The Future of Ohio Democrats
The Future of Ohio Democrats
Turns out David Pepper has some shame after all. What now?
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Last month, I wrote a subscribers-only article that asked simply, has [Ohio Democratic Party Chairman] Pepper resigned yet?
Even though a Republican operative couldn’t have done a better job leading the Democrats than Pepper did during his reign, I do not think he is an evil man.
In fact, I believe him to be a decent, albeit weird, guy who enjoys painting sunsets over bodies of water and selling Russiagate novels to liberal Baby Boomers on Amazon.
It’s not like he inherited a gold mine and spent the fortune into the ground. The party was admittedly in shambles when he took over after the disastrous 2014 midterm election that saw Democrats wiped from the map.
The problem is there is nothing to show other than some non-partisan Supreme Court wins. Meanwhile, we were reading shit like this from Seth A. Richardson of cleveland.com in January 2019:
The sources detailed numerous accounts of the state party not being able to keep track of money. In one instance, a box was found in a closet at ODP headquarters in Columbus with $25,000 in checks that had not been deposited, sources said.
Another time, a box with more than 20 cell phones was discovered. None of the cell phones were in use and nobody was assigned the phones, but ODP was paying the bills to keep the lines active, sources said.
Campaigns also had to regularly battle with the party to receive financial support for specific programs from the state candidate fund - a pool of money overseen by the party.
Showing their masochistic nature, the Democrats retained Peppers’ services after his “Dream Ticket” got dumped in statewide elections in 2018.
Thankfully, Pepper either had enough shame or someone on the Executive Committee made clear to him that he wouldn’t be coming back for another rodeo next year.
Yesterday, Pepper issued his resignation, effective at the end of the year.
My favorite part is Pepper saying to chalk “whatever criticisms there may be” about the Dems’ performance during his tenure up to him, the man with a $99,000 salary. Like, who else would we blame?
Pepper also boasted about gaining “new footholds in rural areas,” which made me want to chuck my laptop into the path of a COTA bus on Sullivant Avenue before I remembered that stupid keyboard is responsible for my livelihood.
That was my first inclination because this has actually been one of my pet issues since running for Statehouse in 2018.
I remember right after I declared myself for the Kamikaze mission, I sat-in on an Ohio Democratic Party “Talkers” conference call. It was basically a venue for Statehouse candidates to springboard ideas off of each other and party organizers that I ruled a waste of time after my first and only time calling in.
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As literally the last House candidate to get into the race, I asked the leader of the call if the party had any active programs trying to connect to rural Ohio.
I had surmised that while I was likely doomed, the party itself couldn’t depend on Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Toledo and Dayton to deliver the statewide vote. We would need votes in rural areas of the state to achieve victory, and it ain’t like I grew up on a farmstead raising cattle or harvesting corn.
“That’s a good question,” the woman replied. “As a candidate, do you have anything that you have found to work?”
The query stunned me. I was simply the dipshit they found on the street who was eager enough for a suicide mission. I thought I was talking to an ostensible professional with a history of winning elections.
Needless to say, Democratic candidates much more qualified than me took a beating in rural America just like I did.
Ohio Democrats could be in a similar situation as Virginia, Arizona or Georgia Republicans. The changing demographics of their states do not bode well for their future.
Maybe the Ohio Democratic Party is condemned to running corrupt candidates in places like Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. But we can either throw in the towel or fight our way out of this hole.
Personally, I’ve always been about that action.
I hope the Executive Committee selects a new chairman that comes from a union organizing background. Somebody that knows how to talk to people who aren’t donors to the party. Somebody who doesn’t come from generational money and attended Yale Law School. Somebody who has a proven track record of winning a damn election.
However, if any candidate besides Sherrod Brown is ever going to win another statewide election, we need somebody who can figure out what the Hell is going on in rural Ohio.
Democrats will never win rural Ohio outright. The Republican-controlled subsidies to farmers have all but ensured that. But we can’t keep absorbing 70% to 30% (sometimes up to 90% to 10%) losses across the board.
Barack Obama understood that to win Ohio, you need to put boots on the ground in rural areas. Sure, you won’t win rural counties outright, but if you keep the margins somewhat respectable, those extra percentage points can pay dividends down the road.
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden did not do that work, and they both got waxed by a demented gameshow host.
The urban-rural divide is not unique to Ohio, or even America. (Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Divide is a book that goes into this topic in great detail for those interested.) But due to our demographics, we are going to have to quell the bloodbath in rural areas if we’re ever going to have a shot at winning.
Obviously, if I had the answers to that conundrum, I’d be in the Statehouse trying to pass Right-to-Repair or rural broadband legislation and not clacking my fingers on a 2015 Macbook Pro. But I don’t believe relating to rural Americans to be akin to decoding ancient hieroglyphics.
From Wisconsin dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd, a Democrat with a PhD. in rural sociology:
“As the companies become bigger and more consolidated it limits our ability to negotiate in the marketplace,” Lloyd explains, “which shows up in higher prices for our inputs”—seed, feed, fertilizer, tractor equipment, and so on. “It’s squeezing producers on all sides and making it difficult to stay afloat. We’re like little ants compared to these companies.” The GOP has not adequately addressed the issue either, she says, leaving an opening for Democrats. “Rural voters are like, ‘Give us something we can work with here.’”
It’s going to take the right people to cut through Republican messaging around what I dubbed the Triple B’s: Babies, Bullets and Bibles.
Democrats can’t treat rural voters like they do Black churches, only showing up every four years to ask for their vote. They need to do the work now in identifying (ideally) young leaders within rural areas that have already earned the trust of their communities.
“Democratic officials on the Democratic side need to go to places like Mansfield and Manchester and other smaller communities, most of whom have lost so much in the past 30 years and show the Democrats have the plan for them,” Pepper said yesterday.
Do they have a plan? I follow state politics more than 90% of Ohioans and even I am flummoxed by this idea that Democrats have a plan other than pretending the halcyon day of American manufacturing is going to return to our shores.
I’ve lived in rural Ohio. Its schools are old. Its infrastructure is crumbling. It lacks adequate “access” to healthcare and its hospitals are being slammed by the COVID-19 surge. To me, rural Ohio needs big government because it ain’t like the capitalists have done them any favors over the last 30 years.
But people like me can’t just appear in rural Ohio and tell that message to lifelong residents who are already skeptical of government.
It needs to be somebody that was raised within their communities, and I hope the next chairman of the party has the talent to go find the leaders of tomorrow in rural America. Because while we might have lost the Baby Boomers to Fox News and Facebook, there are young minds in the sticks who simply need somebody to put a sword in their hand in order to change their section of the world.
If we can’t even do that, then we deserve to be like Kentucky Democrats who are relegated to the urban centers of the states.
THOSE WMDs. GM’s closure of Lordstown, Ohio plant spawns generation of migrant workers…McKinsey proposed paying pharmacy companies rebates for OxyContin overdoses… What Facebook fed the Baby Boomers… Deep frozen Arctic microbes are waking up… Did Hiroshima save Japan from Soviet occupation?