And what kind of party will it be?
The Franklin County Democratic Party faces the national intra-party debate. Will it be business as usual or do these unprecedented times call for a new direction?
The Franklin County Democratic Party Executive Committee will meet on July 22 at 6 p.m. ET in the union hall of IBEW Local #683 in Grandview. The public is allowed to attend, and I encourage every Central Ohio patriot reading this humble dispatch to do so.
The crux of the meeting will be a problem facing the Democratic Party at large: In these unprecedented times, will local Democrats choose to operate as if it’s business as usual?
That is to say, will the local Democratic Party put its thumb on the scale for City Council District 7 candidate Tiara Ross? A bevy of local Democratic sources say there’s an insider push—led by City Council President Shannon Hardin—to do just that.
The argument goes that Ross earned the most votes of the three candidates in the May primary, which is true in that Ross managed to beat immigration attorney Jesse Vogel by 639 votes in an election with an eight-percent voter turnout.
However, that win becomes less impressive with every second spent researching the details behind the curtain.
For example, Ross lost District 7, the district she’s vying to represent after moving into it one day before the legal deadline, by 18 points.
Fifty-nine percent of voters pulled the lever for candidates who weren’t Ross despite her litany of endorsements from party brokers of past and present.
That number almost assuredly would have been higher, too, if three city council members and her boss, City Attorney Zach Klein, hadn’t used the city’s lax campaign finance laws to drop an eye-popping $60,000 into her coffers.
The machine politicians and their enablers, many of whom whose salaries depend on the uninterrupted status quo, have tried to make an issue about the amount of money Vogel has hauled from outside Columbus.
But as I have written before, Vogel is only playing in the system that Columbus Democrats rigged to prevent challengers from outside the insiders’ sandbox.
As State Senator and Franklin Democratic Party insider Bill DeMora admitted to The Rooster in March, Columbus has a ward system “in name only.”
Columbus’ electoral system has been intentionally designed to limit legitimate threats to the city council’s power. To successfully defeat an establishment candidate, you basically must be a celebrity or a prodigious fundraiser with a professional campaign apparatus, such as Vogel.
Meanwhile, establishment politicians can write checks in any amount that their campaign coffers can cover.
So you get things like Councilman Rob Dorans dropping a $20,000 donation to Ross to underwrite one of her city-wide mailers a couple of weeks before Vogel won every precinct in Dorans’ district.
Columbus’ electoral system, as currently construed, means that Dorans is insulated from any blowback in his district over that decision, even if he continues to underwrite Ross’ campaign into the fall. Dorans could lose District 5 in the next election and still retain his seat by winning the other eight alleged districts.
Would Vogel’s detractors in the establishment give him kudos if he hamstrung his political operation by limiting potential donors to those in Columbus, which, by the way, Vogel had the most of, too?
No. They would move to some other bad-faith critique, like painting him as a bomb-throwing “socialist we can’t afford” or something else equally laughable to try to hide their preferred candidate’s numerous inadequacies.
And so, with the storm brewing in November and anti-incumbent sentiment growing within the Democratic Party on a national scale, Ross’ party backers are looking to retreat to a time-tested tactic: Handing voters a piece of blue cardboard in the parking lot outside their precinct.
You can see the power of the Franklin County Democratic Party’s Official Sample Ballot in the photo above, from a Juneteenth parade on the East Side. It’s honestly hilarious that endorsed school board candidate Patrick Katzenmeyer, the husband of former Senator Sherrod Brown’s daughter, donned an “official sample ballot” shirt for a parade.
But don’t get lost in the absurdity of the shirt, because local politicians know the sample ballot’s power.
Then-Councilwoman Shayla Favor, an early supporter of Ross, revealed as much when her since-successful county prosecutorial campaign blocked the party’s endorsement of her chief challenger, then-Assistant Prosecutor Anthony Pierson in January 2024 (emphasis mine):
Anthony Pierson, deputy chief counsel for retiring Franklin County Prosecutor Gary Tyack; Columbus City Councilmember Shayla Favor and Delaware City Attorney Natalia Harris will have to earn votes the "old-fashioned way" — as Favor put it — without anyone appearing on the party's slate card that is distributed outside polls.
