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      Bob Gibbs, House Republican Facing Primary Challenge in Ohio, Will Retire

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      The state’s redistricting process had drawn Mr. Gibbs into a primary fight against Max Miller, who served in the Trump White House and was endorsed by the former president.Representative Bob Gibbs of Ohio announced on Wednesday that he would not seek re-election, just as early voting got underway in the state. Ohio’s redistricting process had forced Mr. Gibbs, who has served in Congress since 2011, into a Republican primary against a Trump-backed challenger, Max Miller, among others.Mr. Gibbs said in a statement that the tumultuous effort to redraw the state’s congressional map had become a “circus,” and he criticized the last-minute changes to his rural district south of Cleveland.“It is irresponsible to effectively confirm the congressional map for this election cycle seven days before voting begins, especially in the Seventh Congressional District where almost 90 percent of the electorate is new,” he said.Mr. Gibbs’s name will still appear on the ballot in the district but signs will be posted at voting locations stating that votes for him will not be counted, said Rob Nichols, a spokesman for the Ohio Secretary of State, in a brief interview.Mr. Gibbs was facing a serious primary challenge from Mr. Miller, an aide to former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Miller last year when the Ohio candidate was aiming to unseat Representative Anthony Gonzalez, who had voted to impeach Mr. Trump. But Mr. Gonzalez said in September that he would not run for re-election.Mr. Gibbs and Mr. Gonzalez were later drawn into the new Seventh District. Mr. Gibbs voted against impeaching Mr. Trump after the Capitol riot and voted to overturn the results of the presidential election, positions that the former president has treated as litmus tests for which Republicans he will support in 2022.Mr. Miller on Wednesday praised Mr. Gibbs’s tenure.Ohio is losing one of its 16 congressional seats as part of the once-a-decade redistricting process after the latest census. The state’s efforts to redraw its district lines have been mired in legal challenges.In January, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a congressional map drawn by the state’s Republican-dominated Redistricting Commission, calling it too partisan for a state where the G.O.P. has lately won about 55 percent of the statewide popular vote.Max Miller, an aide to former President Donald J. Trump, had originally aimed to unseat Representative Anthony Gonzalez.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesThe court is planning to hold a hearing on the new congressional map sometime after the May 3 primary, and is hearing challenges to a fourth set of state legislative maps. Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Secretary of State, removed the state legislative races from the May 3 ballot and a new date for those elections has not been set.Jen Miller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, echoed Mr. Gibbs’s frustration with redistricting. “Ohio is swingable but it doesn’t seem that way because we have this history of extreme gerrymandering,” she said.Redistricting is a potentially decisive factor in determining which party will control Congress. Both parties have sought to give themselves advantages in states across the country — giving rise to legal wrangling in several states, including New York, Maryland, Alabama and North Carolina.Michael Wines More

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      Republican congressman Bob Gibbs retires, blaming redistricting ‘circus’

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      Republican congressman Bob Gibbs retires, blaming redistricting ‘circus’Six-term lawmaker from Ohio’s Amish country exits primary race that would have put him up against Trump-backed Max Miller Republican congressman Bob Gibbs announced his sudden retirement on Wednesday, declaring himself a casualty of “the circus” over Ohio’s still-unresolved congressional map.The six-term congressman from Amish country exits a primary race in north-eastern Ohio that, under new temporary maps, would have put him up against the Trump-backed Republican Max Miller.Early voting is already under way.US rightwing figures in step with Kremlin over Ukraine disinformation, experts sayRead moreMiller was initially recruited to defeat Anthony Gonzalez, who joined a handful of fellow Republicans who voted in favor of the former Republican president’s impeachment. Gonzalez has since retired.In a statement, Gibbs said “almost 90% of the electorate” in the new seventh congressional district where he would be required to run is new, with nearly two-thirds drawn in from another district “foreign to any expectations or connection” to the district he now serves.Trump weighed in to congratulate Gibbs on “a wonderful and accomplished career”. He called Gibbs a strong ally of his America first” agenda and the fight against “the Radical Left”.“Thank you for your service, Bob – a job well done!” Trump said in a statement.Calling the decision to retire difficult, Gibbs called it irresponsible “to effectively confirm the congressional map for this election cycle seven days before voting begins”.He appeared to be referencing a 30 March procedural ruling by the Ohio supreme court, which extended the briefing schedule for the legal challenge to Ohio’s congressional map well past this year’s primary.However, congressional districts for 2022 elections had actually been set since 2 March. That was when the Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, the state’s elections chief, ordered county boards of elections to reflect the Ohio Redistricting Commission’s second congressional map on ballots.Gibbs said he believed Ohio’s prospects were bright “despite the circus redistricting has become”.“These long, drawn-out processes, in which the Ohio supreme court can take weeks and months to deliberate while demanding responses and filings from litigants within days, is detrimental to the state and does not serve the people of Ohio,” he said.The high court’s bipartisan majority, comprising the Republican chief justice, Maureen O’Connor, and three Democrats, has been engaged in a protracted back-and-forth with the Republican-controlled redistricting commission for months.In response to lawsuits brought by voting rights and Democratic groups, justices have tossed four plans and counting for legislative and congressional lines, declaring each an unconstitutional gerrymander that unduly favors Republicans.Their face-off continues to escalate.As justices consider a request to hold mapmakers in contempt for their repeated failure to craft lines that meet constitutional muster, Republicans who control the state legislature are thinking hard about bringing impeachment proceedings against O’Connor.Gibbs is the 17th House Republican to say he won’t seek re-election, compared with 30 Democrats. His term runs through January 2023.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsOhionewsReuse this content More

