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      Footage reveals Ohio state senator driving during Zoom call

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      An Ohio state senator used a virtual background of his home office in an apparent attempt to conceal the fact that he was driving during a Zoom meeting – on the same day a bill to ban distracted driving was introduced.Andrew Brenner might have succeeded in fooling the meeting with the state’s controlling board, were it not for the seatbelt strapped across his chest, glimpses of the road behind him and the constant turning of his head as he changed lanes.The footage of the meeting, which was streamed live to the public via the state’s broadcaster on Monday, came on the same day Ohio legislators introduced a bill to crack down on dangerous driving, including introducing penalties for texting and livestreaming while behind the wheel.At the start of the video conference of the board, which makes adjustments to the state budget, Brenner appeared in a parked car. A few minutes later, he left the call before reappearing with a different background featuring wooden cabinets, hanging artwork and a houseplant.The Republican, who represents a district north of the state capital Columbus, continued to participate in the call, listening and responding to questions while keeping his eyes mostly on the road ahead. As he drove, the background faltered, revealing glimpses of the view from the driver-side window.Brenner denied that he was driving unsafely. He told The Columbus Dispatch he “wasn’t distracted” during the meeting and was “paying attention to the driving and listening to” the discussion.“I wasn’t distracted. I was paying attention to the driving and listening to it [the meeting],” he said. “And I’ve actually been on other calls, numerous calls, while driving. Phone calls for the most part, but on video calls, I’m not paying attention to the video. To me, it’s like a phone call.”The incident coincided with the introduction of a bill to Ohio’s General Assembly to penalise unsafe driving. House bill 283 proposes expanding a ban on texting while driving, currently a secondary offence in the state, to explicitly outlawing texting, livestreaming, taking photos and the use of mobile apps while driving. It makes both the holding and use of an electronic device while driving a primary offence.The state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said he planned to include provisions against distracted driving in his upcoming budget proposal. He said in a press statement last year: “Ohio’s current laws don’t go far enough to change the culture around distracted driving, and people are dying because of it.“Distracted driving is a choice that must be as culturally unacceptable as drunk driving is today, and strengthening our current laws will lead to more responsible driving.”Brenner’s multitasking joins the growing ranks of professionals who have pushed the boundaries of acceptable Zoom behaviour during the pandemic, ranging from the morally precarious to the downright hilarious.Last month, Rebecca Saldaña, a Democratic state senator in Washington, apologised after joining a Zoom hearing while driving, the Seattle Times reported, while in February, a California plastic surgeon came under an ethics investigation after appearing at a virtual traffic court hearing from an operating theatre.Meanwhile, the Canadian MP William Amos apologised after appearing stark naked during a virtual parliamentary session last month, covering his private parts with a phone as he stood between the flags of Quebec and Canada after his laptop camera accidentally turned on during the call. And a Texas lawyer went viral in February after he was left unable to undo a Zoom filter during a hearing and had to inform the judge that he was not a cat. More

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      Val Demings: officer who shot Ma’Khia Bryant ‘responded as he was trained’

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      Val Demings, a Democratic congresswoman and a former police chief, said on Sunday the officer who fatally shot teenager Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio this week “responded as he was trained to do”.In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Demings spoke about the Columbus officer’s actions and how her time as Orlando police chief informed her perspective on police reform.Ma’Khia, 16, was shot and killed on Tuesday, about 20 minutes before the former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.Franklin county, where Ma’Khia was killed, has one of the highest rates of fatal police shootings in the US. In a departure from protocol, officials released body camera footage soon after Ma’Khia was killed. The video appears to show her swinging a knife at another individual. Officer Nicholas Reardon shoots at Ma’Khia, who falls.One of Ma’Khia’s close friends, Aaliyaha Tucker, told the Columbus Dispatch her friend was funny, kind, helpful and outgoing. “She’ll talk about how beautiful that you are,” Tucker said. “She was just a nice person.”On Saturday, a rally was held in memory of Ma’Khia’s at the Ohio statehouse.On CBS, host John Dickerson asked Demings about Reardon’s conduct, which would still be protected under a police reform bill, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which has passed the US House. The bill would restrain police officers from using excessive force unless a third party was in danger and de-escalation was not possible.“Everybody has the benefit of slowing the video down and seizing the perfect moment,” Demings said. “The officer on the street does not have that ability. He or she has to make those split-second decisions and they’re tough. “But the limited information that I know in viewing the video, it appears that the officer responded as he was trained to do with the main thought of preventing a tragedy and a loss of life of the person who was about to be assaulted.”Dickerson asked what Demings would say to officers who believe they are being scrutinized unfairly because of an increased focus on accountability. She said that when she spoke to officers, she told them to remember their training and that they work with human beings, and to use compassion.“The overwhelming majority of law enforcement officers in this nation are good people who go to work every day to protect and serve our communities,” Demings said. “I remind them of that. Always stand on the right side. Speak up.” More

