Republican in Ohio Senate Primary Spoke Offensively About Asians

The leading Republican candidate in the Ohio Senate primary employed offensive stereotypes about Asian people in a 2013 podcast, citing a widely discredited book, “The Bell Curve,” that has drawn allegations of racism and sloppy research.

The Senate candidate, Mike Gibbons, a financier who has poured millions of dollars of his own money into his campaign, made the comments during a discussion of how to do business in China. The remarks, published here for the first time, come as Republican candidates grapple with how to address a topic that has inflamed their voters, many of whom blame Beijing for a coronavirus pandemic that Donald Trump has referred to as the “Chinese virus.”

And though Gibbons hasn’t used that terminology, his decade-old comments on China and Asian people could draw fresh scrutiny to a candidate who has received little national media attention despite running in one of the marquee races in this year’s midterm elections.

“I’ve often thought that when I’ve run into Asians they’re all — you know, if you’ve ever read ‘The Bell Curve,’ it’s a book, a very controversial book, I can’t even remember who wrote, I think his name is Murray wrote this book,” Gibbons said in the Nov. 3, 2013, podcast, according to a transcript of his comments reviewed by The New York Times. He was referring to Charles Murray, a co-author of the 1994 book.

Gibbons continued: “And it said that the smartest people in the world as far as measurable I.Q. were Ashkenazi Jews. And then right below them was basically everybody in China, India and, you know, throughout the Asian countries.”

About a minute later, Gibbons, who earned a master’s degree from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, described being in a class with “mostly Asians” during graduate school.

“It was astounding to me how much they studied, how they were incredibly bright, but they memorized formulas,” Gibbons said. “And when we ran into a word problem — and you know, I think this is a function of the educational track they put them on — they got lost in the weeds.”

As the discussion continued, his co-host asserted that the Chinese education system did a poor job of teaching critical thinking.

“They’re very good at copying,” Gibbons added.

Asked about Gibbons’s comments, Samantha Cotten, a senior communications adviser to the campaign, said in an email, “Mike was discussing the difference in educational structure and attainment that he experienced in both business and graduate school in relation to China.”

Asian American leaders and advocates described Gibbons’s comments as offensive.

“Defining an entire continent of billions of individuals by a singular characteristic is the definition of racism,” said Representative Judy Chu, a Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Gibbons’s comments, she added, “betray his own lack of ‘critical thinking.’”

Russell Jeung, the co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, a group that monitors incidents of discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said Gibbons’s description of Asian intelligence was “part of the dehumanizing rhetoric around AAPIs that has contributed to the surge in racism that harms us today.”

China has been an especially vexing topic for Republicans during this year’s campaigns, especially in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Candidates have accused one another of being “soft” on Beijing, which many primary voters hold responsible for everything from the coronavirus pandemic to lost manufacturing jobs.

In July 2020, the Pew Research Center reported that 83 percent of Republicans held unfavorable views of China. And in a March 2021 Pew survey, 72 percent of Republicans said they supported getting tougher on China on economic issues, and 53 percent said that they viewed China as an enemy of the United States.

The pandemic has also been accompanied by an alarming surge in attacks on Asian Americans across the United States. In the most recent example, in Yonkers, N.Y., a security camera captured a man assaulting a 67-year-old woman of Asian descent inside the entry to an apartment building. The video shows him hitting her more than 125 times, stomping on her crumpled body and spitting on her in what law enforcement officials said was a racially motivated incident.

A Trump-like pitch

On the campaign trail, Gibbons casts himself as a self-made man, a political outsider and a job creator — in language that often sounds a lot like Trump’s 2016 campaign.

His Cleveland-based investment banking and financial advisory firm, Brown Gibbons Lang & Company, has indeed made him wealthy and successful. According to his Senate campaign’s financial disclosure, Gibbons reported assets worth between $83 million and $286 million. He has already spent nearly $12 million in advertising alone, according to AdImpact, eclipsing his closest rivals.

“I can’t be bought,” he said during a recent stop in Canton. “I’ve already lived my American dream. I’m not going there to get rich or make friends. I’m going there to restore American values.”