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      Tim Ryan Struggles to Reach Ohio’s Exhausted Majority

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      Mr. Ryan, the Ohio Democrat running for Senate, has been listening to white working-class voters. Whether they are listening to him and the Democratic Party is the question.NILES, OHIO — Representative Tim Ryan won re-election in 2020. But in one sharply personal way, he lost, too.Mr. Ryan, 48, the Ohio Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, was born and raised in Niles, a manufacturing city of roughly 18,000 that sits halfway between Youngstown and Warren in southern Trumbull County.Mr. Ryan had once won Trumbull with as much as 74 percent of the vote. That number fell to just 48 percent in 2020, when he narrowly lost the county by roughly one percentage point. A place that was once a bastion of white blue-collar Democrats turned away from a white Democratic native son whose blue-collar grandfather had been a steelworker in Niles for four decades.Now, Mr. Ryan is trying to win back his party’s voters in Trumbull and throughout Ohio as he runs for Senate. His problem in Trumbull exemplifies the larger problem for Democrats in the Midwest: The lingering appeal of Trumpism and the erosion of support for the party among the white working-class voters who once formed a loyal part of its base in the industrial heart of the country.Many national Democratic pollsters and pundits have written off Mr. Ryan’s pursuit as a near-impossible task. They see Ohio as too red and too white to change course. But as his Republican opponents have been veering farther to the right and aggressively pursuing former President Donald J. Trump’s endorsement, Mr. Ryan is betting voters have had enough of the extremism in American politics. He is focused on bringing back voters who feel forgotten by Democrats and turned off by Republicans.“I feel like I am representing the Exhausted Majority,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview, using a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked. People, Mr. Ryan added, “just want to move on and actually focus on the things that are really important.”Like other Democrats in long-shot races, Mr. Ryan must stay firmly within a narrow lane as he vies to replace Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who is retiring. Mr. Ryan does not tout Medicare for All and other transformative policies that tend to energize progressives, and he does not want to talk about transgender women in sports and other divisive issues. Instead, he wants to campaign strictly on jobs, manufacturing and taking on China. His first television commercial — part of a $3.3 million ad buy — almost sounds like it came from a Republican, squarely centering on the nation’s fight to beat China on manufacturing.“It’s us versus them,” he says in a digital one-minute version of the ad, during which he mentions “China” eight times in 60 seconds. The ad has drawn criticism from some Asian advocacy groups and elected officials, who described it as racist and called on him to take it down.Shekar Narasimhan, the chairman of AAPI Victory Fund, a political action committee that mobilizes Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, urged Mr. Ryan to not use hate or fear to win votes. “That’s what the Trump Republicans do and why we fight them everywhere,” he said in a statement.Mr. Ryan condemned anti-Asian violence but said that he was speaking specifically about government policies of the Chinese Communist Party that have hurt Ohio workers and that he was not backing down.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Seven months before the November election, it is too early to say whether the Ryan playbook is working. Interviews with voters, former elected officials and community leaders in Niles, Warren and other towns in the industrial region known as the Mahoning Valley showed just how hard the midterms will be for Democrats, and for Mr. Ryan. His jobs-and-the-economy message clashes with the prices working-class voters have been paying at the grocery store and at the gas pump.Many Republican voters in this part of the Mahoning Valley were quick to dismiss any Democrat as unviable, citing gas prices, inflation and the U.S.-Mexico border as Democratic problems that needed Republican solutions. Democrats tended to be split between those who supported Mr. Ryan and those wary he had become too much a part of the Democratic establishment. Even anti-Trump voters have been in an anti-establishment frame of mind.Outside the Hot Dog Shoppe in Warren, Royce VanDervort, 76, who worked for the Packard electric division at General Motors, said he understood why people grew tired of the Democratic political machine amid factory closures and job losses, but was surprised by just how strong and enduring the Trump appeal has been. He is a die-hard Democrat and said he supports Mr. Ryan. “Too old to change now,” he added.But Mr. VanDervort’s friend and neighbor, Dennis Garito, 57, was the kind of voter Mr. Ryan has been trying to win back. A retired fabrication worker and a Democrat for 35 years, Mr. Garito now describes himself as an independent. On the one hand, he said, he worries Mr. Ryan and other Democrats have lost touch with the people they represent. On the other, he has grown sick of far-right Republicans who argue, he said, like “kids fighting.”He plans to vote for Mr. Ryan in the Democratic primary in May. But if an anti-Trump Republican, State Senator Matt Dolan, wins the Republican primary and makes it on the ballot in November, Mr. Ryan will likely lose Mr. Garito’s vote. “If it comes down between Dolan and Ryan, I’m probably going to vote for Dolan,” Mr. Garito said. Mr. Ryan, he added, had become “too much of a career politician.”In the industrial region known as the Mahoning Valley, interviews with voters in Warren and other towns showed just how hard the midterm elections will be for Democrats.