Only Bernie Sanders Can Keep Ohio From Trump Again

-by Tim Russo

Listen....oooh wah oooh

Some folks know I used to have a pretty good Dem rolodex. Thus, in summer 2016 I tried in vain to raise the alarm with the highest-up Democrats I could reach, for months, that Ohio was trending heavily Trump. As a leading indicator in presidential elections my entire lifetime, Ohio trending Trump meant the entire Midwest was trending Trump, too. The response was always the same, "Ha! Eat it Bernie Bro! So what. We don't need Ohio."

Now, Ohio is most definitely Trump country, just as it was Obama country the previous two presidential elections. Trump's ugly chaos is at least...change. Swing voters, but especially non-voters in Ohio, have wanted dramatic change, of any kind, since the crash of 2008 (remember that? Ohio sure does). Ohio knows the game is rigged, knows who rigged it, and as Democrats flail away at their Putin matroshka dolls denying the reality before their own eyes, it is folly to think an establishment Democrat, even any Democrat, will deliver the change Ohio has been demanding for a decade. Absent a non-Democrat (read, Bernie Sanders) seizing the Democratic Party in 2020 the way Jeremy Corbyn has seized Labour in the UK, Ohio will no doubt re-elect Trump, who even though he's con-man's con, at least fucks shit up good.

Do you want to know a secret? oooh wah oooh

For decades, the Ohio Democratic Party has zombie-walked in Clintonian Third Way pointlessness as if they think no one notices. Five days before the 2018 midterm, Ohio U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, cruising to re-election, reverted to his factory setting of knifing the left in the back once he knows his paycheck is secure. On Nov. 1, Brown reversed his own position on reimposing Glass Steagall and breaking up the banks, with the added flourish of doing so to CNBC. Cherry on top, Sherrod's Pulitzer prize winning wife no doubt immediately put her inside game spin into overdrive to keep her husband's total surrender to capital safely, deeply buried in an unread CNBC transcript. No headlines. No op-eds. No trending post at DailyKos. No pearl clutching MSNBC roundtables with Nicolle Wallace or Joy Ann Reid. Just fealty to Wall Street fundraising safely assured from the self-proclaimed guardian of Ohio's left. Off to Iowa!

If Brown's 2018 opponent Jim Rennaci had two brain cells to rub together, he'd have pummeled Sherrod to pieces on this about face in favor of keeping the game rigged. Alas, Sherrod Brown has been for 30 years the luckiest man in Ohio politics. Brown's re-election was assured when his 2012 opponent Josh Mandel dropped out suddenly in 2018, leaving a pointless millionaire TrumpBot Jim Rennaci to attempt to unseat, against a midterm headwind, what is one of the strongest last names in the history of Ohio politics. Sherrod Brown now preens like a peacock mulling over a 2020 presidential run, Wall Street's biggest fear now certain to be unspoken in Iowa or New Hampshire. Viva La Resistance!

Give Sherrod a break. He was only aping the top of his ticket, Rich Cordray, who ran hard right every day for months via millions spent on a TV ad starring a Republican cop in uniform declaring his undying love for Rich Cordray, just like all his Republican cop friends he tells us! In a year we were told the core of the Democratic Party base is black women, as Mike Dewine ran left on medicaid, Cordray's right wing cop love was sugary frosting on the base-turnout-depressing cake baked first by shoving two women out of his gubernatorial primary. #ThemToo

Meanwhile, in Ohio's largest Democratic county, Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish worked at nothing harder in 2017-2018 than assuring himself not only no primary, but no Republican opponent in the fall. Less turnout, hooray! This, Budish achieved, by bending over for every sports billionaire demand he could find from the day he took office in 2015. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson backed up Budish, spitting in the face of 20,000 signatures demanding a referendum on Budish's 2017 giveaway to Cavs owner Dan Gilbert. Jackson literally refused to accept the boxes in which the piles and piles of signature forms were presented.

Before Cleveland Congresswoman Marcia Fudge floated her name for House Speaker after the 2018 midterm, Fudge was instrumental in the back room guarantees to renovate Gilbert's Quicken Loans Arena at taxpayer expense. This latest sports billionaire largesse relies heavily on playoff game revenue. Anyone think the Cavs will be in the playoffs anytime soon now that Lebron James is a Laker? Taxpayers are still on the hook, alas. Marcia Fudge gets a chair's gavel.