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      'A good start but miles to go': progressive Nina Turner on Biden and Democrats' future

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      When Joe Biden, a 78-year-old white male moderate, was sworn in as US president, it was seen as only a matter of time before progressives became restive and “Democrats in disarray” headlines were dusted off.But two months in, the party remains uncharacteristically united. Biden is being hailed as an unlikely radical, drawing comparisons with transformative presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson – his very reputation as a steady centrist enabling him to move further and faster.How long can the Democratic honeymoon last?One key arbiter of this grace period is the influential figure of Nina Turner, a longtime backer of Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-declared democratic socialist beaten by Biden in last year’s party primary. She believes the signs are encouraging – so far.“He’s doing all right but we’re going to press on, we’re going to keep pressing,” says Turner, 53, currently campaigning for election to Congress in Ohio. “We haven’t got all that we need but this is a good start. The people are the north star, not those of us who are politicians, and their needs are great. You got 33 million people out there who need a $15-an-hour minimum wage. So, a good start but we got many more miles to go.”A former Ohio state senator, Turner was a national surrogate for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, led its spin-off grassroots organisation Our Revolution and served as national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 run. Her own shot at national office in Ohio’s 11th congressional district has come about after Marcia Fudge resigned to become housing secretary under Biden.Turner was endorsed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including Jamie Raskin of Maryland. If successful in the Democratic primary in August and the special election in November, she would cement her position as a leader of the left of the party.Ohio voted twice for Barack Obama but then twice for Donald Trump as Republicans made gains among blue-collar voters. Turner reflects: “When I ran for secretary of state in 2014, what I heard in the rural areas of the state was there is a need for Democrats to show that it’s not just two corporate parties that people are choosing between, that the Democratic party really does get it.“We got to go back to the roots of FDR and the roots of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm – that kind of service speaks to the people of the great state of Ohio, whether they’re urban, suburban or rural. I know that it does because I was out there on the stump for President Obama, especially in 2012.”Biden’s sweeping $1.9tn coronavirus relief package, including direct cash payments to millions of Americans and measures to cut child poverty nearly in half, was seen as a win for working families. But it was not an unalloyed victory: Sanders’ amendment to include increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour was struck down by Republicans and moderate Democrats.Turner says: “The Covid relief bill is certainly a good start. That $1.9tn is a big deal; I think it’s 10% of GDP. It’s strong and the reason why we’re there is because progressives were pushing. Now we need to get that $15-an-hour minimum wage over the finish line because it’s the floor and not the ceiling.“We got to address the systemic problems that were there before the pandemic with systemic solutions and I believe the Democratic party can do it. And I’m going to Congress to help them along the way.”Biden’s bold advance may soon stall, however, on Capitol Hill. Senate Republicans in the minority can use a procedural mechanism called the filibuster to block his legislative agenda on gun control, healthcare, voting rights and much else. Many on the left regard the filibuster as a relic of the Jim Crow era and are calling for it to be abolished so that Democrats could pass bills with a simple majority.But Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continue to support it. “They are on the wrong side of history,” Turner says. “Senator Joe Manchin needs to get a spine. People deserve to have robust debate in both chambers and not have it prohibited by people who want to play games with people’s lives.“While they collect their salary off the taxpayer’s dime, people like Manchin and Sinema have the pure and unadulterated gall to stand in the way of the people getting the resources that they need. There’s a moral contradiction there that must be addressed.”Manchin, from pro-Trump West Virginia, has defended the filibuster by articulating hopes of reviving bipartisanship. Biden promised to unify the nation but found Republicans unyielding in their opposition to the coronavirus relief bill. Turner warns the president against over-stretching to accommodate the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.“President Obama came in as the diplomat that he is – ‘I want bipartisanship’ – and tried to negotiate with these Republicans. Dr Maya Angelou said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ They already showed us Democrats who they are and we ought to believe them and so I don’t want to see President Biden fall into that trap.“It was tried and tested under President Obama: the Republicans under Senator McConnell are just not going to do right and so Democrats are going to have to take the rein for these two years that we have and use the people’s power on the people’s behalf.“That is why the people gave us the presidency. That is why they answered the call in Georgia and that is why they allowed Democrats to keep control of the House. Now we’re going to have to show people something or we might be in for a rude awakening in 2022.”Turner, an assistant professor of history and podcast host, argues that opinion polls show a majority of Americans agree with progressives on issues ranging from the Green New Deal to canceling student debt, from increasing the minimum wage to reforming the legal system, especially for racial justice.“The thing that we are seeing coming from President Biden, even though it might not be all that progressives want, the progressives cast the die. The American people might not call themselves progressives, but when we drill down to talk to them about the issues, they are right where we are.“What we’re talking about is not radical. The people who are out of touch are people like Senator Joe Manchin and Senator Mitch McConnell because the last time I checked, there are poor people in Kentucky and there are poor people in West Virginia, just as there are poor people in Ohio who need their elected leaders to provide relief for them. That’s all we’re asking.”In the New York Times, Ezra Klein has noted that the $1.9tn stimulus package looks a lot like the proposals Sanders has fought for all his career. “Bernie Sanders didn’t win the 2020 election,” he wrote. “But he may have won its aftermath.”Does Turner believe that, after all these years, Sanders has been vindicated?“Sometimes visionaries are ahead of their time and, whether it was popular or not, he has stayed consistent and now the people have caught up with his vision,” she says. “The progressive movement – but America, by extension – is right where Senator Bernard Sanders is on these issues. We’re going to keep pushing.”An intrigue of the next four years is whether Biden will backslide – and whether Sanders will call him out on it. Turner adds: “You can both recognise somebody saying that President Biden’s on the right path and at the same time continue to push. Those things are not mutually exclusive. So I wouldn’t say the progressives are necessarily keeping their powder dry; they’re saying we are off to a good start but we got to make this thing better.” More