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesRoyce VanDervort, 76, a retired General Motors worker in Warren, said he was supporting Mr. Ryan in the Senate race.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesDennis Garito, 57, a retired fabrication worker who describes himself as an independent, said he worries that Mr. Ryan and other Democrats have lost touch with the people they represent.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAsked later about Mr. Garito’s comments, Mr. Ryan said Mr. Garito reflected those voters in the middle who are without a home politically. His role model has been Senator Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who has weathered Republican waves by focusing on rebuilding the middle class.“I am telling everyone right now — ‘Just hear us out, come listen to us,’” the congressman said.On a blustery, snowy day in early spring, Mr. Ryan sat in Giuseppe’s Italian Market, one of his favorite Italian delis in Niles, dressed down in jeans and a gray pullover with a United Steelworkers logo. In the Democratic primary, Mr. Ryan is the front-runner, but he will face Morgan Harper, a progressive lawyer, and Traci Johnson, a tech executive.Mr. Ryan has been on a rigorous tour of the state, aiming to visit with voters in all 88 counties. So far, he has hit 82. He met with union workers in town halls, diners and factories along the Ohio River. He hosted round tables with business owners and home health care aides in Cincinnati, Cleveland and other cities. He picketed with aerospace workers north of Dayton.“I want to see these folks,” Mr. Ryan said. “I want to be in their communities.”Mr. Ryan’s visit-every-county tactic echoes Beto O’Rourke’s driving tour of Texas in 2017 and 2018, when Mr. O’Rourke made campaign stops in all 254 counties in Texas during his unsuccessful bid to defeat Senator Ted Cruz.The Mahoning Valley where Mr. Ryan still lives stretches across northeastern Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania, and was once a thriving zone of steel factories and manufacturing plants. But Mr. Ryan saw the region transform amid job losses, bad trade deals and disinvestment, he said.“Growing up, you think it is just happening here, but when you travel Ohio, you realize that it is the vast majority of Ohio,” he said.In Youngstown in the Mahoning Valley, the exodus of white blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party accelerated with the arrival of Donald Trump.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesDemocrats’ struggles in Youngstown and other blue-collar Ohio cities extend beyond Donald Trump.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesThe exodus of white blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party accelerated here with the arrival of Mr. Trump, who stirred populist anger as he pledged to bring back manufacturing jobs and companies, as well as to aid struggling workers who had been laid off or reassigned. Many of his promises never materialized, but that didn’t hurt the former president’s well of support among the workers who saw him as their champion. Ohio went to Mr. Trump in the past two presidential elections, and it appears to be trending in Republicans’ favor, as President Biden’s low approval ratings are expected to hurt Democrats.The diminishing support for Mr. Ryan in 2020 in Trumbull County was part of a larger wave of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump that knocked out other well-known Democrats in the Mahoning Valley, said Bill Padisak, who works in Niles and serves as president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Central Labor Council in Mahoning and Trumbull Counties. But he said it was too early to tell whether many of those people would remain Republicans.“A lot of the union members I talk to, I think they will swing back,” Mr. Padisak said.Democrats’ struggles go far beyond Mr. Trump. The outrage, racial resentment and white grievances harnessed by Republicans have proven too salient for some voters who see their identity and way of life under attack. Others blame the Biden administration and Democrats for the troubles with the economy and illegal immigration.On a visit to Warren for her 18-year-old daughter’s dance competition, Kristen Moll, 54, echoed a common refrain among Republicans. “Right now, regardless of if you’re running for Senate or governor or any public office, I would feel the Democratic Party in general is leading the country down the wrong path,” Ms. Moll said.David and Jennifer Raspanti, at a restaurant in Boardman Township with their family, said they did not care whether the next senator was a Republican or a Democrat as long as the candidate was not extreme.Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times“Some of that Trump support has waned, but I don’t know if it has waned enough,” said Charlene W. Allen, 76, a community activist and legislative aide to the Youngstown Warren Black Caucus.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAt her home, Charlene W. Allen, 76, a community activist and legislative aide to the Youngstown Warren Black Caucus, believed Mr. Ryan had a shot. But she said he could not win the seat without doing more to repel Republicans’ attempts to sow division, like proactively taking on issues of race and crime.“Some of that Trump support has waned, but I don’t know if it has waned enough,” she said.David and Jennifer Raspanti, who are the owners of a painting company in Trumbull County and who are Republicans, said they did not care whether the next senator was a Republican or a Democrat as long as the candidate was not extreme and could make clearheaded decisions.“We need to come back to the middle,” Ms. Raspanti, 44, said at a restaurant in Boardman Township, where the family was having breakfast with their two sons after church. “We need to listen to each other better.” More

