Every Circus Comes to an End
There isn't much to feel good about other than four Republican Senate hopefuls going down in flames. It's another primary election in Ohio, baby. So nice we'll do it twice.
Congratulations, by opening this email you are in the roughly 25% of Ohio voters that knows today is the first of two primary elections to be held in the next five months.
Today’s election covers statewide, Congressional, and local races. The second primary—expected in August but not yet set in stone—will feature state legislative races that about approximately 8% of voters will care about.
Gotta hand it to the Republicans on this one. Their willingness to sew chaos into the election system through the redistricting process to protect their unchecked power worked as well as they drew it up on the subterranean cave.
The Republican Senate primary — featuring five serious gremlins vying for a chance to try their hand at insider trading — has been great content despite being deeply embarrassing for our state.
Some lowlights, in no particular order, and not including the Mandel rally The Rooster attended Saturday:
Josh Mandel invoking Martin Luther King Jr. while cutting an ad at the Selma Bridge. He then mansplained MLK’s views to his daughter and somehow didn’t burst into flames.
JD Vance refusing to “throw his friend under the bus” after Rep. Marjorie-Taylor Greene spoke at a Neo-Nazi conference. “She did nothing wrong.”
Mandel claiming that Andrew Jackson would be something called a “Bitcoin Maximalist.”
Bob Gibbons saying he thinks the middle class are freeloaders.
After Vance pitching $10,000 donations to his campaign to have dinner with him and his oligarch sugar daddy Peter Thiel, only for Mandel to respond that for $10.80, you could eat gas station Denny’s fries off the hood of his car in a parking lot at midnight in Berkshire. (This will go down as the only time in history Mandel was legitimately funny.)
Mandel accused by former staffers of producing a “toxic work environment” that featured shouting matches with his girlfriend who moonlights as his campaign finance manager.
Jane Timken claiming her opponents had small dicks in an ad.
Donald Trump, days after endorsing Vance, calling him “J.P. Mandel” at another rally.
Vance’s first-year law roommate outing him for confessing to wondering if Donald Trump was “America’s Hitler” in 2016.
Mandel, with the full intention of getting banned, tweeted a poll asking: “Of the various illegals flooding across the border, which will be responsible for more crimes? Muslim terrorists or Mexican gang bangers?”
Bernie Moreno shitting on White Castle, a family-owned corporation based in Columbus, before bowing out of the race as soon as Trump asked.
Mandel praising a server at a Toledo brewery for coming into work sick, setting off a social media storm that led to the brewery apologizing for letting a sick woman handle people’s drinks and food.
Vance opening an ad with the line, “Are you racist? Do you hate Mexicans?”
Gibbons and Mandel getting in each other’s faces at a debate like two frat bros gone off six Bud Lights, with Gibbons calling Mandel “a pussy.”
Vance calling a New York Times columnist “one of the many weird cat ladies who have too much power in this country.” This kicked off a weeks long feud with “weird cat ladies.”
Multiple reports of Trump calling Mandel an uncharismatic weirdo while also making several jokes about his “fucking gross penis.”
Vance campaigning with Rep. Matt Gaetz, a man currently under federal investigation for sex trafficking a minor.
Here is the only poll worth considering, from the firm that accurately called the last two presidential elections in Ohio:
The only result that would surprise me among the five serious candidates would be a win by Jane Timken. She must rue the day she didn’t throw Rep. Anthony Gonzalez under the bus when he voted to impeach Trump. (If only she had read the March 21st, 2021 dispatch of The Rooster.)
The wild card in the race is how much money has been spent trying to bamboozle voters. There are going to be thousands of Republican voters that will walk into the booth today with no idea how they’re going to vote.
From Karen Kasler of wosu.org:
The money being spent on ads in just the Republican US Senate primary in Ohio is record breaking: nearly $65.7 million.
“This is at least three to four times as much as it's ever been spent on a Republican statewide primary ever. So in Ohio context, it's historical," Everhart said. He expects the total by November to top $150 million.
Powerful interests would not spend this kind of money for a 20% chance to win a Senate seat if “politics doesn’t matter” as so many of our countrymen have been beaten into thinking.
Trump, for his part, is already hedging his bet in case his preferred candidate, the hillbilly cosplayer, loses despite having Trump’s famously “complete and total” endorsement:
Anybody but Mandel. That’s all The Rooster can say at this point.
WHAT ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS?
Oh Jesus. Is there any point in discussing the Democratic primaries? Probably not, but we will anyway.
Former Dayton mayor Nan Whaley is endorsed by The Rooster for governor. We’re not particularly inspired by her “wages up, bills down” ethos because we fail to see how a Democratic governor could do any of that in the face of Republican supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature.
Still, she’s better than former Cincinnati mayor John Cranley, your typical big city real estate concubine that loves fracking almost as much as he hates bike lanes. Neither of them will beat DeWine in November, but we’re with Nan until then.
As for Senate, The Rooster endorses Morgan Harper, despite her having zero chance of winning the primary and her weirdly embracing crypto bro culture while claiming to care about climate change. Primaries are where intra-party discussions like this are supposed to happen, and the careerists who mock her for trying are pathetic.
But Tim Ryan, my God. The Rooster has never hidden that he’s found Ryan to be about as aspiring as a loaf of Wonder Bread in a clearance aisle. Such is life in Ohio.
The Rooster also understands that you must go to war with the electorate you have, not the electorate you wish you had. The Rooster also recognizes that our personal views would be categorized as “far left” and do not represent anything close to the majority views of Ohioans.
But Ryan is red-baiting China and talking about how in 15 years “we could all be speaking Mandarin” while cutting new ads talking about how we need more police, not less police. (Not sure how nobody noticed the correct grammar would be fewer police, but probably not my place to critique somebody else’s shoddy syntax.)
Ryan also made sure to stress that he’s not the guy for “culture war stuff” which I’m sure is a line that came right out of some consultant’s lizard brain. I get the sentiment, but here’s the thing—”culture wars” are about protecting marginalized populations from bad-faith attacks from powerful politicians. The culture wars can easily be won if the Democrats were ever willing to fight.
Look at Roe vs. Wade, which will be overturned in the coming weeks. Tim Ryan spent half his career opposing abortion. Democrats refused to fight on the Hyde Amendment or even codify Roe vs. Wade into law. Why? “Because Republicans don’t actually want to ban abortion because then they’ll lose it as an issue.” Like those freaks won’t immediately set their sights on birth control or anything else to gain leverage over pregnant women.
Ryan is going to debase himself chasing Ohio’s conservative voters by saying “he’s not like those other Democrats.” The Republicans are going drop $100 million on his head for control of the Senate and paint him as a baby-killing Communist who served in sexual tv thrall to Nancy Pelosi and has never actually had a real job. He’s going to lose by 12 points and slither into lobbying to pay off all his substantial personal debts.
….
Make sure to vote today, friends! Democracy is clearly alive and well in this country and it’s moving us in the right direction. But don’t let Ryan fool you, teaching your child Mandarin would be one of the best things you could give them as a skill needed to compete in the “global economy of tomorrow.”
That fight between China and the USA is already over. We lost. But unfortunately Ryan won’t be the last Democrat to debase themselves pretending otherwise.
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