OH-01: Pure(val) Lesser Of Two Evils Politics

There's been a lot of silly talk by click-hungry pundits about how there's no blue wave coming. Unless, they're smart enough-- and they're not-- to be explain that there's no blue wave because it's actually an "anti-red wave," just ignore them and they'll slither back under their rocks. Ask a Republican incumbent if they feel a wave coming. Today Politico's Elena Schneider reported on how the wave is impacting once-safe GOP seats by focussing in on one, OH-01, a very carefully-drawn district which includes most of Cincinnati. She wrote that "Republicans who represented some of the safest congressional seats in their party for years are suddenly under intense pressure in 2018, with Democratic challengers threatening to overwhelm them in suburban districts where President Donald Trump has struggled." It's not the best intro for the post about OH-01 she wrote.

A little background: Ohio lost 2 seats after the 2010 census and the Republican legislature gerrymandered the state very effectively, The congressional delegation when from 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans in 2008 to 13 Republicans and 5 Democrats in 2010. Part of that was a flip in Cincinnati, The first district has basically the whole city (aside from parts of the affluent east side) and it's a Democratic city. The western suburbs aren't nor are the parts of Warren and Hamilton counties tied to the district to make sure it would elect Republicans. Romney beat Obama here 52.4% to 46.3%. But during the 2016 race the suburbs started shifting away from Trump. The PVI went from R+6 to R+5 and Trump didn't do as well as Romney did (51.2%) but Hillary was such a wretched candidate that she blew it and did worse than Obama (44.6%). The district, though, just rarin' to vote against Trump now.

Steve Chabot had been elected to Congress in the massive 1994 red wave. The 2006 blue wave shook Chabot up but he managed to hold onto his seat, narrowly-- 52.2% to 47.8%. Two years later, in the general, the blue wave was extended and Chabot lost to conservative Democrat Steve Driehaus, 155,455 (52.5%) to 140,683 (47.5%). Dreihaus, former minority whip of the state House, was an unimpressive congressman, an anti-Choice jackass unable, for obvious reasons, to inspire the Democratic base... so they didn't bother showing up for him in 2010. He voted the way the DC Democratic leadership determined a Democrat in a purple district should vote, GOP-lite. In 2010, Chabot wanted his old seat back. 103,770 (51.5%) voters agreed while just 92,672 of the 140,683 voters who had swept Driehaus into office 2 years earlier made their way to the polls. Why bother to re-elect an inauthentic Democrat who was just voting with the Republicans anyway. Too bad the DC Dems are incapable of learning anything from that.

This cycle, Hamilton County clerk, Aftab Pureval, was unopposed in the primary. His website indicates he's the kind of Democrat who will be playing defense rather than offense, working to protect the status quo rather than pushing forward with a progressive agenda. He's definately running a Republican-lite campaign that would make any progressive want to puke. If he wins it's because of the anti-red wave and because of the related Trump-exhaustion. Schneider asserts he's outraging and out-working Chabot. (As of the June 30 FEC reporting deadline, Pureval had raised $1,569,432 to Cahbot's $958,196.) He refused to sit down for an interview with Politico for Schneider's story.

NRCC chair Steve Stivers (R-OH) did the interview instead. "It just took a little while to get him, you know, built back up and run a race because he hasn't been targeted since 2010, and he won pretty comfortably then. But Steve never lost touch with his constituents and that's why he's in good shape... now [he] has his organization up and humming the way he used to when he was in tough races." Schneider wrote that "Another national Republican strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, had a harsher assessment: 'The question is, can some of these incumbents, including Chabot, be defossilized?'"

Pureval is pitching himself as an independent voice to voters in Chabot's district. "As a Democrat, I reduced the size of government and saved the taxpayers nearly $1 million," Pureval said in an interview with Politico, echoing his first round of TV ads.

He is running like a lot of red-district Democrats across the country. Pureval, who got his start in politics as student body president of Ohio State University, has vowed not to support Nancy Pelosi for speaker and rejected some proposals popular among liberals-- like Medicare-for-all or abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Pureval also found some room for agreement on trade with Trump, with an eye toward the 51 percent of the district that voted for him in 2016.