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      G.O.P. Presses for Greater Edge on Florida and Ohio Congressional Maps

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      In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a map drawn by his fellow Republicans in the Legislature. In Ohio, Republicans closed in on a G.O.P.-friendly map for the midterm elections.With the midterm election cycle fast approaching, Republicans in the key states of Florida and Ohio have made critical progress in their push to add to their dominance on congressional maps by carving new districts that would be easier for G.O.P. candidates to win.In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday vetoed congressional maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature and called for a special session to draw new maps in mid-April, a rare fracture between the Republican governor and state lawmakers. Mr. DeSantis had previously pledged to veto the maps and had pushed his own maps that would have given his party a stronger advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.In Ohio, a new map of congressional districts that is gerrymandered to heavily favor Republicans appeared highly likely to be used in the midterm elections after the State Supreme Court indicated on Tuesday that it would not rule on a challenge to the map until after the May 3 primary election.The Republican pressure comes as Democrats have fared better than expected in this year’s redistricting cycle. Democrats have drawn aggressive gerrymanders in states like New York, Oregon, Illinois and Maryland, while Republicans have sought to make their current seats safer in states like Texas and Georgia.The result is an emerging new congressional landscape that will not tilt as heavily toward Republicans as it did after the last redistricting cycle, in 2011. In the first elections after that round of redistricting, in 2012, Democrats won 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans maintained control of the chamber with 33 more seats than Democrats.The realignment in this year’s redistricting has rankled some Republicans across the country, who had called on G.O.P.-led state legislatures to be more aggressive in drawing maps.“Republicans are getting absolutely creamed with the phony redistricting going on all over the Country,” former President Donald J. Trump said in a statement last month.Mr. DeSantis seemed to share Mr. Trump’s view, taking the rare step of interjecting himself into the redistricting process and proposing his own maps, twice. His most recent proposal would have created 20 seats that would have favored Republicans, and just eight that would have favored Democrats, meaning the G.O.P. would have been likely to hold 71 percent of the seats. Mr. Trump carried Florida in 2020 with 51.2 percent of the vote.Legislators in the Florida House of Representatives discussed redistricting at a session in January.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressBut Republicans in the State Legislature, who often acquiesce to Mr. DeSantis’s requests, largely ignored the governor’s proposed maps and passed their own maps that would have most likely given Republicans 18 seats, compared with 10 for Democrats. Mr. DeSantis declared the maps “DOA” on Twitter when they passed.In a news conference on Tuesday announcing his veto, Mr. DeSantis said the map drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature violated U.S. Supreme Court precedent.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.“They forgot to make sure what they were doing complied with the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Mr. DeSantis said at the State Capitol.The vetoed map did away with a seat held by a Black Democrat, Representative Al Lawson of Tallahassee, and created a smaller district in Jacksonville where a Black Democrat might get elected. Mr. DeSantis had proposed maps earlier this year that further eroded minority representation, including in Mr. Lawson’s district.Mr. DeSantis acknowledged that the map lawmakers end up drawing in the special session would still be likely to face a court challenge. The state’s current map was drawn by the courts after Florida voters wrote anti-gerrymandering provisions into the State Constitution in 2010.On Tuesday, the governor appeared to take aim at those provisions, calling them far-reaching and inconsistent. He hinted that in the future, the state might argue in federal court that the provisions were unconstitutional, but he said his intent was not necessarily to repeal them.“Our goal in this was just to have a constitutional map,” he said. “We were not trying to necessarily plot any type of litigation strategy.”He added, “We will obviously say it’s unconstitutional to draw a district like that, where race is the only factor,” referring to Mr. Lawson’s heavily Black district in North Florida.Legislative leaders in Florida told lawmakers to plan to be in Tallahassee for the special session April 19-22. Florida has a relatively late primary election, set for Aug. 23, and voting is unlikely to be threatened by the uncertainty over the maps. However, some House races have yet to attract a full field of candidates, in part because the district lines remain unclear.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Ohio Supreme Court Intensifies a Redistricting Map Standoff

