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Ohio Issue 1 Election 2023: Live Results – The New York Times
Elections|Ohio Issue 1 Election Results: Amendment Approval Thresholdhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/08/us/elections/results-ohio-issue-1.html More
There’s an extraordinarily important referendum in Ohio next week that the anti-abortion movement hopes most citizens don’t notice. It’s a vote that demonstrates why reproductive rights and the preservation of democracy, two issues that have catalyzed recent Democratic victories, are intertwined. That’s almost certainly why it’s being held in the torpid month of August, a time when a great many people would rather think about almost anything other than politics.Issue 1, which Ohio Republican legislators put on the ballot, would make future ballot measures to change the state Constitution harder to pass in two key ways. If it’s approved, citizens who hope to put amendments to the voters would first have to collect signatures in each of the state’s 88 counties, up from 44 now. And to pass, constitutional ballot initiatives would need to win 60 percent of the vote, rather than a simple majority.The measure’s import may not be immediately clear to voters, but it’s meant to thwart a November ballot initiative that will decide whether reproductive rights should be constitutionally protected in Ohio, where a sweeping abortion ban is tied up in court. Publicly, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, has denied that abortion is the motivation behind Issue 1. But at a private event in May, he told a group of supporters, “It’s 100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our Constitution.”The outcome of next Tuesday’s vote will resonate nationally, because the strategies of both Ohio abortion-rights supporters and opponents are being replicated elsewhere. Throughout the country, reproductive-rights advocates, faced with legislatures that have insulated themselves from the popular will, are turning to referendums to restore some of what was lost when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And throughout the country, abortion opponents understand that to keep abortion illegal, they need to change the rules.Most voters, as we’ve seen repeatedly, want abortion to be legal. Last August, a Kansas measure declaring that abortion isn’t protected by the state’s Constitution was defeated by an overwhelming 18 percentage points. In the midterms, there were abortion-related initiatives on the ballots in five states, including Kentucky and Montana, and the pro-choice side won all of them. Encouraged by these victories, activists are planning ballot measures to restore reproductive rights in states including Arizona, Florida, Missouri and, of course, Ohio.Ohio has been trending right for years, but gerrymandering ensures that the State Legislature is far more extreme than the population. As The Statehouse News Bureau, a news organization devoted to Ohio politics, has reported, “Ohio’s voter preference over the past 10 years splits about 54 percent Republican and 46 percent Democratic.” Yet under Ohio’s highly gerrymandered maps, Republicans control 67 of 99 State House seats and 26 of 33 State Senate seats. The Ohio Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled these maps unconstitutional, but before the last election, federal judges appointed by Donald Trump ordered the state to use them.“This August election is sort of a final vote that gives the people any chance to say, at some point we still exert power here,” said David Pepper, former head of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of “Laboratories of Autocracy,” a book about undemocratic right-wing statehouses.Ohio, you might remember, is the state that forced a 10-year-old rape victim to flee to Indiana for an abortion. Its prohibition on abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detectable — usually at around six weeks of pregnancy — has no exceptions for rape or incest. The Republican governor, Mike DeWine, told The Statehouse News Bureau that even though he signed the law, he thinks it goes farther than voters want, and he urged lawmakers to amend it, though he didn’t specify how. But with Republicans in gerrymandered districts more worried about primary challenges from the right than about general election challenges from the center, they have little incentive to respond to public sentiment. Instead, some anti-abortion lawmakers want even stricter anti-abortion laws, and one, Representative Jean Schmidt, has said she’d consider a ban on birth control.The November ballot initiative to make abortion a constitutional right is a chance for Ohio voters to circumvent their unrepresentative representatives. With this August initiative, the Republicans are working to head off the voters by essentially asking them to disenfranchise themselves. Because most people are unlikely to give up their rights quite so easily, Republicans scheduled the vote at a time when few are paying attention. Just last December, Ohio Republicans voted to effectively eliminate August special elections because of their expense and low turnout. But for this election, they reversed themselves.It is not just Democrats who oppose Issue 1; the former Ohio governors John Kasich and Bob Taft, both of whom are Republicans, do as well. “This is a fundamental change in Ohio’s voting rights,” Taft said during a League of Women Voters forum in June, adding, “I just think it’s a major mistake to approve or disapprove such a change at the lowest-turnout election that we have.”The task for opponents of Issue 1 isn’t to convince voters, but to alert them. “It’s just a math question: Can you reach enough people on a short timeline?” said Yasmin Radjy, executive director of the progressive group Swing Left, which is running a get out the vote drive in Ohio. Polling has been mixed: A July USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that 57 percent of voters oppose the measure, but one from Ohio Northern University shows a tossup, with a little more than 42 percent supporting Issue 1, 41 percent opposing it, and the rest neutral or undecided. (Interestingly, the Ohio Northern poll also shows that almost 54 percent of voters support a constitutional amendment to protect reproductive rights, suggesting that some voters aren’t connecting Issue 1 to abortion.) As The Columbus Dispatch points out, there hasn’t been an August vote on a ballot initiative in Ohio in almost a century, making the outcome unpredictable.Issue 1’s backers are doing their best to confuse Ohioans with ads suggesting, bizarrely, that the initiative is about defending parents’ rights against those who, as one spot said, “put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids.” This is such dishonest agitprop that it’s challenging to even parse the logic behind it, but essentially, Issue 1 proponents are pretending that language in the November referendum saying that “individuals” have the right to make their own “reproductive decisions” implies that children have the right to transition without parental consent.If the right prevails on Issue 1 — and probably even if it doesn’t — you can expect to see the blueprint repeated in other places. Already, Republicans in states including Florida, Missouri and North Dakota, recognizing the danger that direct democracy poses to their own abortion bans, are trying to make the ballot initiative process much more onerous.In May, Dean Plocher, the Republican speaker of the Missouri House, angry that a bill creating new obstacles to citizen-led ballot initiatives had stalled in the State Senate, warned that, in the law’s absence, there would be a referendum to “allow choice,” which would “absolutely” pass. If that were to happen, he said, the Senate “should be held accountable for allowing abortion to return to Missouri.” It’s not clear whom exactly he thought the Senate should be accountable to. He certainly didn’t mean the voters.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