The pitch seems to be paying off: Gibbons is leading the field, according to a recent Fox News poll of Ohio Republican primary voters, along with Josh Mandel. Twenty-two percent of those surveyed said they planned to vote for Gibbons in the May 5 primary, and 20 percent favored Mandel. Other candidates polled lower: J.D. Vance at 11 percent, Jane Timken at 9 percent and Matt Dolan at 7 percent.

Senator Rob Portman, who is retiring, has endorsed Timken, a former state party chairwoman, as his preferred replacement.

But the race is still wide open — 24 percent of voters remain undecided, and about two-thirds of the supporters of each of the top three contenders said they would consider another candidate.

The world according to Mike Gibbons

Like the other candidates in the Ohio race, Gibbons has played up his ties to Trump. He was a finance co-chair of Trump’s presidential campaign in Ohio in 2016, and, his website notes, he “gave even more money to the Trump re-election campaign in 2020.”

But Gibbons does not always seem to have been in sync with one of the core elements of Trump’s political appeal: the former president’s trade policies, which were defined by an America-first agenda that included imposing tariffs on Chinese goods and promising to return manufacturing to the United States.

Last year, Gibbons praised Trump’s handling of China during an interview with Jewish Insider.

“I’ve done large financial transactions all over the world, and I can tell you I long ago noticed what was going on in how China was abusing their role,” he said. “But they don’t play by the rules, and I think Donald Trump was the first one with enough gumption to go out and say, ‘We’re gonna force you to play by the rules, and you’re not going to keep draining us of our intellectual property.’ I think he was the first one to stand up.”

Years earlier, however, during an interview with Crain’s Cleveland Business in 2005, Gibbons expressed a different perspective. Asked what the “biggest challenge” Northeast Ohio was facing, he replied by discussing free-market capitalism, arguing that the region’s political leaders were clinging to an outdated understanding of global economic forces.

The biggest challenge, Gibbons said, was “getting our politicians to understand the way the world works.”

“The battle is over between socialism and capitalism, and capitalism won,” he told Crain’s Cleveland Business. “If our politicians want to keep fighting that battle we will end up looking like Youngstown,” an Ohio city that has been hit hard by job losses over the last few decades.

He continued: “If you can have the same product on the shelf out of China, with the same level of risk as far as getting it there and development costs, invariably, in a free market, all those jobs [making that product] are going to move to China. And we better face it. No legislation in the world can stop it.”

“That’s the way a free market works, and that will ultimately create more benefits for the people of the United States,” Gibbons said.

Asked about those comments, Cotten, the senior communications adviser to the Gibbons campaign, said, “Mike was stating that free market capitalism is good for the U.S., not pushing American jobs overseas.”

She added: “Unfortunately, because of decades of failed Democrat policies that included higher taxes and excessive regulations, good-paying, blue-collar jobs were driven to places like China. Mike believes in the America first agenda” and a need for “new leadership in Washington that will put our economy back on track like we experienced under President Trump.”

What to read

• President Biden will attend a NATO summit in Brussels next week. The New York Times continues its live coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war.

• The crisis in Ukraine has empowered the political center, Jonathan Weisman reports.

• Sarah Bloom Raskin withdrew from consideration to serve as the Federal Reserve’s top regulator after Senator Joe Manchin III said he wouldn’t vote to confirm her, Jeanna Smialek reports.

Closing segment

A change in the political climate

At his first in-person fund-raiser of his presidency Monday evening, President Biden focused his remarks on the threat of climate change, boasting that he had written the first climate bill in the 1980s and calling the issue “an existential threat to humanity.”

For environmentalists who have long pushed to make climate change a salient political issue, it’s a major moment. While polling indicates that most Americans believe the United States should work to address climate change, the issue can get lost in campaigns.

Biden has long argued that solving climate change is also a way to create more jobs. He repeated that theme last night in Washington, D.C. — but also added that addressing climate change was a timely national security issue.

It would be a “different world,” Biden said, if the United States and Europe could rely on renewable energy rather than Russian oil.

— Blake & Leah

Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.