Apparently, city council doesn’t feel Ross should have to earn votes “the old-fashioned way,” despite their endorsements and multiple $20,000 checks.
That might have something to do with Ross’s multiple scandals that The Rooster broke, like cheating in law school or driving on a suspended license for over a year while accumulating $3,875 in unpaid parking tickets.
The negative attack ads write themselves, should that be something Vogel’s campaign is interested in doing. I hope they are.
Because power inherently protects power. And who can blame them? City Council has a pretty sweet thing going for themselves, where the policy debates occur behind closed doors (and in Signal chats) before all the unanimous votes are taken in public.
I understand why a single vote on a nine-member council inherently threatens them. Vogel would have the power to introduce popular legislation that incumbents might have to vote against, and suddenly, the progressive facade of the council’s perfectly aligned demographics would crumble as more voters start asking harder questions.
They know that Ross is a uniquely troubled candidate, albeit one to whom they’re now staked.
But the Franklin County Democratic Party’s Executive Committee doesn’t have to go along with that scheme. It doesn’t have to endorse Ross against another lifelong Democrat and prodigious fundraiser like Vogel.
Are they the executive committee of a cocktail party, as I have long alleged, where all a prospective candidate has to do is rub the feet of the appropriate “stakeholders” and meet the hyper-specific demographic to maintain the council’s perfectly balanced racial kaleidoscope?
Do we have to slurp that gruel because insiders foisted a candidate upon us that they didn’t even care to vet in the most basic ways?
Do we have to pretend it’s business as usual despite Trump making significant inroads into key demographics of the Democratic base in the last election?
These are rhetorical questions.
The Franklin County Democratic Party knows that I think when the chips come down, they will act in wickedly Republican ways to maintain their power at all costs. Vogel is an outsider to them, which is the only thing they hate more than each other.
But I hope enough executive committee members can muster the autonomy and courage to prove me wrong.
The Executive Committee is supposed to represent more than the vested self-interests of City Council. It’s supposed to represent the interests of all Democratic voters in Franklin County.
Ross enjoys enough institutional support without the party having to act like her opponent is a Republican—or worse, a socialist.
If Ross’ backers feel she needs the almighty sample ballot behind her to win despite enjoying every other lever of power on her side, it’s worth asking if that’s a campaign worth supporting in the first place.
Unfortunately, campaigns cost money…
Here’s what’s going to happen, regardless of whether the Franklin County Executive Party decides to endorse Ross or not on July 22.
The corporate interests in Columbus are going to pass the hat to raise as much money as possible for Ross, who, again, is little more than the establishment’s patsy to maintain the status quo.
Her campaign is going to use that money to go negative on Vogel and paint him as a communist extremist. And believe me, it’d be a lot cooler if those baseless allegations were factual.
And it sucks that our system leaves everyday folks having to donate hard-earned money in the hope of good governance. If I had my druthers, Columbus would have a public finance system—but again, that wouldn’t be to the benefit of the establishment.
As such, I’m calling on all patriots to donate whatever they find reasonable to Vogel’s campaign to help balance the scales in the upcoming fight.
I don’t make this ask lightly. However, we must do what we can to elect Vogel and demonstrate that the powerbrokers can be beaten. Political machines tend to fade into oblivion the moment they lose.
We can elect Vogel and change the course of political history in Columbus, because we deserve so much more than the status quo.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter. Let’s hope freedom rings on Nov. 4.
Sherrod Brown… you dirty dog!!!!!
On Monday, I revealed my increasing belief that former Senator Sherrod Brown was only teasing a potential gubernatorial run to stymy former Congressman Tim Ryan from entering the race, as a favor to Dr. Amy Acton.
I no longer believe that to be the case after several discussions with politicos on Monday.
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