The 2024 election map is a challenging one for Democrats — especially in states they need to hold for a majority. But the incumbents made a strong financial showing this quarter.Senate Democrats staring down tough re-election fights can look to one bright spot: sizable fund-raising hauls and cash stockpiles more than a year before Election Day.In states where they are most vulnerable in 2024 — Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin — Democratic incumbents have raised more money than they previously have at this stage in earlier cycles, the latest campaign filings show. Saturday was the deadline for campaigns to file spending and fund-raising reports for the three months between April 1 and June 30.Most of the vulnerable incumbent Democratic senators also topped their prospective Republican challengers in fund-raising and will head into the fall with several million dollars in cash on hand.The race for Senate control is in its earliest months, and Republicans are still building campaigns. Yet the Democrats’ relative financial strength in the second quarter of an off year suggests significant energy as the party aims to protect its slim majority next year.The electoral map, however, will be one of the most challenging the party has faced in years. Nearly two dozen Democratic seats are up for re-election in 2024, with eight incumbents seen as vulnerable, while just 10 Republicans face re-election — and all of the G.O.P. incumbents won by comfortable margins in previous cycles.In their Senate re-election bids, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana both brought in more than $5 million. Mr. Brown had $8.7 million in cash on hand, and Mr. Tester $10.5 million. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin raised $3.2 million, the most ever raised in a Wisconsin Senate contest in an off year, according to her campaign.Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a conservative Democrat who has not yet publicly said whether he will run for re-election — and is flirting with a third-party presidential run — raised $1.3 million over the last three months and has more than $10 million in the bank, expanding his cash advantage over Gov. Jim Justice and Representative Alex Mooney, Republicans who have already begun campaigns to unseat him.In Pennsylvania, Senator Bob Casey posted his best fund-raising quarter to date, bringing in more than $4 million for his re-election bid.Republicans have been preparing their own money machines and recruiting candidates in five states with vulnerable Democrats. Republican confidence has also been bolstered by the 2024 Senate map.The Democrats “are trying to use money to defy gravity,” said Stu Sandler, a political consultant and former political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “This is a lopsided map for them,” he added, pointing to former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 victories in Ohio, Montana and West Virginia — all states Mr. Trump won decisively. And, he said, Republicans have some “very credible favorites” to challenge the incumbents.Democrats view this fund-raising as a crucial show of strength that will fortify their candidates ahead of a difficult 2024 cycle for the party.“Voters and grass-roots supporters are once again supporting battle-tested Senate Democratic candidates in record ways because they recognize the stakes of this election and the importance of stopping Republicans from implementing their toxic agenda,” said Tommy Garcia, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.In Arizona, Representative Ruben Gallego raised more than Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has changed her party affiliation from Democrat to independent, by two-to-one — the second time this year Mr. Gallego has notched such a ratio. He still trails Ms. Sinema in cash on hand by more than $7 million. Ms. Sinema has not yet announced whether she will run for re-election.Even Democrats in safe Republican territory had strong showings. In Texas, Representative Colin Allred raised $6.2 million in his challenge to Senator Ted Cruz. Mr. Allred, who announced his campaign in May, brought in more money in a shorter period of time than Mr. Cruz, who raised $4.4 million in the last three months. More
When Lordstown Motors, an electric vehicles (EV) manufacturer in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, declared bankruptcy last month, it was the latest blow to a region that has seen decades of extravagant promises fail to deliver.The 5,000 new jobs executives vowed to create in 2020 generated fresh hope for the shuttered General Motors Lordstown plant, which once functioned as an economic engine for the area and a critical piece of the nation’s industrial heartland.Local leaders rebranded Mahoning Valley “Voltage Valley”, claiming the EV revolution would revive the region’s fortunes. Donald Trump, then the president, trumpeted a major victory. “The area was devastated when General Motors moved out,” he said. “It’s incredible what’s happened in the area. It’s booming now. It’s absolutely booming.”But Lordstown Motors’ failure and its decision to sue its major investor, the electronics giant Foxconn, over a soured investment partnership, have dented Voltage Valley’s fortunes. Years of similar failures have given some residents here “savior fatigue” and have largely given up hope that the Lordstown plant can ever be fully rebooted.“I really want the plant to do well and succeed, but we’ve experienced so many ‘Hey we’re gonna come in and save the day’ promises that never happen,” said David Green, the regional director of United Auto Workers (UAW), who started working at Lordstown in 1995.Green said he was especially skeptical of Foxconn. The company has put up nets to prevent workers fromkilling themselves at one of its Chinese plants, he said, and has failed to live up to other promises of job creation across the US: “This is the savior company? I don’t have warm feelings toward them.”Still, some local leaders are optimistic. They insist Foxconn, which is attempting to scale up autonomous tractor production at Lordstown and lure a different EV startup, will save the plant.