitute Matt Szollozi—endorsed Ramaswamy earlier this year.
AFT joined their fellow tradesmen in the Northwest Ohio Building & Construction Trades Council, the Cleveland Building & Construction Trades Council, the Central Midwest Regional Council of Carpenters, the Ohio State Association of Plumbers & Pipefitters, and the Ohio Conference of Teamsters in endorsing Ramaswamy.
It’s fair to say that these union leaders were only following the will of their membership, but that in and of itself only speaks to the Republican problem that our most beautiful trade unions have.
Even the IBEW’s endorsement of Acton won’t prevent almost half of its rank-and-file membership from voting for a jet-setting billionaire to fix the problems created by 15 years of unchecked Republican rule of Ohio. That so many Republicans are infecting the rank-and-file speaks to the lack of political education that happens inside these unions.
Dr. Acton’s advisors are engaging in bad calculus and committing malpractice by not coming out swinging against the data centers.
But that pales in comparison to her failure to hang the odious Leslie Wexner on her opponent.
Longtime readers of The Rooster probably won’t have a hard time imagining how the Ohio Republican junta would react if an Ohio-based Democratic billionaire, who had given millions to candidates and causes over the years, had been exposed for also enabling the creation of a literal island of pedophilia fantasy.
But in a stroke of luck, the pedophile enabler is a longtime Ohio-based Republican thong and teenage anorexia magnate.
In the halycon days of 2025, Dr. Acton had no problem (correctly) blasting Ramaswamy for “protecting pedophiles” after previously campaigning to release the Epstein Files right until they implacated Donald Trump over 5,000 times.
But like Ramaswamy no longer caring about Epstein once Trump fell into the investigative crosshairs, Acton has pulled a similar stunt with Leslie Wexner’s involvement.
I agree with House Oversight Committee Democrats—sans Rep. Shontel Brown, who apparently had bigger fish to fry than Wexner under oath in New Albany—when they said Wexner was dishonest and outright deceitful during his testimony, laughably claiming that Epstein was never his friend.
It’s an issue that Republicans certainly don’t want to talk about, as evidenced by Senate President (and Ramaswamy running mate) Rob McColley hiding behind a fleet of henchmen while explaining he donated $5,000 in Wexner money to “a food bank” without an announcement.
The Rooster is still waiting to confirm that supposed donation in the next campaign finance report.
But again, it’s not hard to imagine how Republicans would respond if a Democrat caught in a similar situation donated that money to charity.
They would still blitz him with ads labeling the Democrat as a pedophile protector. It’s something that perennial Senate candidate Sherrod Brown understood, despite his daughter also having tens of thousands of dollars from Wexner World on her still-active Columbus-based campaign committee.
But Acton, who correctly stated that Ohio deserves a governor who won’t tolerate predatory behavior, hasn’t even uttered Wexner’s name.
It’s even more baffling after Congresswoman Joyce Beatty (D-Columbus), a longtime “friend” of Wexner’s, dumped his money via an Instagram post on Friday evening, roughly 12 hours after The Rooster excoriated her for her silence, which has continued unabated since then!
It’s hard to envision Acton changing course on Wexner, considering the sinecure she enjoyed with the Columbus Foundation after she (sensibly) quit the DeWine Administration at the height of the COVID pandemic.
From Ohio State’s Alumni Magazine in Nov. 2020:
Her new position as director of The Columbus Foundation’s Kind Columbus initiative dovetails perfectly with her continued advisory relationship with Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.
It’s unclear what Acton accomplished with the Kind Columbus initiative. One source close to her revealed that she showed up to work one day with “a couple of million dollars in a bank account” with no clear guidance on how that money should be spent.
Acton left the Columbus Foundation in Feb. 2021 to “consider” a Senate run, with her family ultimately talking her out of it due to concerns about how she would handle the pressure, a year removed from being treated as Hitler reincarnated throughout Republican political circles.
The Columbus Foundation is a subsidiary of the Columbus Partnership, which, according to Wexner’s own words, was founded by J.W. Wolfe to decide “who’s mayor” and “where the highways went” in Columbus.
Columbus Foundation President and CEO Doug F. Kridler sits on the “Board of Advisors” to the Columbus Partnership.
It’s another example of how Central Ohio’s Epstein problems run deeper than one obscenely rich, elderly pervert.
Dr. Acton cannot impugn Wexner without impugning the Columbus Partnership and the Columbus Foundation, the former of which still lists Wexner as a “Chairman Emeritus.”
But in Acton’s defense, it’s true that she has a shot as the kindly grandmotherly figure in contrast to a weird, alleged billionaire Hindu monotheist who can’t resist flying his private jet to far-flung places like Cleveland and Cincinnati.
Donald Trump gets more unpopular every day, something that’s sure to metastasize if he’s dumb enough to send ground troops into Iran, which he absolutely is.
But the Democratic Party has played it safe throughout my adult life. “When they go low, we go high,” as Michelle Obama once quipped to an avalanche of cheering.
We can see where the high road has led America and Ohio.
I would prefer that Dr. Acton’s campaign not suffer a similar fate.
Which Ohio Republican did TMZ fail to spot in Scotland?
I’ve heard from a handful of associates lately that “TMZ is stepping on [my] turf.”
To which I can only say, “Music to my ears.”