"American workers have been getting a raw deal for a very long time," Pureval said, while adding that he thought Trump's approach to trade deals has been "ham-fisted."

Those attitudes aren't putting off Democratic voters hopeful of notching a win. "Being less partisan is a good thing around here," said Keri Arinsmier, a 36-year-old voter who showed up to Pureval's recent opening of a field office in Warren County. "This guy is a shooting star of a candidate because he's practical," said Valerie Naughton, another Warren County voter.

And Republicans acknowledge a close race is brewing. "Chabot is a name brand and Aftab is the new product on the market," said Mark Weaver, a Republican consultant in the state. "It'll come down to the west side of Cincinnati, who know Chabot well, but you also can't deny the Democratic enthusiasm."

Pureval's-- and the DCCC's-- theory of the race is that Democratic voters will have no choice but to vote for him no matter how crappy and uninspiring he is because they hate Trump and his rubber-stamps, like Chabot, so much. That gives Pureval the space to take Democrats for granted and just go after Republican-leaning independents and moderate Republicans. There are garbage candidates like Pureval-- lesser of two evils-- wherever the DCCC was able to prevail in the nominating process. What they don't understand is that no matter how right-of-center their policy agenda is, the Republicans will call them the most far left candidate in the history of the known universe and that no matter how much they shame themselves and make fools of themselves by denouncing Nancy Pelosi, the Republicans will always denounce them as Pelosi-puppets.

Pureval's positioning reflects Democrats' knowledge that it won't be easy to turn this seat blue. Former Hamilton County Democratic Party Chairman Tim Burke called Chabot "a very dangerous candidate who has surprised people with the races he's won before."

But Burke added that the district was "designed to ensure that Chabot be protected, [and] he's not protected in the same way anymore."

The 2016 election foreshadowed the district's new competitiveness: While Trump romped to a 9-point victory in Ohio, he got a lower share of the vote in Chabot's 1st District than Mitt Romney did in 2012, when Romney lost the state to former President Barack Obama.

That happened in only one of Ohio's 11 other GOP-held districts: the 12th District, a longtime Republican stronghold where the GOP flirted with a disastrous defeat in a recent special election before pulling out a narrow lead that is still awaiting certification, with provisional ballots still being tallied in the Columbus-area district.

"That was a huge indicator of what's to come in the suburbs," said former Democratic Rep. Steve Driehaus. "The turnout you saw in Franklin and Delaware counties, and voters moving very strongly toward the Democratic candidates, tells you a lot about the mood out there."

Chabot's campaign panned talk of a Democratic surge in the suburbs, pointing to the raw vote total in the May primary, when 20,000 more Republicans voted in the primary than Democrats.

Pureval is seeking to emulate Driehaus, who unseated Chabot in the last Democratic wave election in 2008. "Those populations shifts, happening late in the decade, 2008 and 2018, the tremendous advantage Chabot once had isn't there anymore," Driehaus said.

But Chabot and his campaign see a key difference in the 2018 campaign, believing that Pureval is the "most liberal candidate I've ever had," the Republican told the Cincinnati Enquirer in August, making him "so much more vulnerable." Pureval, unlike Driehaus, is pro-abortion rights.

Chabot's campaign spokesman Cody Rizzuto called Pureval a "far-left liberal," adding that he's "confident the voters will soundly reject his extremist views and associations."

Chabot is also taking his argument to the airwaves, attacking Pureval for his tenure at the Hamilton County clerk's office. The ad shows a clip of Pureval saying, "The era of political patronage-- of 'it's more important who you know than what you know'-- is over." Then, a narrator cuts in and says, "Aftab broke that promise on his very first day in office.

"He started firing longtime employees and used your tax dollars as hush money to buy their silence. Aftab replaced them with his own political cronies, including the son of the Democratic Party chairman."

Pureval's campaign responded with its own ad, calling the attacks "simply [not] true," adding that "it's not surprising that Chabot is running a negative campaign."

"He's a politician who's been in Congress for 22 years and has little to show for it," the narrator of Pureval's ad continued.

Predictions: Pureval will win and be as uninspiring a congressman as Driehaus was, and then lose in 2022, since 2020 will be another good cycle for Democrats.