“I think Foxconn will be successful,” said Lordstown’s mayor, Arno Hill. “They are fairly confident they are going to be here for a while.”Hill and other leaders said Lordstown Motors was not the only new employer in town. GM partnered with LG Corporation to build an EV battery plant that employs about 1,300 people next door to Lordstown, and a new TJX warehouse has hired about 1,000 workers. A new industrial park is planned in the region, as are two gas plants.The feelings of those not in the business of promoting the region are more nuanced. In nearby Warren, where many Lordstown employees have lived since GM originally opened the plant in 1966 opening, mentions of Foxconn saving Lordstown or the Mahoning Valley drew a mix of eye-rolls, scoffs and blank looks from residents in the city’s downtown.“There are words, but I have seen no action,” said Leslie Dunlap, owner of the FattyCakes Soap Company, and several other Warren businesses, as she worked at a farmers’ market. “People here have lost faith in big companies.”Warren’s fortune is tied to that of the plant – when the latter’s employment numbers dipped, “people stopped spending money here, started selling houses, walking away from properties,” Dunlap said.Residents on a recent Tuesday afternoon said they were “cautiously optimistic” about the region’s economic future. Warren’s downtown shopfronts are full. But the city also bears the scars of rust belt decline with vacant industrial buildings and blighted neighborhoods.A few miles down the road at Lordstown, the lots around the well-kept offices where a few hundred Foxconn employees work are repaved. But the rest of the 6.2m sq ft factory looks like a depressing relic. Weeds sprout from the cracked pavement of the vast, unused blacktop lots surrounding it.Lordstown employed 11,000 people at its peak, but between the mid-1990s and 2016, the workforce in Trumbull county, where Lordstown sits, dropped by 63%. Just a few thousand remained when Lordstown closed in 2018.Some still hold a shred of hope that GM will repurchase the plant – it is nextdoor to an EV battery factory, and batteries are expensive to ship. It makes sense, said Josh Ayers, the bargaining chairman for UAW 1112.“I have a pit in my stomach every time I drive past Lordstown,” he said. “Foxconn is in there but I don’t see a future for them.”Regardless of the plant’s potential, local labor leaders say they have largely moved on and trained their attention on GM’s nearby Ultium electric-vehicle plant. A small explosion, fires and chemical leaks at the plant recently injured employees who work there, for as little as $16 per hour – less than the amount the local Waffle House offers, and low enough that some employees need government assistance, Ayers noted.Some local leaders tout the region’s job openings. Ayers said they exist because turnover is high. “People used to run through walls to work at Lordstown,” he said. “Nobody is running through walls to work at Ultium.”It is not the first time that a politician’s promises have left locals disappointed.‘This plant is about to shift into high gear’As the Great Recession battered the nation in late 2009, Barack Obama traveled to General Motors’ mammoth Lordstown plant to promise laid-off autoworkers a brighter future.Obama’s 2009 GM bailout became a lifeline: ramping up production of the Chevrolet Cobalt would bring back over 1,000 workers, the president told the anxious crowd.“Because of the steps we have taken, this plant is about to shift into high gear,” Obama bellowed over loud cheers. The plan soon fizzled, however, and by 2019 GM had shed the plant’s workforce and sold it to Lordstown Motors.In 2014 Obama declared Youngstown the center for 3D-printing technology, though the industry has brought few jobs. The failure to revive the area, in part, helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.Mahoning Valley was once steel country, and residents here trace their economic troubles back to 1977’s Black Monday, when two steel plants abruptly closed and 5,000 workers lost their jobs. Since then, the promises to pull the region out of its slow tailspin have been plentiful.An eccentric businessman from nearby Youngstown briefly revived the Avanti car company until slow sales and poor management killed it by 1990, leaving its workforce jobless.A glass company that recently received tax incentives to build a large plant “never made one fuckin’ bottle”, UAW’s Green said.Perhaps most infamously, Trump, in a July 2017 Youngstown speech, promised residents auto jobs “are all coming back. Don’t move, don’t sell your house.” A year later, GM idled the plant and, as residents here are keen to highlight, it did so after receiving billions in taxpayer assistance, including $60m in state subsidies in exchange for a promise to keep the plant open through 2027.In 2019, Trump tweeted that he had been “working nicely with GM to get” the Lordstown deal done. But Lordstown Motors floundered almost from the start, suffering from scandals over inflated sales figures and battery range. By 2022, a new savior arrived: Foxconn. It agreed to buy the plant and a 55% stake in Lordstown Motors for $230m. That relationship soured, and Foxconn quit making the payments this year. The deal collapsed.In a sign of how little impact this “booming” transformation has had, the name “Foxconn” hardly registered with some Warren residents. They squinted as they tried to recall where they had heard it. Others pointed to other ventures they felt could have more impact – a proposed science-fiction museum and businesses at the farmers’ market.Outside the county courthouse, an employee who did not want their name printed said they knew of the Lordstown Motors collapse, but it was not top of mind for anyone they knew: “Lordstown is not where the money is. I don’t know where it’s at.”‘Foxconn didn’t come through’About 450 miles from Lordstown, in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, Foxconn in 2017 promised to build a hi-tech factory campus that would employ 13,000 people in exchange for $4.5bn in tax incentives. Residents were forced from their homes to make way for the factory, but very little was built.Kelly Gallaher is among those who fought the project, and she sees a replay in Lordstown as Foxconn promises big things while its deal falls apart. Mount Pleasant residents tried to warn Lordstown on social media when Foxconn showed interest in the plant, she said.“Lordstown needed a savior angel, and they weren’t in a position with any other backup choices. But it isn’t a surprise that Foxconn didn’t come through,” Gallaher said.Guy Coviello, the chief executive of the Youngstown/Warren Chamber of Commerce, dismissed such concerns. Foxconn is not asking for incentives or making big promises, he said, claiming that the problems in Wisconsin were largely “political ballyhooing”.The idea that autonomous tractors will save Lordstown is not landing with many residents. But one thing everyone around Lordstown seems to agree on is the notion that the region’s manufacturing heyday is never returning – for no other reason than automation has made it impossible. Manufacturers simply don’t need the labor force they once did.Mahoning still has much to offer. Its population loss is stabilizing, the cost of living is low, it is near other major population centers and it offers a huge workforce, Ayers said.Those selling points may bring more investment. But after so many broken promises, any floated idea is met with skepticism. Reflecting on Obama’s speech, Green said the president’s reassurance was a “great feeling that day”.“What a stark contrast to 10 years later.” More