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      JD Vance eyes Ohio’s Senate seat as a working-class man – with millions in tech funds

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      As a prospective conservative candidate for the US Senate from Ohio, author JD Vance can claim a rarely authentic connection to the white working-class voters who helped make Donald Trump president.In his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the tale of his escape from generations of poverty and addiction in the shadow of Appalachia, thanks to a fiercely loving grandmother and a stroke or two of lonesome luck. (The Netflix film adaptation was less well received than the book.)Even if Vance, 36, were a Democrat, his life story – the Marines, Yale law school, venture capital, national renown – would make for political biography gold.But as the Republican party embarks on a highly tenuous makeover, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, from being “the party of the country clubs” to the party of the working class, Vance and his political fortunes have attracted a disproportionate share of excitement in conservative circles – and a mounting pile of actual gold.Before he has even confirmed that he will run for office, Vance has built a campaign slush fund worth at least $10m on the strength of donations from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a formerly ardent Trump supporter, and the hedge fund heiress-slash-Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, Forbes magazine first reported.The new working-class face of the Republican party, it seems, will be rolled out on a distinctly ruling class budget.But a successful Vance candidacy might be worth a very large sum indeed for Republicans, who could see a rare opportunity to confer blue-collar legitimacy on the tricky project of sweeping decades of hostility on workers’ issues – from wages to unions to health care to the giant economic relief package signed into law by Joe Biden just last month – behind a red curtain.“They’re not going to get there on the standard worker issues,” said David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic party, of the Republican attempt to rebrand. “There’s no way.”The conventional wisdom among political strategists has long been that the Republican party, whose supporters are disproportionately white, faces a demographic timebomb as the US electorate diversifies. Trump knocked down the theory a bit last year by making inroads among Latinos and, to a lesser extent, African American men.The “working-class” pitch is partly an appeal to those new Republican-curious voters. But Trump also pointed to another, powerful way for the Republican party to extend its reach: by winning an ever-greater share of working-class white voters, the kind who might have once belonged to a union and voted Democratic, but who backed Trump in both 2016 and 2020 by a margin 40 points greater than the national spread.Republican strategists are brainstorming about how to retain those voters. An internal Republican memo revealed this week by Axios, called Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party, advised that “House Republicans can broaden our electorate, increase voter turnout, and take back the House by enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class.”Plutocrats inside the party who might disagree are keeping mum for now, or placing their bets discreetly, while the party’s leading firebrands in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election – senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – have taken up the message and are running with it.“The Republican party is not the party of the country clubs, it’s the party of hardworking, blue-collar men and women,” Cruz hypnotically declared in February, in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).