The insider's case against Jesse Vogel

Why are Columbus' most powerful people working to stop an affable immigration attorney from being one vote on a nine-member council?

The Monday dispatch will be the July Mailbag.

You can submit questions anonymously through Jotform.

An eclectic mix of subjects is what makes the mailbags one of the consistently most-trafficked blogs per month. No question is too bizarre!

(And yes, we will talk about literally anything else other than the Columbus District 7 race next week. That’s my oath.)

Thank you for your attention to this matter. Now, let’s get on with the show.

As you might have surmised from my tenor over the past two blogs, I believe the Franklin County Democratic Party goofed in its shotgun endorsement of Tiara Ross in a meeting with no recorded video or permanent record of individual votes.

Putting the candidates aside for a moment, I think it’s a slap in the face to Jesse Vogel’s volunteers and 15,806 people who voted for him. That somehow, their efforts were illegitimate.

The insiders who endorsed Ross love to say that “the voters have the final say,” but that ignores the power of the sample ballot that gets shoved into well-intentioned voters’ hands when they walk into their precincts in November.

It’s why then-City Councilwoman Shayla Favor worked so hard to block the endorsement of Anthony Pierson in last year’s County Prosecutor race, and why elected city Democrats went nuclear when Pierson’s campaign handed out blue pieces of cardboard anyway:

It’s almost as if their campaign gremlins have learned the power of the sample ballot in inevtably low turnout elections that are themselves an indictment of the party’s ability to animate voters outside the city’s employ.

But the party’s endorsement of Ross goes beyond the message to Vogel’s camp and supporters: It’s a message to anyone thinking about running for office in Columbus.

That no matter how hard you work, no matter how much money you raise, you will be deemed illegitimate because you failed to get permission from the appropriate “stakeholders” to be trusted with the “pathways of implementation to public policy.”

It’s probably why, in a city of a million people, not a single soul challenged the two incumbent council members currently running for election. But hey, that’s a boon for councilman Rob Dorans, who can continue underwriting Ross’s campaign to no potential consequence despite every precinct in District 5 voting for Vogel in the May election.

Dorans’ move, which would be lambasted by the usual suspects as sickenly anti-democratic if it came from a Republican, is an inevitable downwind effect of the “ward in name only” system, which city leaders designed to stifle the debate that comes with honest campaigns.

And now we have proof that, even if a unicorn candidate like Vogel appears, the Franklin County Democratic Party will call a perverts’ summit as we saw on Tuesday night for a smash-and-grab endorsement that left insiders walking out with the smug satisfaction usually ascribed to David, not Goliath.

But what is it about Vogel that party leaders find so repulsive? It’s not like “he threatens my job security” is a winning campaign message to the average voter. So what do they tell themselves behind the scenes?

Thankfully, we now know thanks to an email to the Executive Committee from Sarah Cherry, a former Ohio House Democratic Caucus attorney who is currently awaiting the outcome of a legal complaint against former House Minority Leader Allison Russo (D-Upper Arlington) for gender discrimination and retaliation before an inevitable lawsuit.

You can view the email in its entirety before we examine some of her points.

I don’t do this to pick on Ms. Cherry, which, as a token of my good faith and respect for her, I let her know this blog was coming yesterday.

I’m only using it as an example since it's a well-written and succinct synthesis of the insider talking points against Vogel that are being used behind the scenes.

First, Columbus voters have repeatedly rejected a ward system. Our at-large district system is about decentralizing where Councilmembers live so every neighborhood has a champion, but our candidates run in and represent the whole city. Some are pushing a new standard that every Councilmember should be top-vote-getter in that district’s precincts. As a voting rights attorney, let me say: that is dangerous given Columbus’s voting patterns and especially District 7’s legacy of a redlined past and gentrified present. The city’s district maps were not designed to translate into demographics that reflect the whole city. Applying that standard would leave us with less fair representation than exists now. Tiara did win most under-served parts of District 7. Born and raised there, worshipping there her whole life, addressing quality of life issues there for nearly a decade–Tiara is ready to be District 7’s champion.

Do district borders matter or do they not? Vogel didn’t design them. City leaders did.

And Vogel won District 7 by 18 points. If the racial dynamics were reversed and we got the same result in November—Vogel winning the district by double digits but Ross winning the council seat thanks to the city at large—that would open the city to a slam-dunk federal civil rights lawsuit.

And Vogel might still have a case as honkey. But that’s a topic for another blog.

As for moving the goalposts to the underserved neighborhoods within District 7… “underserved” by whom? The answer is the city and county governments; the same apparatuses that has endorsed Ross from the top down.

If it had been an avalanche of poor people at the polls rallying around Ross, I might listen. But only seven percent of voters bothered to vote, which, again, is a reflection of the party, not Vogel.

Second, the party should support those leaders in the general election who want to build the party. Tiara is that leader. Some who prefer no endorsement have raised the push for neutrality in the prosecutor primary race last spring, without noting key differences between that race and this one. To put it simply, this is the general election. As I understand it, Mr. Vogel is already endorsed by a party that will likely devote considerable resources to him: the Working Families Party. (No offense to that group, but I’m already a member of a working families party: the Democratic Party.)