Bristol Smith, a manager at a McDonald’s in Maryville, Tenn., came across Vivek Ramaswamy’s name this spring, shortly after Mr. Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, announced he was running for president. Mr. Smith was intrigued. He liked the way Mr. Ramaswamy “stands up against the wokeness” and his plan to send the military to the southern border to combat drug cartels. He respected Mr. Ramaswamy’s acumen as a businessman worth hundreds of millions of dollars.Then Mr. Smith, 25, searched for Mr. Ramaswamy’s faith. Mr. Smith is an evangelical Christian who recently started a small church that meets at his parents’ house.“I looked up his religion and saw he’s Hindu,” he recalled. “I was going to vote for him until that came up.” What the country needs is to be “put back under God,” as Mr. Smith sees it, and he doesn’t want to take a chance on someone who is not a Christian.At that point, he said, “I got back on President Trump’s train.”Mr. Ramaswamy, 37, was raised by Indian immigrants and is a practicing Hindu. That poses a dilemma for some of the conservative Christian voters who make up a significant share of the Republican primary electorate and are accustomed to evaluating candidates not just on their policy proposals but also on their biographies and personal beliefs, including religious faith. For many conservative voters, a candidate’s faith is a signifier of his or her values, lifestyle, loyalties and priorities as a leader. It’s the Sunday-morning version of the classic question of which candidate you would most enjoy having a beer with: Who would fit in at your church? “It’s another hurdle people need to cross to go to him,” Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in Iowa, said of Mr. Ramaswamy.Mr. Ramaswamy stood for a prayer at the Veterans Freedom Center during a morning pancake breakfast in Dubuque, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Vander Plaats recently had Mr. Ramaswamy’s family over for Sunday supper at his house, where the meal opened with a prayer and the reading of a passage from the Bible. He came away impressed with Mr. Ramaswamy and said that his message aligned with the priorities of many evangelical voters. He mentioned Mr. Ramaswamy’s list of 10 core “truths,” the first of which is: “God is real.” (The second: “There are two genders.”)“I think he’s really connecting with the audiences in Iowa,” said Mr. Vander Plaats, who has not endorsed a candidate. “He welcomes the deeper questions.” Mr. Ramaswamy is polling under 5 percent in most recent national polls.Mr. Ramaswamy’s approach has been to confront the issue directly and argue that he has more in common with observant Christians than they might think.“I’m not Christian. I was not raised in a Christian household,” he told Mr. Vander Plaats in June in front of a small audience at the headquarters of his organization, the Family Leader. “But we do share the same Christian values that this nation was founded on.”In an interview in late June, after leaving a meeting with a few dozen pastors in New Hampshire, Mr. Ramaswamy said his faith taught him that Jesus was “a son of God, absolutely.” (That “a” is a sharp distinction from the central Christian belief that Jesus is the son of God. Hinduism is a fluid and expansive tradition, and many believers embrace scores of deities, with some seeing Jesus as one teacher or god.)Although he is not a Christian, Mr. Ramaswamy pointed out, he speaks openly about why belief in God matters and why rising secularism in America is bad for the country, and about values like marital fidelity, duty, religious liberty and self-sacrifice.“I don’t have a quick pitch to say, ‘No, no, that doesn’t matter,’” he said of the theological differences between Hinduism and Christianity. “It’s that I understand exactly why that would matter to you.”At campaign stops, Mr. Ramaswamy refers to Bible stories, including the crucifixion of Jesus, and quotes Thomas Aquinas. He frequently mentions his experience attending a “Christian school” in Cincinnati (St. Xavier High School, a Catholic school). And he contrasts “religions like ours,” which have stood the test of time, with the competing worldviews of “wokeism, climatism, transgenderism, gender ideology, Covidism,” as he put it to an audience in New Hampshire.Iowa voters asked questions to Mr. Ramaswamy in Dubuque.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Ramaswamy’s campaign has disseminated clips of an Iowa pastor comparing him to the biblical figure of King David, and of his lengthy answer to a New Hampshire man who asked about his “spiritual beliefs” at a town hall. In Iowa, a woman pressed her hand to Mr. Ramaswamy’s chest and blessed him in the name of Jesus Christ.“Amen,” Mr. Ramaswamy said as she concluded her prayer.If Mr. Ramaswamy comes to have a chance with evangelical primary voters in the crowded Republican field, it will be thanks in part to forces beyond his campaign. Many conservative voters for whom a shared faith might have once been a litmus test now say they are looking not for a “pastor-in-chief” but for someone who shares their political and cultural goals, and who will fight on their behalf.“Theology matters, but the culture has changed. America has changed,” said David Brody, the chief political analyst for the Christian Broadcasting Network, who has interviewed Mr. Ramaswamy. The biggest objective now, Mr. Brody said, is combating “cultural Marxism” and correcting the course of “a country gone haywire.”He contrasted evangelical priorities in next year’s Iowa caucuses with those in 2008 and 2012, when Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum won on the strength of their conservative Christian bona fides.