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      Years ago, voters created a commission to make political maps fairer. Now the State Supreme Court is blocking maps drawn by the Republican-led commission, saying nothing has changed.A bipartisan majority of Ohio Supreme Court justices has ratcheted up an extraordinary legal standoff over the state’s political boundaries, rejecting — for the third time in barely two months — new maps of state legislative districts that heavily favor the Republican Party.The decision appears likely to force the state to postpone its primary elections, scheduled to take place on May 3, until new maps of both state legislative seats and districts for the United States House of Representatives pass constitutional muster.The court’s ruling late Wednesday was a blunt rebuff of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, a Republican-dominated body that voters established in 2015 explicitly to make political maps fairer, but that now stands accused of trying to fatten already lopsided G.O.P. majorities in the state’s legislature and the U.S. House.Ohio has become the heart of a nationwide battle over political boundaries that has assumed life-or-death proportions for both Republicans and Democrats, one in which courts like Ohio’s have played an increasingly crucial role.With redistricting complete in all but five states, Democrats have erased much of a huge partisan advantage that Republicans had amassed on the House of Representatives map by dominating the last round of redistricting in 2011. Democrats have also rolled back some of the Republican gerrymanders that have allowed the party to dominate state legislatures.The minority justices in the 4-to-3 ruling in Ohio, all Republicans, said in a bitter dissent that the decision “decrees electoral chaos” by upending election plans and fomenting a constitutional crisis. But the four majority justices, led by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, said it was the Redistricting Commission that was creating chaos by repeatedly drawing maps that violated the State Constitution’s mandate for political fairness.Constitutional scholars and Ohio political experts have said the Redistricting Commission had been betting that the high court would be forced to approve its maps so that it would not shoulder blame for disrupting statewide elections. The court has already complained of foot-dragging by the commission, threatening last month to hold its members in contempt for failing to produce a new state legislative map on time.“There’s this attitude that ‘if we can’t get our way with the court, we’re going to try to run out the clock on them,’” Paul De Marco, a Cincinnati lawyer who specializes in appeals cases, said of the Redistricting Commission, which is made up of five Republicans, including Gov. Mike DeWine, and two Democrats.With the ruling this week, the court effectively called the commission’s bluff.“This court is not a rubber stamp,” Justice Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, wrote in a concurring opinion. “By interpreting and enforcing the requirements of the Ohio Constitution, we do not create chaos or a constitutional crisis — we work to promote the trust of Ohio’s voters in the redistricting of Ohio’s legislative districts.”The stalemate is playing out in a state whose 15 House seats — the seventh-largest congressional delegation in the nation — represent the second-largest trove of congressional districts whose boundaries remain to be drawn for this year’s midterm elections. (Florida, with 28 House seats, is the largest.) The delegation’s partisan makeup could determine control of an almost evenly divided House of Representatives.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.The Ohio Supreme Court is also in a standoff with the Redistricting Commission over the state’s congressional map, having already rejected one version in January as too partisan. It is considering a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the commission’s newly redrawn map of Ohio congressional districts, which would create solidly Republican seats in 10 of the 15 districts. The map would leave Democrats with three safe seats and two competitive seats where the party would hold slight edges.The fight over the maps could well move to federal court, where Republicans have asked that a three-judge panel be created to consider instituting the Redistricting Commission’s rejected maps so that elections can proceed. Chief Judge Algenon L. Marbley of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio declined to act on Monday, noting that the State Supreme Court was considering the maps.But Judge Marbley, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, indicated that he would step in if there were “serious doubts that state processes will produce a state map in time for the primary election.”In North Carolina, Pennsylvania and some other states, state supreme courts have played decisive roles in redistricting this year, casting aside gerrymanders in favor of fairer maps often drawn by nonpartisan experts. The Ohio court is at an impasse because the State Constitution allows the court to reject maps it deems unconstitutional, but gives it no clear authority to make maps more fair, much less to adopt ones that the commission did not draw. Maureen O’Connor, the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court and a Republican, said the state’s G.O.P.-dominated Redistricting Commission was creating chaos by repeatedly drawing maps that violated the Ohio Constitution’s mandate for political fairness. Earl Gibson III/Getty ImagesIt wasn’t supposed to be this way.Ohioans thought they had abolished hyperpartisan political maps for good seven years ago, when they resoundingly approved a constitutional amendment that took mapmaking authority away from politicians in the legislature and gave it to the new commission. That referendum ended a long struggle between voting rights advocates and political leaders of both parties, who had resisted any change in the mapmaking process.The two sides struck a compromise that gave politicians control of the Redistricting Commission, filling its seven seats with elected officials and their appointees, generally favoring the party in power. In return, voting rights groups were granted one of their wishes: a constitutional mandate that the commission draw maps that “correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio,” based on the previous decade’s elections.Seven in 10 voters approved the 2015 amendment. Three years later, another amendment effectively extended the deal to congressional maps.“This issue is proof that when you work together in a bipartisan manner, you can accomplish great things,” Matt Huffman, a Republican state representative from Lima who campaigned for the 2015 amendment, said after it passed.Today Mr. Huffman is the president of the State Senate and sits on the Redistricting Commission. But he now says that the constitutional requirement that maps reflect voters’ preferences was only “aspirational” — a view the Supreme Court rejected in January.Jen Miller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, said that “we mobilized more than 12,000 Ohioans to advocate for fair maps through emails, phone calls and even submitting their own maps.”She added: “What’s disappointing, and shocking for most of us, is that it’s business as usual. Nothing has changed.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Republican in Ohio Senate Primary Spoke Offensively About Asians