The Working Families Party is a subset of the Democratic Party. And maybe if we had Ranked Choice Voting, we could draw those kinds of distictions. But unfortunately, State Senator Bill DeMora (D-Columbus), a ranking general within the FCDP, is working with State Senator Theresa Gavarone (R-Hell) to ban that practice throughout the state.

Is Vogel raising $150,000 (and counting), knocking on 10,000 Democratic doors, and marshaling a small volunteer army not the literal definition of building the party? Because, from my vantage point, that only looks like a foreign concept to people who are not accustomed to having to campaign for power.

Mr. Vogel, so far during his time in Columbus, has primarily worked against the Democratic leaders this party has backed. He supported Joyce Beatty’s opponent. He started a PAC that donated to Hearcel Craig's opponent. He also protested Sherrod Brown last year. These things concern me greatly. Campaign finance filings paint the same picture. Most of Mr. Vogel’s funding comes from out-of-state networks more interested in national litmus tests than in us here in Columbus. Troublingly, he also accepted campaign contributions from individuals in the DeWine administration connected to the HB 6 scandal. At the same time, Mr. Vogel brands himself as separate from Democrats, labeling us “the establishment” and calling Democrats “cowards” on social media. That rubs me the wrong way.

I think the worships of “electeds” is a horrible look for the Democratic Party. Like, if your job depends on those electeds—fine, whatever. But don’t expect the rest of us to worship politicians.

The seats of power do not belong to the individual, no matter how much you like them. They belong to the people.

It’s fine to support a Democratic challenger to Congresswoman Beatty. We live in a democracy where you have an enshrined right to do that.

It’s fine to protest Sherrod Brown for his cowardice on Gaza and Haitian immigrants in Springfield. He is not a God who walks amongst us to anyone outside his own mind.

As for the money raised outside Columbus, well, what is Vogel supposed to do?

Any elected official in Columbus could cut Ross a $50,000 check today, if that’s something they wanted to do and their campaign coffers could cover it. Corporations and unions with business in front of the city know where their bread is buttered; they’re not going to interrupt the gravy train by donating to Vogel.

If that’s not the actions of the “establishment,” then words no longer have meaning. Just because it’s not flattering doesn’t make it any less true.

If this criticism were actually about money from regular Columbus residents (which it’s not), it should be written in stone that Vogel earned more donors and more money by that metric, too. Somehow, that part never gets mentioned, though.

As for the HB-6 knock, there’s a reason why the insiders never specify the amount, which is $250 from two peripheral figures in the HB-6 scandal. As I have written before, I would have donated the money if I were Vogel, but I’m not.

And if it were honestly about “taking money from HB-6 figures,” then they’d have to seriously ponder what that means for our most beautiful labor unions.

Vogel is merely playing by the rules as designed by our city leaders. If they don’t like it, then I challenge them to enact a public campaign finance model at the earliest opportunity.

But they won’t, because that would undercut the power of their swollen purses that are lined by wealthy interests with business in front of the city.

While Mr. Vogel does admirable work as a new attorney, I would like to see him establish himself further in the community and work more with the party than against it.

Establish himself more than Ross, who, as a matter of fact, lived in Reynoldsburg for her entire adult life, never voted in a city election until she could vote for herself, and only moved into Columbus a day before the legal deadline required to run for office?

As she has pointed out, she commuted a grueling 19 miles in a climate-controlled SUV to Columbus five days a week for her job, which is usually the normal expectation of having a high-paying job for anyone that’s not an aspiring politician.

Instead of twisting themselves into knots trying to paint incumbent politicians as unimpeachable Gods or pretending that their candidate “took on slum lords” out of the charity of her heart and not a $145,000 salary, the insiders should be honest about what actually irks them about Vogel.

It’s that he’s not beholden to any of them.

He didn’t ask for their permission to run for office. He just went out and did it, and he’s proven quite effective at it, despite his opponent having every institutional advantage baked into her campaign.

He didn’t do what you’re supposed to do in this city, which is carry water for machine politicians in anonymity for years in hopes of climbing the political ladder in exchange for keeping any criticisms of the party to yourself and maybe a group chat of your closest friends.

In that environment, it probably is appalling to see somebody having the audacity to protest a United States Senator over their support of an ongoing genocide to which he provided material aid through several key votes.

Through that lens, why wouldn’t they resent the freedom that Vogel has, after they chose to shackle themselves inside a political prison that can’t even effectively turn out voters in an election of more consequence than some pissant city council race?

And hell, that’s only if their most faithful stooges are allowed to shove blue pieces of cardboard into voters’ hands as they stumble into the polls to vote for God knows what.

The fate of the Democratic Party in America doesn’t hinge on the result of thre Columbus City Council District 7 race. Not by a longshot.

However, it offers a searing microcosm into what ails this party on the local and national elvel and helps explain the lackluster turnout and rightward shift in the 2024 election in Columbus and America at large.

The Franklin County Democratic Party shouldn’t run scared from honest campaigns or act like publicly criticizing public officials is somehow beyond the pale.

As Council President Hardin so eloquently stated: Those dirty tricks are straight out of the Republican playbook. And my mind reels when thinking about anything more sinister than that.

THOSE WMDs. Martin Van Buren is responsible for OK… A push for more organ transplants is putting donors at risk… Laura Loomer and Jewish MAGA’s dance with the devil… Your brain on revenge is a lot like your brain on drugs… The $4 million girlfriend experience.