“The lazy narrative that he’s Hindu so he can’t appeal to evangelicals, I don’t buy it at all,” Mr. Brody said.In recent years, theological lines have blurred as political divides have hardened. Few churches split these days over old debates like the exact timing of the end times or the role of free will in salvation. About half of American Protestants now say they prefer to attend a church with people who share their political views, according to polling from Lifeway Research.Mr. Ramaswamy taking a question at a campaign event in Windham, N.H.John Tully for The New York TimesMr. Ramaswamy’s emphasis on his belief in one God has a long history for Hindus in the United States, especially those speaking to white Christian audiences, said Michael Altman, a professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama.Swami Vivekananda, who represented Hinduism at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, took pains to depict his faith as monotheistic, in contrast to the stereotypes of its followers as “heathen” polytheists. Although the faith has many deities, they are generally subordinate to one ultimate “reality.” Many Hindus and scholars say its theology is too complex to be described as either wholly monotheistic or wholly polytheistic.“The polytheism hurdle is the first thing that has to be addressed” for many American Christian audiences, Mr. Altman said. He sees Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch against “wokeism” as a way to counter stereotypes associating Hinduism with hippies, yoga and vegetarianism.Some evangelical observers say it was former President Donald J. Trump who opened up a new lane for Republican candidates who were not necessarily people that voters would expect to sit next to in church on Sunday morning. Many evangelical voters embraced the crude, thrice-married casino magnate not because he was one of them but because they believed he would fight in the public square on their behalf.Most Indian Americans, including Hindus, are Democrats. But some conservatives see an opening with a population that prioritizes family life, marriage and education. As president, Mr. Trump hosted Diwali celebrations at the White House, and in April the Republican National Committee announced a new Republican Hindu and Indian American Coalition. Prime minister Narendra Modi of India is a popular figure among a rising cohort of right-wing Indian Americans, attracting a crowd of 50,000 when he appeared with Mr. Trump in Houston in 2019. Mr. Ramaswamy spoke last year at a gala organized by the right-wing U.S. group HinduPACT, which is aligned with Mr. Modi’s style of nationalism.President Donald J. Trump lit the ceremonial diya lamp during Diwali celebrations in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2018.Doug Mills/The New York TimesNikki Haley, another Indian American contender in the 2024 primary, has similarly emphasized her background as the daughter of immigrants. But although Ms. Haley was raised Sikh, she converted to Christianity and now attends a large Methodist church in South Carolina. Bobby Jindal, a Louisiana Republican who ran for president in 2016, was raised Hindu but has described himself as an “evangelical Catholic.”Mr. Ramaswamy attends the same temple in Dayton, Ohio, that he did as a child and that his parents still do.One of the temple’s priests officiated his wedding in New York City in 2015. He and his wife and their two young sons attend temple on holidays and to mark special occasions, including the younger son’s first birthday in early July, his wife, Dr. Apoorva Ramaswamy, said. Dr. Ramaswamy, who has publicly discussed the family’s faith on the campaign trail, said there were more similarities among committed believers across traditions than between serious and nominal adherents within the same faith.“The fact that we are believers, that we have that sense of humility, that we raise our children with true respect and fear and love of God — that’s so much more unifying than the name of the God people pray to,” Dr. Ramaswamy said.The question for her husband’s campaign is whether enough Christian voters will agree.Ken Bosse, the pastor of New Life Church in Raymond, N.H., described himself as “an extreme follower of Jesus Christ” who would prefer to have a Christian in the White House, all things considered. But he would be open to the right candidate who is not a Christian, noting that “we have had some professing Christians in that position who didn’t follow biblical principles.”Mr. Bosse invited Mr. Ramaswamy to deliver a brief speech at his church on a Sunday morning in April. He liked the candidate’s emphasis on reclaiming a positive American identity, he said, and on his story as a self-made millionaire who is the child of immigrants.At the moment, however, Mr. Bosse is leaning toward supporting Mr. Trump. More
Larry L. Householder, former speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, awaits sentencing on Thursday after being convicted of participating in a racketeering conspiracy that resulted in a bailout for two struggling nuclear power plants.It is, federal prosecutors say, perhaps the biggest public corruption scandal in Ohio’s history, a three-year conspiracy in which one of Ohio’s biggest corporations funneled some $60 million to one of the state’s most powerful politicians in exchange for a $1.3 billion bailout.And those investigators say they are only coming to the end of Act I.On Thursday, the former Republican speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, Larry L. Householder, will be sentenced in federal court in Cincinnati for violating racketeering and bribery laws.The outlines of the charges have been known since his arrest, with four other men, three years ago: FirstEnergy Corporation, a Fortune 500 electric utility based in Akron, funneled the $60 million though various nonprofit entities. In return, Mr. Householder rammed a law through the state legislature that gave the company the bailout for two troubled nuclear power plants. Prosecutors have recommended a sentence of up to 20 years.But, as described early this year in a 26-day trial, the alliance between the utility and Mr. Householder, 64, was far more than a bribery scandal. Among other things, prosecutors and experts say, it was an almost cinematic example of how the dark money that pervades both state and federal politics slithers unseen from donor to beneficiary.It is also a cautionary tale about how state legislatures — second-rung political bodies that are often run by part-time politicians, but increasingly dealing with issues of national importance — are at least as prone to manipulation by special interests as their Washington counterparts.David DeVillers, who oversaw the federal investigation as the U.S. attorney in Cincinnati until early 2021, said in an interview that the gusher of dark money was crucial to the plot and an issue well beyond Ohio.