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      Mike Gibbons, a leading contender to succeed Senator Rob Portman, made the comments in a 2013 podcast on doing business in China.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.The pandemic has been accompanied by an alarming surge in attacks on Asian Americans across the United States.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Trump-like pitchOn 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 GibbonsLike 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 readPresident 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 segmentPresident Biden spoke in Philadelphia last week. He has argued that solving climate change is a way to create more jobs, and he repeated that theme at a fund-raiser on Monday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesA 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 & LeahIs 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. More

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      How Josh Mandel, Son of Suburban Ohio, Became a Right-Wing Warrior

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      The Senate candidate was a rising Republican when he abandoned his moderate roots. Now, those who have watched his transformation wonder if his rhetoric reflects who he really is.BEACHWOOD, Ohio — In the fall of 2016, Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign was pressing Ohio’s young state treasurer, Josh Mandel, to step it up. A former Marine, he held some sway with Republican voters, and Trump aides wanted him doing more public events.But Mr. Mandel couldn’t quite find the time. He just had so many scheduling conflicts, he joked over breakfast with Matt Cox, a Republican lobbyist and, at the time, a friend. Mr. Cox recalled Mr. Mandel rattling off the excuses he used to avoid being too closely linked to a candidate he wasn’t sold on: Running after his three children, other political commitments, his observance of all those Jewish holidays.Once Mr. Trump won, any reluctance from Mr. Mandel fell away fast. Within weeks, he spoke at the president-elect’s first victory rally, slamming those who were “avoiding Trump” during the election. Five days after the rally, he launched his second bid for Senate, borrowing Mr. Trump’s catchphrases of a “rigged system” and “drain the swamp” for his announcement video.Mr. Mandel has not looked back. As he runs for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, the 44-year-old politician has become one of the nation’s most strident crusaders for Trumpism, melding conspiracy theories and white grievance politics to amass a following that has made him a leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination in this Republican-leaning state.His political evolution — from a son of suburban Cleveland to warrior for the Make America Great Again movement — isn’t unique. Across the country, rising stars of the pre-Trump era have shed the traditional Republicanism of their past to follow Mr. Trump’s far-right brand of politics, cementing the former president’s influence over the next generation of the party’s leaders.Mr. Mandel with a supporter at the Faith and Freedom Rally in Troy, Ohio, last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesBut Mr. Mandel’s transformation has been particularly striking. Friends, strategists and supporters who powered his start in public life say that Mr. Mandel has so thoroughly rejected his political roots in Cleveland’s liberal-leaning suburbs that he is nearly unrecognizable to them. Some are convinced that his shift began as a clear political calculation — following his party to the right. But with his recent entrenchment on the fringe, many now wonder if it is not just Mr. Mandel’s public identity that has changed, but also his beliefs.“He’s twisting himself into something he wasn’t, just to win an election.” said Mr. Cox, who is not a Trump supporter and has donated to Mr. Mandel’s opponents. “Telling obvious lies,” he said, “is not part of the game. It’s intentional. And you have to believe that, if you say it that often.”Mr. Mandel has burned protective masks and blamed the “deep state” for the pandemic and has claimed that former President Barack Obama runs the current White House. He has rejected the separation of church and state and said that he wants to “shut down government schools and put schools in churches and synagogues.” The grandson of Holocaust survivors who were aided by resettlement organizations, he has compared a federal vaccine-or-testing mandate to the actions of the Gestapo, and today’s Afghan refugees to “alligators.”And he denies that President Biden was legitimately elected. “He is my president,” Mr. Mandel said recently in a video, pointing to a Trump sign in an Ohio cornfield.