The DCCC Can Make OH-01 Into A Real Race-- But They're Not Going To

By the numbers, the craftily-gerrymandered first congressional district of Ohio looks nearly impossible for a Democrat. It includes most of Cincinnati-- Lyle Park and Prospect Hill but not Mount Adams-- but not all of it (which would turn it blue) and enough of Warren County to guarantee Republican majorities. Since the district was redrawn-- after Obama’s 55-44% win against McCain-- Romney won it with 52% and Trump won it 51-45%. Still it looks more possible than almost any other red district in Ohio-- and Lord knows, the moribund Ohio Democratic Party doesn’t do squat in congressional elections and neither does the DCCC. The PVI is R+5, far from impossible in a wave election. But the Democrats don’t seem to have been able to find a Randy Bryce to believe enough in himself or herself to take on longtime incumbent Steve Chabot. SO, instead, it looks like a small gaggle of vanity candidates running in an election which could actually land one of them in Congress.

The last time I looked, a Berniecrat, Sam Ronan, had decided to run as a Republican. But now I can’t tell what he’s running as. His website doesn’t indicate which party and neither does this video he made.



Howard Wilkinson, reporting for WVXU, did a pretty thorough job on the race, although he left Ronan out entirely. He reports that the 2016 candidate, Michele Young, who lost to Chabot 210,014 (59.2%) to 144,644 (40.8%), is about to jump in a primary that already includes Robert Barr, a rabbi, whose website doesn’t mention any issues act all. The DCCC searched-- unsuccessfully-- for a credible candidate.

At the top of the list was Hamilton County commissioner Todd Portune, who has proven he can win cross-over votes from Republicans. But, in the end, Portune gave the DCCC a thumbs-down.

Then there was Mark Lippert, a former Navy SEAL who was ambassador to South Korea under the Obama administration. Another no-go.

And P.G. Sittenfeld was approached by the DCCC. So, too, was state representative Alicia Reece. So far, nothing has come of that either.

The filing deadline for candidates is February 7. Still time for some Bigfoot Democrat to wade into the race, but the clock is ticking.

He reported that Michele Young will officially jump in in early February. He seems more obsessed with the rabbi though.

Today, one month away from the candidate filing deadline, the most active candidate to take on Chabot in Ohio 1 appears to be one who would make history if he were elected.

His name is Robert Barr; and what makes him unique is that he is a rabbi-- and no rabbi has ever been elected to Congress. Catholic priests, a couple; Protestant ministers, a bunch.

But never a rabbi.

And Barr is the only rabbi to run who is a "pulpit rabbi"-- meaning that he leads a congregation, performs weddings, burials, bar mitzvahs and other functions. Thirty-seven years ago, the 62-year-old Barr, a product of Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, founded Congregation Beth Adam in Loveland, which he still leads today.

"I am not running to become the first rabbi to be elected to Congress," Barr told WVXU. "I am running to be a congressman who happens to be a rabbi."

Barr said he made the decision to run "by watching what was going on in politics in this country. I was extremely disheartened. I saw people who had been good friends stop talking to each other. The atmosphere has been poisonous."

Some of his own friends, he said, tried to discourage him from running.

"The first thing I heard from some of my friends was, 'Bob, running for Congress is going to be awful,'" Barr told WVXU. "But the more they talked about how bad it was, the more I wanted to do it."

Barr is discouraged by what he sees coming out of Washington today-- the acrimony, the name-calling, the extreme partisanship that grinds legislation to a halt and results in nothing positive getting done.

"Politics in Washington is so balkanized, so divided," Barr said. "People on both sides appear to be unwilling to talk to each other because they are afraid of being seen as weak or as a loser."

As for Chabot, Barr said, "after 20 years, I've not seen him work to repair that damage."

Barr is idealistic, but he is not delusional. He knows perfectly well that defeating Chabot would be a steep climb in that heavily-Republican district.

"I just have this feeling that, right now, people are looking for someone who has worked in the community, someone who is authentic," Barr said. "I've been doing that for 37 years."

Last week, he announced an impressive group to serve as his campaign co-chairs.

They are retired Judge Nathaniel Jones of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Barb Rinto, the former director of the University of Cincinnati's Women's Center; and Sallie Westheimer, the retired CEO of 4C for Children.

He is not going to run a campaign on duct tape and bailing wire; he plans on raising serious money for this campaign-- although he knows that, in a general election, Chabot and his allies, would outspend him by a large margin. Chabot already has over $1 million in his campaign account.

Barr told WVXU that as of about two weeks ago, he had raised $150,000 for his campaign since he officially became a candidate on Oct. 15. He won't say how much he has now, but said that when he files his first quarter campaign finance report with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) it will be "substantial."

The only Democratic candidate in Ohio 1 to have filed a campaign finance report so far with the FEC is a little-known transgender dentist named Laura Ann Weaver, who has a little over $8,000 in the bank.

While Barr is out raising money and putting together a campaign organization, Young is organizing. her campaign.

Sabato's Crystal Ball managing editor is Kyle Kondik, an Ohioan and he told Wilkinson that "The Democrats can win back control of the House without picking up a single seat in Ohio” which explains why they are ignoring the state and why “Ohio 1 will not end up being a prime target” for the DCCC. They use similar excuses all over the country, part of the explanation for a decade of pitiful failure.