“Any time you have a supermajority, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, and industries that are based on passing laws like marijuana or sports gambling or energy, it’s a formula for corruption,” he said.In a memorandum on sentencing last week, Mr. Householder’s lawyer, Steven L. Bradley, said that his client had not admitted wrongdoing, and that Mr. Householder genuinely believed that the legislation enacting the bailout “was an important piece of legislation, which is why he advocated and voted for it.” The blare of publicity and the ignominy of conviction, Mr. Bradley wrote, had left Mr. Householder “a broken man.” In an email, Mr. Bradley said he plans to “vigorously pursue an appeal with the hope of winning a new trial.”Mr. Householder, a onetime insurance agent from an impoverished rural county in southeast Ohio, had been House speaker from 2001 to 2004. He left his legislative seat because of term limits and faced a federal corruption investigation after leaving the post then, but was not charged.After returning to the legislature in 2016, Mr. Householder secretly spent millions in 2018 to support Republican candidates for 21 seats in the State House — more than a fifth of the 99 seats — who would back his insurgent campaign to again become House speaker. He spent more millions on a media campaign to push the nuclear bailout law to passage, and then tens of millions on a scorched-earth crusade to undermine a ballot initiative that threatened to undo it.By the time he was arrested in July 2020, Mr. Householder was soliciting secret contributions from others seeking legislative favors — and plotting to change the State Constitution’s term limits clause to extend his tenure by 16 years.At each step, a web of political action committees and dummy nonprofit organizations called 501(c)(4)s, after their place in the federal tax code, ensured that money fueling the schemes could not be traced to Mr. Householder or FirstEnergy.“The scope of the conspiracy was unprecedented,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. “So was the damage it left in its wake, both in terms of its potential financial harm to Ohioans and its erosion of public trust.”In a wiretap disclosed during the trial, a lobbyist charged in the affair, Neil Clark, boasted to undercover F.B.I. agents about his handiwork.“I spent close to $20 million in the last eight weeks, $20 million,” he said. “FirstEnergy got $1.3 billion in subsidies, free payments.”He later added: “So what do they care about putting in $20 million a year for this thing?”FirstEnergy sought a bailout for two nuclear power plants, including this one in North Perry, Ohio.Amy Sancetta/Associated PressFirstEnergy had sought state subsidies for two nuclear power plants on the shore of Lake Erie for years when Mr. Householder returned to the State House in 2016. The company claimed that renewable energy and cheaper fuels had made both plants unprofitable.Mr. Householder left little doubt that he wanted his old job as speaker back. After his 2016 election, FirstEnergy’s chief executive at the time, Chuck Jones, invited him to fly on the company’s private jet to attend the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump.Over several days of socializing at high-end restaurants, prosecutors said, they discussed a deal: Mr. Householder needed money to regain the speaker’s post when its occupant left office in 2018. The company needed a legislative solution to its nuclear power woes.What began with a handshake became a multimillion-dollar political operation, with the money laundered through nonprofit groups allowed by the tax code to conceal donors’ names.“They can give as much or more to the (c)(4) and nobody would ever know,” the lobbyist, Mr. Clark, told Mr. Householder in another wiretapped conversation. “So you don’t have to be afraid.”Chuck Jones in 2015, when he was FirstEnergy’s president and chief executive.Phil Masturzo/Akron Beacon Journal, via Associated PressNeil Clark, a lobbyist, was also charged in the affair.Jonathan Quilter/The Columbus Dispatch, via USA Today NetworkWeeks later, Mr. Householder established a 501(c)(4) called Generation Now. Other nonprofits, both new and old, were rolled into the scheme: a PAC called Hardworking Ohioans, two new nonprofits and many more.Rivers of anonymous money — most, but not all, from FirstEnergy — began to flow. In one typical transaction, Generation Now shunted $1 million of FirstEnergy donations to the newly formed Coalition for Growth and Opportunity, whose only reported officer was a Kentucky lawyer who oversaw other nonprofits. The Coalition for Growth and Opportunity donated $1 million to its separate PAC, which spent it on media campaigns supporting Republicans friendly to Mr. Householder and opposing unfriendly ones.And so it went: At least $3 million spent in 2018 to elect Republicans backing Mr. Householder’s speaker ambitions. Nearly $17 million more in 2019 on a successful media campaign supporting House Bill 6, the legislation bailing out FirstEnergy nuclear plants.Clean energy advocates and the natural gas industry opposed the $1.3 billion measure, which propped up two unrelated coal-fired plants and solar energy projects besides the $1 billion nuclear subsidy. And when they began collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to overturn the bailout, FirstEnergy devoted another $38 million to quash that effort.The money paid for a private detective and bullies to disrupt signature gatherers, as well as a saturation advertising campaign claiming that China was “quietly invading our energy grid” with the help of opponents of the bailout.Backers considered it money well spent. When House Bill 6 became law in July 2019, Mr. Jones, the FirstEnergy chairman, sent a picture of Mount Rushmore to Samuel C. Randazzo, then the chairman of the state Public Utilities Commission. Supplanting the mountain’s four presidents were faces of the two men and executives at FirstEnergy and another utility.Below that, prosecutors said, was an all-capital-letters caption that extolled their political clout with a common sexual vulgarity.Meanwhile, Mr. Householder’s Generation Now nonprofit was already plowing new ground. In a wiretapped conversation in 2018, Mr. Householder said he was “expecting big things in (c)(4) money from payday lenders,” an industry that has lobbied federal and state officials against regulating high-interest loans to the poor.For some, the cost of exposure has been heavy.FirstEnergy fired its top executives. Later, it paid $234 million in fines to federal agencies and surrendered another $115 million in ill-gotten gains after admitting to large-scale fraud.Mr. Clark, the lobbyist, died by suicide in 2021 after publishing a book that alleged a lifetime of dirty deals in state politics.Federal prosecutors say their inquiry is continuing, although they have not said where it might lead.F.B.I. agents removing items from the home of Samuel C. Randazzo, then the Ohio Public Utilities Commission chairman, in 2020.Adam Cairns/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated PressIn what was, in effect, a plea bargain with federal prosecutors, FirstEnergy confessed that it had given Mr. Randazzo $4.3 million “to further FirstEnergy Corp.’s interests” on nuclear and other issues in 2019, weeks before Gov. Mike DeWine named him to head the state Public Utilities Commission.Mr. Randazzo, who denies wrongdoing, has not been charged.Court filings and related lawsuits have referred to Governor DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, who have said they were unaware of the illegal payments. Both supported House Bill 6, and Mr. DeWine benefited from hundreds of thousand of dollars in get-out-the-vote support from FirstEnergy during his 2018 election campaign. The company also donated $75,000 to his daughter’s failed bid for a local elective office.FirstEnergy, meanwhile, faces investigation by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission and shareholder lawsuits.And in the five states where it owns electric utilities, utility commissions are likely to require tens of millions of dollars in refunds to customers, in part involving scandal-related spending.On Wednesday, the company said in a statement that it “has accepted responsibility for its actions related to House Bill 6 and has taken significant steps to put past issues behind us.”