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.“I want to believe that this is a character he is playing,” said Rob Zimmerman, a Democrat and former city councilman from Shaker Heights, Ohio. Mr. Zimmerman spent hours advising and fund-raising for Mr. Mandel, viewing him as a politician who could bridge partisan divides. “It is jaw-droppingly different. The Josh Mandel of 2003 — of 2016, even — would not recognize the Josh Mandel of 2021.”“This,” Mr. Zimmerman added, “has broken my heart.”Since launching this campaign, his third for the Senate, Mr. Mandel has largely spoken through conservative media outlets and his active Twitter account.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesMr. Mandel declined to be interviewed for this article. Since launching this campaign, his third for the Senate, he has largely spoken through conservative media outlets and his active Twitter feed, which was restricted last year for violating the platform’s rules on “hateful conduct.” (Mr. Mandel created a poll asking which “illegals” — either “Muslim Terrorists” or “Mexican Gangbangers” — would commit more crimes.)When a reporter for The New York Times attended a campaign event on Jan. 25 at a church in Troy, Ohio, Mr. Mandel singled him out and denounced the newspaper in Trump-like terms, calling it “the enemy of the people” and “evil.”Elsewhere, Mr. Mandel has disputed that his politics have changed, arguing instead that he is in sync with the people he hopes to represent. “The voters in Ohio in the past two presidential elections have made it very clear, they don’t want a moderate running Ohio or running America,” he told a local cable news station after announcing his candidacy last year. “I’m the opposite of a moderate.”Other Republicans challenge Mr. Mandel’s assessment of what most Ohio voters want. Brad Kastan, a Republican donor who has known Mr. Mandel for two decades, said he worried that the candidate was “painting himself into a corner so far out that he can’t win” in a general election.In a state that has moved to the right, backing Mr. Trump by eight percentage points in 2020, Mr. Mandel has been polling ahead of his primary rivals, including Jane Timken, a former head of the Ohio Republican Party, and J.D. Vance, an author made famous by his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” Much of the primary has revolved around winning Mr. Trump’s endorsement.Last spring, when summoned along with other candidates to Mar-a-Lago to jockey for Mr. Trump’s support, Mr. Mandel promised to hold nothing back to win the seat, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting who asked for anonymity to reveal a private conversation.Mr. Mandel’s stridency has surprised some in Beachwood, an affluent, predominantly Democratic suburb dotted with synagogues, where Mr. Mandel was a quarterback for his high school football team and then married into a wealthy Cleveland family.Mr. Mandel showed an early talent for standing out in a crowd at Ohio State, where he erected a 30-foot inflatable King Kong on the campus green to draw attention to his run for student government and won the presidency, twice.Shortly after graduating from the School of Law at Case Western Reserve, he won a City Council seat in Lyndhurst, a Cleveland suburb, drawing on support from his tight-knit community. When Albert Ratner, a major real estate developer and Ohio power broker, hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Mandel, the candidate made a point of downplaying his Republican affiliation: “I really don’t care about partisanship,” he said, according to several people who recounted the gathering.Mr. Mandel attended just one City Council meeting before deploying to Iraq as an intelligence specialist in the Marine Corps Reserve. On his return trip home, his re-entry into U.S. airspace was announced at a high school football game to a cheering crowd.Mr. Mandel played quarterback for Beachwood High School’s football team and served in Iraq with the Marine Reserve Corps.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesAt 29, he won a seat in the Ohio Legislature, where he showed a keen understanding of the conservative causes that energized party activists. At one point, he took on the State House speaker, a fellow Republican, over a policy requiring ministers who led prayers in the chamber to submit their remarks in advance. The rationale was to avoid proselytizing in the Legislature. Mr. Mandel declared it an affront to religious liberty.