Danny O'Connor Chooses the Grift
Danny O'Connor Chooses the Grift
Republicans aren't the only ones willing to lie to their voters.
Franklin County Recorder Danny O’Connor will have been on the ballot 10 times in the last six years when he runs for Congress this year in a district that has yet to be created.
This will be his third attempt at becoming a Congressman since he lost twice to used car salesman Troy Balderson in a special and general election in 2018. Apparently it’s a lot harder to win an election that requires more than the ordainment of the Franklin County Democratic political machine.
Danny, like a lot of mediocre white men (and I say that as one myself), feels it’s his birthright to be in Congress, which must be why he’s running in a district that hasn’t been drawn yet with redistricting looming after Ohio lost a Congressional seat due to 2020 census date.
Danny decided to take advantage of the unknown by raising the specter of him running against the odious Jim Jordan:
Ignoring the fact that Danny O’Connor’s daughter has never lived in a country where Jim Jordan isn’t a Congressional representative, his tweet earned major juice with 7,328 Retweets and 22,435 Likes.
Not bad considering the metrics of his previous five tweets:
One Retweet, 15 Likes
14 Retweets, 103 Likes
22 Retweets, 22 Likes
One Retweet, 15 Likes
Two Retweets, 11 Likes
Danny doubled down on the notion a little under 24 hours later by throwing a link to his fundraising page (something that probably should have been done much sooner):
Here is a small sampling of some of the reactions to his tweet. Please note none of these people seem to know anything about Ohio politics, even if they live here:
I had a hunch that O’Connor’s tweet was dubious considering it appealed to people who think “Gym Jordan” is some sort of zinger, but I decided to talk to a professional about redistricting and the nature O’Connor’s tweet.
Enter Katy Shanahan, the State Director in Ohio of anti-gerrymandering groups All On The Line and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. (Be sure to follow all three on Twitter by clicking the links on their names.)
I guess my first question would be, for the readers, how will Republicans circumvent Ohio’s new fair district requirements to maximize their leverage and what do you expect that map to look like?
Lol great first question! This will be harder for the state legislative maps than for the congressional maps because the state legislative maps not only ban partisan gerrymandering, they also require representational fairness (meaning the seat share the R’s and D’s are likely to occupy has to closely correlate with the vote share they’ve received during recent elections).
Across the decade, the R/D vote share has been 55/45, so the seat share should match that.
Unfortunately the rules aren’t as strict for the Congressional maps *unless* you force it to the final step of the process where R’s pass a four-year partisan map with just a simple legislative majority (and no real bipartisan support).
It’s only in that four-year step that we see a ban on Congressional partisan gerrymandering and stricter rules against cracking apart communities.
Still, the rules in the first three steps of the congressional process will help guard against the worst forms of gerrymandering. All of Cincinnati and Cleveland have to be contained in their entirety within new districts, for example. The districts have to be compact.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for gerrymandering. Toledo, Akron, and Dayton, for example, have no protections against being cracked apart. So you could still keep those split up, sinking those cities’ votes and denying them representation. You could draw the Columbus-anchored district and then crack apart the rest of the county into a surrounding rural seat.
I assume this means Tim Ryan (D-Youngstown) saw the writing on the wall and decided to run for Senate. Does this mean Marcy Kaptur (D-Toledo) is on notice too?
Tim definitely did, not sure about Kaptur. We’ll be pushing for her district to effectively be a lake region district — it shouldn’t go into Cuyahoga County at all, but could just go wider along the lake and include all of Lucas, Ottawa, and most of Lorain counties. Now whether R’s agree to that is another story.
For them, if they draw a Cincinnati-anchored seat that covers most of Hamilton County (sorry Rep. Steve Chabot!). That eases a lot of pressure from the rest of the map to figure out where the 16th district goes. You mostly just shift around the districts to follow new rules and account for population changes and then you’re done. But of course the Republicans will try to maintain as close to status quo as possible
Given Republican desire to maintain the status quo, can you explain to readers what makes Danny O’Connor’s fundraising tweet so egregious? There is 0% chance Franklin County gets drawn into Jordan’s district, right?
His tweet is problematic for a couple reasons:
Our new rules require congressional districts to be compact. There’s no argument that Jordan’s district would be compact if it came even further into Franklin County than it already does.
Jordan’s district will likely be more centralized in western/NW rural Ohio - not coming into Franklin,
Our districts haven’t been drawn yet, so anyone announcing candidacy and then opining on what the lines might look like (particularly given 1 and 2) is an insult to everyone who worked to get our reforms passed and who’s working now to get fair maps based on what the people and our communities want and need and not based on what politicians want.
O’Connor isn’t a dumb guy even if he chooses to post pictures of him putting olives into his Busch Light. He knows there is no chance he will face Jordan. But he chose to lie to people who don’t know the difference for cheap Twitter engagement and a small windfall in fundraising courtesy of #Resistance liberals are too naive to see they’ve been snookered out of their money.
Oh, and he spit in the face of professionals who are doing the hard work trying to ensure the Republicans don’t ratfuck our state in the worst possible way like they have for the last decade. Awesome!
I’m no guru when it comes to winning Congressional races, but you know what? Neither is O’Connor. So I don’t feel bad when I say that lying to supporters as a way of raising money isn’t a way to build a campaign that inspires people. It’s gross and the opposite of leadership. If this is the kind of stunt he’s pulling with two and a half months before the election, it doesn’t bode well for him when the cards are on the table.
If this guy is the best Democrats can muster — well, at least he already has experience writing concession speeches because we already know how this porno will end. And when the inevitable happens, hopefully we never have to hear from this bozo ever again.
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