“Today we are a different, stronger company with a sound strategy and focused on a bright future,” it added.Mr. DeVillers, the former U.S. attorney, said that nonprofits like those central to the FirstEnergy scandal have been largely ignored by law enforcement. Enforcement of restrictions in the federal tax code on 501(c)(4) groups has been lax.Dave Anderson, the communications director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group that follows the energy industry, said that might now change.“This is a case that really illustrates how they can be used for criminal malfeasance,” he said, referring to nonprofits. Now, he said, lawyers who told clients that 501(c)(4) groups are safe conduits for secret cash may be “holding their breath and thinking, ‘Maybe the convictions will be thrown out.’” More
In the summer of 2006, I jumped into the ring for a few rounds of debate with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was peddling reckless claims about an important issue on which he lacked expertise. It wasn’t vaccines. It was the 2004 presidential race. In an article for Rolling Stone, Kennedy suggested that the election had been stolen from John Kerry — a suggestion that, after thorough reporting, didn’t hold up.But now I see where I went wrong. Not on the merits; there’s still no case that Kerry actually won in 2004. My mistake was attempting to debate and debunk Kennedy in the first place. At best, the effort was a waste of time and energy; at worst, a big bow-wrapped gift of the thing a conspiracy theorist desires most — recognition that his arguments are important enough to merit serious debate.After getting in the mud with Kennedy all those years ago, I realized something important that we’d do well to remember now, as Kennedy mounts a long-shot run against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination: You can come armed with all the facts in the world, but when you’re dealing with a conspiracist, there’s no real way to “win” an argument. For people whose views aren’t anchored to facts, winning is simply getting attention — and when you publicly argue with someone like Kennedy, you’ve already lost.I got to thinking about all of this last week, when Kennedy went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and served up a helping of misinformation on the issue for which he is best known, his conviction that several common, widely-used vaccines are harmful.When Peter Hotez, a well-known vaccine researcher, tweeted a link to a Vice story critical of Rogan’s anti-vaccine statements and Kennedy’s appearance on the show, Rogan offered a $100,000 charitable donation if Hotez would come on the podcast to debate Kennedy. Not long after, Elon Musk chimed in, and soon an avalanche of Twitterati were pledging money for a debate; according to one Twitter user who claims to have been tracking the pledges, the pot is now over $2 million.So far, Hotez has courageously refused to take the bait, rejecting, as a physician and scientist, an effort to goad him into defending his work from a skeptic who has for years resisted evidence on vaccines. A back-and-forth between Kennedy and Hotez or another vaccine expert wouldn’t prove anything. And that’s not scientists’ method, anyway. They have established ways of assessing empirical questions — you know, things like lab experiments and clinical trials — and none of them involve owning an interlocutor on a popular podcast.And what would winning a debate with Kennedy even mean? As I learned when I argued with him about the 2004 election, trying to fight misinformation with facts is a tricky business. One side is bound by clearly documented evidence; the other side is free to cherry pick factoids from anywhere, to assert that establishment institutions are inherently suspect and that efforts to fact-check their claims amount to nit-picking, and that anyone who doesn’t see a bigger narrative in a collection of loosely related stories is, in effect, a naïf.I was a reporter at Salon during the 2004 election cycle. I’d spent several months before Election Day covering the ways America had been changing its voting systems since the fiasco of 2000, including the adoption in some places of electronic voting machines that could be vulnerable to hackers or other security lapses. Throughout that time I’d cultivated many sources in the insular, nerdy world of election administration and I’d become familiar with the minutiae of how elections are run.This left me well-prepared for what happened after Election Day — a barrage of theories from people on the left that, due to the electronic voting machines or other problems, the election had been stolen. In his Rolling Stone piece, referring to George W. Bush, Kennedy wrote that he’d “become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004.” He argued that in Ohio, where Bush’s victory put him over the top in the Electoral College, enough Kerry votes were uncounted, flipped or otherwise kept out of the race to cast doubt on Bush’s roughly 118,000-vote margin in that state.I investigated many of these theories, often by consulting the sources I’d cultivated. Kennedy was right that the 2004 election had been rife with irregularities and efforts at disenfranchising voters, particularly in Ohio, where a partisan secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, had overseen several divisive voting measures and obstacles. But pretty much every expert I talked to said that none of the issues were likely big enough to have undone Bush’s win. An investigation by the Democratic National Committee which looked at precinct level voting counts found that the data “does not suggest the occurrence of widespread fraud that systematically misallocated votes from Kerry to Bush.”And so: I wrote a point-by-point debunking of Kennedy’s breathless claims. Then Kennedy wrote a rebuttal to my rebuttal, which I, again, rebutted.For a week or two this dust-up took over my life. Salon, a generally liberal-leaning publication, was deluged by letters from readers angry that I was defending Bush’s win. Thankfully, my editors supported me, and I remember coming away from the episode