“You know who fought the battle for our religious freedom? A 28-year-old Jewish guy,” said Lori Viars, an abortion-rights opponent who supports Mr. Mandel’s Senate bid. “I was so pleased to see him standing up when really no others did.”Running for state treasurer in 2010, Mr. Mandel was accused of trafficking in Muslim stereotypes after a campaign ad falsely implied that Kevin Boyce, the Democratic incumbent and Black man, was a Muslim.But Mr. Mandel’s reaction to the criticism cuts a contrast with the “fighter” image that he projects today. His campaign pulled the ad and he expressed regret, both publicly and privately to Mr. Boyce.“I think he had a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, and I think he knew that wasn’t a right ad,” said Mr. Boyce, whom Mr. Mandel defeated. “He had a very strong reputation then as a moderate Republican and he seemed a little more reasonable.”Mr. Mandel had pledged to serve a full four-year term as treasurer. But he took the first steps toward a Senate campaign just five months after winning the job.He won the 2012 primary by courting Tea Party activists, but ran in the general election against Senator Sherrod Brown, the incumbent Democrat, as a business-friendly Republican. Campaigning that year for Mitt Romney, the G.O.P. presidential nominee, Mr. Mandel said he believed that Ohio voters rejected “hyperpartisanship” and wanted leaders who would “rise above it all to do the right thing.”(Mr. Mandel’s appraisal of Mr. Romney, now a senator and Trump critic, has curdled. “Mitt Romney is a loser,” he said last year.)Mr. Mandel had initially endorsed Marco Rubio in the 2016 presidential race, but he later backed Donald J. Trump. Andrew Harnik/Associated PressMr. Mandel’s sharpest political pivot came after the 2016 presidential race. He had endorsed Marco Rubio, then fell in behind Mr. Trump after he captured the nomination, though he privately expressed doubts about Mr. Trump’s credibility and business acumen and sometimes gave excuses when asked to stump for him, according to friends and former Trump campaign aides.After the October release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women, Mr. Mandel condemned the remarks but affirmed his support for Trump, saying he would be better than Democrats on issues like gun rights, religious liberty and the Supreme Court.Within weeks after Mr. Trump’s victory, Mr. Mandel was matching Mr. Trump in rhetoric and tone.At the postelection Trump rally in Cincinnati, he said Ohio’s cities would become so-called sanctuary cities “over my dead body,” over chants of “Build the wall!”Today, he calls himself Mr. Trump’s “number one ally” in Ohio.Mr. Mandel’s second Senate campaign ended in his withdrawal from the race in January 2018, citing his wife’s health. The two later divorced. The Cincinnati Enquirer is suing to unseal his divorce records. A campaign worker now involved in a relationship with Mr. Mandel has been cited in local news reports as having driven other employees to quit.In Beachwood, discussions of Mr. Mandel’s politics can be as emotionally intense as a family feud. More than a dozen people approached in the affluent suburb declined to be interviewed, some saying they did not want to have to avert their eyes when they saw his relatives at the local coffee shop or the Beechmont Country Club.Some friends and former supporters said that in more recent encounters with Mr. Mandel they had searched for signs of the young man they once supported or even pleaded with him to cease his drift into far-right-wing politics.The criticism, they said, didn’t seem to register.“He made the decision that ‘My path here is to be all-in on Trump,’” said Alan Melamed, a Democratic political consultant who first met Mr. Mandel decades ago. “Since then, he has been going down the path of ‘How far to the right can I go, and how outrageous can I be?’”“People can change,” Mr. Melamed added. “And he did.”Mr. Mandel denies that President Biden was legitimately elected, and has referred to Trump as his president.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesKevin Williams More

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      in US Politics

      Why Ohio is a state to watch in 2022: Politics Weekly Extra – podcast

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      Jonathan Freedland speaks to local Ohioan politics reporter, Andrew Tobias, about why the Senate and gubernatorial midterm races are shaping up to be a litmus test for the influence of Trumpism in Republican success

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