“We are a working-class party now,” Hawley tweeted a day after the November election. “That’s the future.”Democratic partisans snipe that a half-century long commitment by Republicans to increasing the comfort of America’s wealthiest combined with a more recent strategy of trying to prevent voters from voting cannot be erased with simple assertions of newborn political intent.But unfortunately for Democrats, in a world where politics has largely come detached from policy – taken over by culture wars and other more sinister currents roiled by Trump, including racist resentments and the scapegoating of immigrants – the Republican strategy is not dead on arrival, as top Democratic strategists themselves admit.“The Democratic party envisions themselves as the party of working people,” said David Axelrod, former Barack Obama adviser, in a debrief of the 2020 election, “but it doesn’t feel that way to a lot of working people, and the party needs to figure that out.”Both sides acknowledge that branding is important, and in 2022 in Ohio, that could be where Vance comes in. The Senate seat in play unexpectedly opened earlier this year, when incumbent Republican Rob Portman, a mild-mannered Trump skeptic who nevertheless supported the former president, indicated he had had enough of Washington.Older-style conservatives, who dislike Trump but might nod knowingly at the scenes in Vance’s book describing people who “gamed the welfare system”, have encouraged him to get in the race.“I hope Vance will run for Ohio Senator Rob Portman’s seat in 2022,” tweeted Rod Dreher, senior editor of the American Conservative magazine. “He is exactly the kind of new Republican we need.”Assuming that Vance’s Yale law degree or Silicon Valley money would not torpedo his working-class credibility with Ohio voters, however, he could face a second crisis of authenticity, one that could stop his candidacy short before he gets to face a single Democratic opponent.To get to the general election, if he runs, Vance must first survive a Republican primary race – and in the cutthroat world of base Republican politics, where fealty to Trump is all-important, Vance is distinctly vulnerable.“I think that I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance told NPR on book tour in 2016. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”Perhaps even worse, Vance wrote admiringly of Barack Obama in the New York Times in 2017, saying he would “miss” the former president “and the example he set”.His primary opponents would hammer him relentlessly on plentiful past statements such as those, and in recent months a new version of JD Vance has been scrambling furiously away from the old JD Vance. He has tweeted broadsides against the “ruling class”; suggested that immigrants represent a pandemic threat; appeared on Fox News to trash Meghan and Harry, and bash Biden on immigration; gone after big tech, as he takes Silicon Valley money; and even played Twitter footsie with QAnon.“He’s clearly trying to mimic this Trump genuflection that we’re seeing from some of the other candidates, which is kind of embarrassing for JD Vance, because his brand was very different just a couple years ago,” said Pepper, the former Democratic party chair.It remains to be seen whether the internal tensions – not to say hypocrisies – of a Vance candidacy funded by coastal cash, or of the greater Republican rebranding project, will prove too great to sustain in real life. For now, they are both untested political theories.But with a $10m war chest, Vance has enough to get in the game.“That’s a lot of money, that will help him a lot,” said Pepper, adding that Vance’s popularity as an author belied a low name-recognition, for now, among Ohio voters. “But if the only reason he’s in the game is because of coastal big tech, it kills the ‘I’m-a-Trump-guy’ narrative – but it also kills his narrative about representing the working man.” More

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      Fauci warns against lifting Covid measures but Republican states push on

