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Republican primary for governor will feature several heavy hitters
On the side
The Community Mobilization Coalition will have a candidates forum at 6:30 p.m. Monday at New Bethel Baptist Church, 1507 Hillman St. in Youngstown. Candidates running for Youngstown mayor, council president and municipal court judge are invited to attend.
U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Howland, D-13th, criticized Judge Neil Gorsuch during his confirmation hearings for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, urging senators to reject his nomination.
“These confirmation hearings have served to reinforce what we already knew: Judge Gorsuch would be a Supreme Court justice willing to fight for corporations’ rights as a ‘person,’ but not for the rights of workers to collectively bargain and earn a living wage. He would fight to uphold Citizens United and allow an unlimited flow of money into our political system, but not for a loving same-sex couple to join together in marriage. President [Donald] Trump balked at the opportunity to nominate a consensus candidate, and instead chose someone whose jurisprudence is even farther to the right of the late Justice [Antonin] Scalia.”
It appears the Republican Party has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to candidates running to succeed John Kasich as governor next year.
Attorney General Mike De-Wine is the most recognizable of the four candidates seeking the position. He’s been on the statewide ballot seven times for three different positions since 1990, winning five elections.
Secretary of State Jon Husted has been elected to his current job twice and is a former Ohio House speaker. Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor has won her seat twice – with Kasich at the top of the ticket – and was the only Republican to capture a statewide executive office seat in 2006 when she was elected auditor in a difficult year for her party in Ohio on the ballot.
To get a little technical, all three are definitely running, but none have made a “formal” announcement of their candidacy.
Then there’s U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci of Wadsworth, a four-term congressman, who officially announced Monday that he would run for governor.
It’s a somewhat curious move as Renacci has never run statewide and has low name recognition in comparison to the three other GOP gubernatorial candidates. But he’s willing to spend the money to raise his name ID and be a viable candidate.
As an aside, Democrats need to find a top-tier candidate to run in Renacci’s 16th Congressional District, which includes all of Wayne and parts of Medina, Summit, Stark, Portage and Cuyahoga counties. It’s a Republican district, but as Betty Sutton showed in 2012, a solid Democrat can be competitive there. She lost by only 4 percentage points to Renacci that year.
In his gubernatorial campaign announcement, Renacci sounded a lot like President Donald Trump – by design – taking shots at politicians and blasting his fellow Republicans.
“For far too long, career politicians in both Washington and Columbus have been looking out for themselves, not us, and now more than ever we need a serious, conservative outsider to lead our state who will always put Ohio first,” Renacci said. “We need a leader who will end the ‘pay to play’ sweetheart deals that have corrupted Columbus. We need a leader who truly understands what it takes to keep and attract good-paying jobs to Ohio and who knows how to simplify our tax code for Ohio families and businesses. And we need a leader who will put an end to the overregulation that continues to hold Ohio’s economy back.”
While he’s serving his fourth year in Congress, Renacci is calling himself a political outsider.
“Unlike other candidates, I’ve spent the vast majority of my career in the business world, not politics,” he said. “I’m proud to have created over 1,500 jobs in our state and employed over 3,000 hard-working Ohioans. I believe deeply in the value of results, not rhetoric, and I am committed to putting that brand of principled, conservative, business-based thinking to work on behalf of the people of our state.”
So is having too many strong GOP gubernatorial candidates in a Republican state a bad thing?
It depends.
A divisive primary can lead to hard feelings in the general election among the supporters of the losing candidates. And if there are four candidates seeking one position, backers of three of them are going to be upset by the 2018 primary’s outcome.
However, last year’s presidential election is a perfect example of how a primary played no factor in the general election. Republican voters rallied around Trump even though he lost the primary in Ohio to Kasich.
That happened even though the governor refused to endorse or even vote for his party’s presidential nominee, and U.S. Sen. Rob Portman withdrew his support of Trump and also didn’t vote for him.
There’s still a lot of time between now and the May 2018 primary, but it’s doubtful any of the four are going to get out. If anything, Renacci seems the most unlikely of the four and he’s the first one to make a formal announcement about his candidacy.
And even if one quits the race, that still leaves three vying for a single spot.
On the Democratic side, there are already three announced candidates: Sutton, Ohio Senate Minority Leader Joe Schiavoni and ex-state Rep. Connie Pillich. Of the three, Pillich is the only one to run statewide, losing the 2014 treasurer’s race to incumbent Republican Josh Mandel by 13 percentage points in a bad year for Democrats.
Also, more Democrats are expected to jump into the gubernatorial race, which will make for a crowded primary.