Do you promise not to tell?

Down ballot, Ohio Democrats for decades have been a musical chairs rigged game for the sole purpose of their own state pensions. Former Cleveland City Council President and serial groper Marty Sweeney cooked up a move from City Council to state rep. a few years ago. Then, for 2018, Sweeney made an attempt to shift his pension...oops I mean public service...to the state senate. Defeated in that 2018 primary by an identity politics goldmine, Nickie Antonio (female, plus gay-- jackpot), Sweeney still cashed in by slotting his own daughter into his old state rep. seat. She's now my state representative. No one knows a damn thing she stands for, or her father stands for, or any other elected Democrat in Ohio, stands for, except their pensions.

In OH-12's heavily watched 2-round special election this midterm, Danny O'Connor still blames the Green Party for losing his utterly predictable 50-50 race, twice. Instead of moving left to make a Green Party candidate irrelevant, O'Connor aped Cordray's only other "message"-- he's cool. You see, being "cool" is supposed to be a message to the Ohio Democratic Party, just like Ted Strickland's message was something about good ol' boys in 2010. Despite knowing full well a Green would be in his race, both times, moving a single nanometer leftward was total heresy to O'Connor. Better to have the Green Party to slag off, anyway.

Not to be outdone, Youngstown Congressman Tim Ryan mulls running for president on the "yoga vote." The Zen Congressman Ryan is the most reliable NRA stooge in the entire Ohio congressional delegation, just as Cordray has been statewide, just as Ted Strickland before him. It's only a matter of time before one of the AR-15's Tim Ryan has built his congressional record defending sprays a yoga studio with the blood of innocents. Ryan must meditate in downward dog praying to his Third Eye that such a predictable horror doesn't occur before the Iowa State Fair in August, 2019.

Did I mention the Ohio Democratic Party ran a guy for governor 4 years ago who drove without a license for 10 years? Former FBI man Ed FitzGerald, whose only worse gubernatorial predecessor was the catastrophic Rob Burch of 1994, has predictably failed upward into six figures at the corporate law firm of Walter & Haverfield, doing god knows what. Immediately after 2014's meltdown, every single Ohio Democratic Party apparatchik carbuncled themselves onto the 2015 marijuana monopoly attempt not just as staff, but as shareholders-- neoliberalism! In a cut and paste of Dan Gilbert's 2009 casino gambling cash grab, ODP's great and good constitutionally attempted to seize legalized marijuana profits for themselves. Ohio's young voters ain't nobody's fool, so they mobilized to crush it. Ohio Democrats ignored that 2015 lesson, too.

  ...Ohio remains a predictive swing state.

These are just some of the reasons you hear nothing in today's media about a "blue wave" in Ohio. Ohio didn't irrevocably "turn red," Ohio was abandoned by Ohio Democrats to, for the benefit of, the rigged game. In the March 2016 Ohio primary, Hillary Clinton benefited from nothing more than Trump being on the other ticket, thereby splitting the radical change vote between Bernie Sanders and Trump. Ohio Democrats even mounted a campaign during that primary to get Bernie-leaning Democrats to switch to the Republican primary to vote for John Kasich, in what is now clearly the first pathetic attempt of Ohio Democrats to "stop Trump." Kasich's Ohio primary "win" is largely due to those Democrats. Bet Kasich himself has no idea.

Nothing establishment Democrats do will stop Trump in Ohio in 2020, unless it is Bernie Sanders forcing them to do it. Bernie is popular in Ohio and nationally, with both voters and non-voters alike, precisely because he is NOT a Democrat, who Democrats screwed over. Just like themselves. Average folks identify with Bernie for this reason, so if Bernie seizes the Democratic nomination in spite of all that, non-voters will be inspired to return to voting, and Obama-Obama-Trump voters will have someplace to go once they realize Trump's con game was no different. Unless Bernie Sanders drags the Ohio Democratic Party by their hair kicking and screaming the way Blairites do now as Corbyn inevitably approaches 10 Downing Street, the Ohio Democratic Party will once again hand Trump four years of power, con game or not.