The Last Stand with Nan
The Last Stand with Nan
There's one clear choice in a Democratic Gubernatorial Primary featuring two Western Ohio mayors.
Dayton mayor Nan Whaley announced in January that she wouldn’t seek re-election. As a successful mayor who increased her profile in the wake of the tragic Dayton massacre, nobody expected Whaley to walk quietly into the night.
When Senator Rob Portman announced his retirement, the question became if Whaley would run for Senate or try to take on Governor Mike DeWine. We got our answer yesterday when Whaley announced her gubernatorial campaign (that all but clears the way for Tim Ryan to challenge whatever Trump acolyte emerges in the Republican Senate campaign).
I’m not a Nan Stan. Though she has my vote, I find her politics tepid. She is, however, the best chance Ohio Democrats have in unseating Mike DeWine.
Though a sitting Republican governor losing a primary would be unprecedented, DeWine could face a brutal challenge from former Congressman Jim Renacci, one of the few politicos in Ohio with the connections and personal fortune to challenge DeWine. There is a significant amount of Republicans that laughably think DeWine was too restrictive in the way he handled the coronavirus.
Whether DeWine’s ouster comes to fruition or not, expect Republican voters to coalesce around the winner in the name of owning the big-city communists, which Whaley is not but will nonetheless be painted as.
If we’re going to lose to DeWine or Renacci, and the oddsmakers undoubtedly say we will, I would much rather go down fighting with Whaley than her potential primary opponent, Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley.
Cranley has raised $800,000 while exploring a run for mayor and said he would announce his candidacy this summer which to me means he has announced his candidacy anyway but whatever.
Here is the case from Cranley’s hometown Republican opinion columnist who no doubt enjoys cozy access to a Democratic City Hall, the odious Jason Williams of cincinnati.com, who called Cranley “a skilled politician.”
Democrats continue to lose statewide elections, in part, because they focus too much on issues that average voters don't care about (i.e. identity politics). Cranley hopes his pragmatic, pro-working class message will overshadow far-left talking points and resonate with primary voters who may be tired of losing.
"When it is time to get into the governor’s race, I’m confident that Democratic voters are going to be focused on the best candidate to beat the Republicans," Cranley said. "The state has not kept economic pace with the rest of the country."
Make no mistake, Cranley is talented in so far he has been able to arise through a corrupt local machine that has seen three city council members indicted by the FBI in the last year. Only somebody naive about Queen City politics would think he did that walking the straight and narrow.
Williams ties Democrats’ struggles to “identity politics,” which is hilarious considering Richard Cordray, the Democrats’ anointed son and last gubernatorial candidate, was as white as a jar of mayonnaise in a snowstorm and lost to DeWine by four points in the 2018 midterm elections. It’s also telling that Williams only listed a race-based complaint as the only example in the apparently long list of Democrats focusing on “issues that average voters don’t care about.”
Cranley’s big “pro-working class message” seems to center around fracking, something that never lead to the boom in jobs, population or income that gas company executives promised and ruined the environment and gave earthquakes to Southeastern Ohio.
There is no point making Whaley spend valuable resources in vanquishing this whore of real estate who has a corruption problem of his own in an election where Democrats will try to put Republican corruption on stage. He chose to use his office to help local real estate barons, and now he must live with the consequences of being an unappealing statewide candidate like the other mayors in Ohio’s two other metropolitan cities.
Whaley will already have a hard road to hoe in the General Election when faced with an electorate that primarily relies on national outlets for political news, as noted in this excellent article by Dante Chinni of wsj.com on Ohio’s shifting demographics:
Jerry Miller, one of the three Republican commissioners in Pike, said a partisan atmosphere that has deepened as people rely on national news media has reshaped politics in the GOP’s favor. He said he has felt the shift in his own campaigning.
“This last election, I would knock on doors and introduce myself, and the first question, before I could finish, would be, ‘Are you a Democrat or a Republican?’ ” he recalled. “I would tell them I was a Republican, and they’d just say ‘Well, you’ve got my vote.’ ”
Even if Whaley is successful, it will be hard to feel good about her election for long. I could see the Ohio Legislature moving immediately to curtail as many of her powers as possible before she takes power. And considering the GOP has supermajorities in both chambers of the Statehouse and a majority on the Supreme Court, they would relish in legislating their reactionary agenda without the governor’s signature.
But if Ohio is ever going to reclaim its “battleground state” status (that only really existed in presidential years), then that thousand-mile journey would need to start in 2022.
If the Dems get swept in all five statewide races and for the Senate, then you might as well accept that you live in Alabama with shittier weather.
THOSE WMDs. The history of deputy gangs within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department… My relationship with performance has changed… The secret to better home fries is cooking them like the French do… What to say when somebody is gaslighting you… How I tricked myself into liking running.