feeling bruised but journalistically vindicated: A man with a famous political name was wrong on the internet, and, armed with the facts, I had stepped in to correct the record.Looking back, though, I cringe. The other day I went back and listened to a debate I had with Kennedy on public radio’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” Lehrer opened the program by asking Kennedy for his big-picture case. But whether Kennedy is talking about vaccines, elections or other out-there topics (he told Rogan he is “aware” that he could be assassinated by the American government) he tends to present his theories in a particular way. He starts with a few sprinkles of truth — Ohio’s vote was run by a partisan official, some vaccines have serious side effects — and then swirls them up with enough exaggerations, omissions and leaps of logic to create a veritable McFlurry of doubt.Such was his effort when we met on Lehrer: Kennedy offered an assortment of claims about the election that, in big and small ways, were unsubstantiated. So when Lehrer turned to me, I felt I had no choice but to start out by correcting Kennedy’s misstatements. I did so pretty handily, but because I had to point to sources and tease out the nuances Kennedy had elided, I couldn’t help but sound like the boring, persnickety nerd stuck in the weeds. After a few rounds of this back-and-forth, I can’t imagine that much of anything had been clarified for the audience. Instead, the impression was one of earnest complexity: One side says X, the other says Y, but whoever is right, it sure seems like this is a debate we should be having.At one point, Kennedy even made this plain: “You’ll be able to dispute the numbers till the end of time,” he told Lehrer of the faults I found in his case. “Mr. Manjoo,” he continued, “has made a cottage industry of reciting the Republican talking points” by bringing up “arcane disputes of each of these numbers.” “The numbers are correct,” Kennedy claimed, but the arguments over facts were “almost a side issue.” The real story, he said, is that Republicans tried to suppress Democratic votes and “they probably succeeded or may or may not have succeeded in shifting the vote to President Bush, but they certainly tried, and the press has not covered this issue.”In other words: Each side has their own numbers. We’ll never know what actually happened. This guy sounds like a Republican. My story could be right. And isn’t it suspicious that no one is talking about it?Office Hours With Farhad ManjooFarhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you’re interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that’s on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
Eight police officers who fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man, following a car and foot chase will not face criminal charges in his death because a grand jury declined to indict them, Ohio’s attorney general announced Monday.Walker’s death last June sparked protests in Akron after police released body camera footage showing him dying in a hail of gunfire. Police said he had refused to stop when they tried to pull him over for minor equipment and traffic violations, though they haven’t specified further. Police say Walker fired a shot from his car 40 seconds into the pursuit.Officers chased the car on a freeway and city streets until Walker bailed from the still-moving vehicle, ignored officers’ commands and ran into a parking lot where he was killed while wearing a ski mask, body cam video showed. Authorities said he represented a “deadly threat”. A handgun, a loaded magazine and a wedding ring were found on the driver’s seat of his car.Walker took at least one shot from his vehicle at police and then after jumping out of his car he ignored commands to stop and show his hands, Yost said. “There is no doubt he did in fact shoot at police officers,” Attorney General Dave Yost of Ohio said.Walker reached for his waistband as officers were chasing and raised his hand, Yost said. The officers, not knowing he left his gun in the car, believed he was firing again at them, Yost said.Yost said it is critical to remember that Walker had fired at police, and that he “shot first”.Walker’s family called it a brutal and senseless shooting of a man who was unarmed at the time and whose fiancee recently died. Police union officials said the officers thought there was an immediate threat of serious harm and that their actions were in line with their training and protocols.The blurry body camera footage did not clearly show what authorities say was a threatening gesture Walker made before he was shot. Police chased him for about 10 seconds before officers fired from multiple directions, a burst of shots that lasts 6 or 7 seconds.The eight officers, whose names have been withheld from the public, initially were placed on leave, but they returned to administrative duties three and a half months after the shooting.A county medical examiner said Walker was shot at least 40 times. The autopsy also said no illegal drugs or alcohol were detected in his body.City leaders have been meeting with community leaders, church groups, activists and business owners ahead of the grand jury meeting while also preparing for potential protests.Walker’s death received widespread attention from activists, including from the family of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr. The NAACP and an attorney for Walker’s family called on the justice department to open a federal civil rights investigation.President Joe Biden responded during a trip to Ohio last summer by saying the DoJ was monitoring the case.Separately, another grand jury has refused to indict a former northern Virginia police officer after he fatally shot an unarmed shoplifting suspect outside a busy shopping mall in February.Authorities presented the case to a grand jury for an indictment against Wesley Shifflett, who shot and killed Timothy McCree Johnson outside Tysons Corner Center on 22 February.The shooting occurred after Shifflett and another Fairfax county police officer chased Johnson on foot from the mall after receiving a report from security guards that Johnson had stolen sunglasses from a Nordstrom department store.Dimly lit body camera video shows the chase and the shooting. The officer is heard saying “Get on the ground” and later saying “stop reaching” as shots are fired. After the shooting, Shifflett tells another officer that he saw Johnson “continually reaching in his waistband”.A search of the grounds after the shooting turned up no weapons.Shifflett was fired last month for what Fairfax county police chief Kevin Davis called “a failure to live up to the expectations of our agency, in particular use of force policies”.A lawyer for Johnson’s family likened the shooting to an execution. Johnson’s mother, Melissa Johnson, said officers shot her son when all they knew at the time was “that he was Black and male and had allegedly triggered an alarm from a store for some sunglasses”. More