Will Progressive Republicans Make A Comeback? The Competition Could Do Wonders For The Democratic Party

Blue America has always been more than aware of the failings of the Democratic Party. At a time when other progressive organizations were petrified of bucking the establishment too hard, we were working, successfully, to dislodge entrenched corrupt conservative Democratic incumbents like Al Wynn (MD), Tim Holden (PA) and Sylvester Reyes (TX), who were all replaced-- with progressives Donna Edwards, Matt Cartwright and Beto O'Rourke. But we've never endorsed a Republican. Except once, since we've come along in 2005, the Republican candidate was always the greater of two evils. And even in that "once," all we did was point out that Steve Pestka, the anti-choice homophobic asshole the Michigan Democratic Party had decided to run against libertarian Justin Amash, was a worse candidate than Amash. In fact, Michigan's whackadoodle anti-choice fascists decided to endorse putative Democrat Pestka instead of Republican Amash!

Let's not kid ourselves; whatever heritage of progressivism the GOP once had-- from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt, Tom Dewey, Jacob Javits, Nelson Rockefeller, Charles Percy, Mark Hatfield, Margaret Chase Smith, Charles Mathias and John Lindsay-- somewhere between the mass migration of Southern Democratic racists to the GOP and the ascendency of the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party, the GOP turned into a hardcore vehicle for hard core conservatism, gross corruption and, more recently, perhaps inevitably, a kind of neo-fascism, while the Democratic Party establishment moved right and away from it's own labor roots and more in a corporatist/Clintonian direction.

Will Blue America ever endorse a Republican? Who knows? I don't foresee it, but... there's an interesting movement on the fringe of the left. Some of the idealistic-- and impatient-- activists who had backed Bernie are having a look at the GOP as a vehicle to... well, to what is the question of course, but let's not go there quite yet. Let's start with the video up top, a monologue by freshly-minted Cincinnati faux-Republican Samuel Ronan.

You may have thought the contest to replace the wretched Wasserman Schultz was between the establishment candidate (former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez) and Berniecrat Keith Ellison. On the final ballot, Perez got 235 votes (54%) and Ellison got 200 votes (46%). But before the final ballot there were a whole bunch of mostly vanity candidates, including South Carolina lobbyist Jaime Harrison, Sally Boynton Brown of Idaho (now, unfortunately, Florida, where she is doing far more damage), South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Fox News analyst Jehmu Greene, Peter Peckarsky and... Sam Ronan. Never heard of him? Not many others besides a handful of activists have either. In the first round of balloting he didn't get a single vote. He withdrew and endorsed Ellison.

Ronan came to America from Germany with his parents when he was 6 years old. He joined the Air Force and the became a dedicated left-wing activist. In the video above he makes the case that the Democratic Party sucks and that he might as well run for Congress as a Republican in the Cincinnati-based first district. He will be challenging Ryan rubber stamp Steve Chabot in the Republican primary.

I'm not sure if Ronan is aware that in the last Democratic wave (2008), Chabot was washed away, defeated by dull centrist Democrat Steve Driehaus. Dreihaus, riding Obama's coattails took 155,455 votes (52.5%) to Chabot's 140,683 (47.5%). On that same day, Obama had won 171,639 votes. Driehaus was an uninspiring conservative Democrat and in the 2010 midterm, all those 2008 Obama voters stayed away from the polls. Dreihaus only got 92,672 votes (46%) and lost to Chabot who took 103,770 votes (51.5%). My guess is that had Ronan stayed a Democrat and won the primary he could have beaten Chabot and gone on to inspire Democrats and independents in 2010 and beyond. Instead he's decided to run against Chabot in the primary, where he'd probably be lucky to get 20% of the vote.

But Ronan isn't the only idealistic progressive acting on this strategy. A somewhat sketchy group that tries identifying itself with Bernie, Brand New Congress, is backing some progressives running as Republicans, like Robb Ryerse in Arkansas' 3rd district, a Trumpist hellhole (Fayetteville and Ft Smith with an R+19 PVI). Trump beat Hillary 61.9% to 30.5%. Hillary, though, beat Bernie in the primary there, so, not a very high consciousness area, at least not yet. Maybe Ryerse can change that. Although a Democrat, Joshua Mahony, is running against incumbent wing-nut Steve Womack this cycle, no Democrat ran last year, in 2014 or in 2012. The last Democrat to run was Dave Whitaker in 2010 and he only got 27,6% of the vote. The last competitive race in the district was 25 years ago when Republican Tim Hutchinson edged Democrat John VanWinkle 125,295 (50.2%) to 117,775 (47.2%). Unlike Ronan, though, Ryerse, a pastor, actually is a Republican, albeit a genuinely progressive one.



Lindsay Brown (watch the video above) is a sharp, young progressive (ex-Democrat) running as a Republican against GOP incumbent Leonard Lance in north-central New Jersey. A progressive Democrat, Peter Jacob. is also running against Lance, as are half a dozen other Democrats. The DCCC seems to be encouraging a corrupt conservative party hack, Lisa Mandelblatt, exactly the kind of candidate Lance can count on beating and whose only argument-- aside from "I'm a woman and it's my turn"-- is "I m the lesser evil.

Perhaps Brown's, Ryerse's and Ronan's arguments will make sense to millennials, but it will be interesting to see how many actual Republican primary voters will be interested in progressive ideas re-cast in the kind of language Fox News viewers and Hate Talk Radio listeners have been trained-- brainwashed-- to listen to.