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      The top infectious disease expert in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, has warned it is too early to end Covid-19 restrictions, despite Texas and Mississippi having lifted mask mandates and business capacity limits this week.States are easing restrictions after a drop in cases, though that decline is starting to plateau at a high rate of 60,000 to 70,000 infections per day.“We’re going in the right direction but we just need to hang on a bit longer,” Fauci said on Sunday, to CBS’s Face the Nation.Public health experts have warned that the US could undermine progress with vaccines and allow for thousands of preventable deaths by lifting restrictions at the first sign of improvements. More than 524,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the US and January was its deadliest month of the pandemic so far.Fauci, chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, said turning restrictions “on and off” risked another surge.“This is not going to be indefinite, we need to gradually pull back as we get people vaccinated,” he said.Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who advised Biden’s transition team, warned the US was still “in the eye of the hurricane”.Osterholm told NBC’s Meet the Press the situation appeared to be improving, but said he was concerned the B117 variant, which is 50% more infectious than other variants in the US, could create a new surge.“We do have to keep America as safe as we can from this virus by not letting up on any of the public health measures we’ve taken and we need to get people vaccinated as quickly as we can,” said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.On CNN’s State of the Union, the Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves, said he lifted restrictions in his state because of declining rates of hospitalizations.“Our objective in Mississippi has never been to rid ourselves of the virus … our goal is to make sure we protect the integrity of our healthcare system,” the Republican said.Mississippi has seen an average of 461 cases per day, down 17% from the average two weeks ago, according to the New York Times. There were 1,240 deaths from Covid-19 in the state in January, the highest of any month since the pandemic began. About 16% of residents have received a first vaccine dose.“The numbers in Mississippi don’t justify government intervention,” said Reeves, who encouraged residents to keep wearing masks in crowded settings.Other governors have celebrated their state’s mask mandates and said they will remain in place until there is a substantial improvement in infection rates.Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, told ABC’s This Week his state’s mask order was followed by a “significant drop in cases”.“We’ve seen it throughout this last year, these mask really, really work,” DeWine said.He said his state would drop health orders once it had 50 cases or fewer per 100,000 people for two weeks. Though rates were still high in Ohio, he said, the state’s vaccination distribution was getting better each day.“But as we’re doing that, we can’t give up the defense,” DeWine said.The dean of Brown University’s school of public health, Ashish Jha, said decisions such as those by Reeves and Texas governor Greg Abbott to lift restrictions could slow the process of getting life back to normal and put residents at risk of infection and death.“Given how close we are to the finish line, anybody who gets infected today and dies in three or four weeks is somebody who would have gotten vaccinated a month from now,” Jha told ABC. “This is why it’s urgent to just keep going for a little bit longer.” More

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      Democrats Want a Stronger Edge in the Senate. Ohio Could Be Crucial.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDemocrats Want a Stronger Edge in the Senate. Ohio Could Be Crucial.The retirement of a moderate Republican senator and conservative infighting have raised Democratic ambitions in the state, a longtime political bellwether that is increasingly tilting red.Ohio served as a political bellwether and swing-state proving ground for years, but has recently been dominated by Republicans.Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMarch 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCOLUMBUS, Ohio — For Democrats of late, winning in Ohio has been a bit like Lucy and the football.First, Hillary Clinton made a late push there in 2016, returning to the state on the weekend before the election with no less a local celebrity than LeBron James, even though she had stayed away for much of the fall. Then, in the 2018 governor’s race, Democrats were optimistic about Richard Cordray, the wonky former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And in November, it was President Biden who made an 11th-hour stop in Ohio, even though his campaign was also skeptical about its chances there.Each candidate lost, and for the two presidential hopefuls, it was not even close.But Ohio Democrats are getting their hopes up again, aiming to capitalize on Senator Rob Portman’s surprise announcement last month that he was retiring and on Republican infighting after more than a decade of G.O.P. dominance at the state level.“I think people will look for something different,” Senator Sherrod Brown, the only remaining Democrat in statewide office, said of his party’s chances to pick up the Portman seat in 2022. “There’s a whole lot of people whose lives have gotten worse in the last five to 10 years.”If Democrats are to increase their Senate seats significantly beyond the 50 they now hold, with the party relying on Vice President Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker in the event of a 50-50 deadlock, states like Ohio are essential. They owe their narrow advantage to the fast-growing South and West, having picked up Republican-held seats in three states — Georgia, Arizona and Colorado — that Mr. Biden also carried in November.Yet the president’s recent challenges with some of his appointments and coronavirus relief legislation make the limitations of such fragile Senate control vividly clear: To claim something larger than what’s effectively a Joe Manchin majority, in which appointments and the shape of legislation can be determined by a single red-state senator, Democrats will have to go on the offensive next year in a part of the country that has proved far more fickle for them: the industrial Midwest.Mr. Biden’s hopes for working with a more expansive majority will hinge on whether his party can capture a cluster of Republican-held seats across the Big Ten region: in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa. Former President Barack Obama won all of those states both times he ran, but they have become more forbidding for Democrats, or at least more competitive, as working-class white voters have become more reliable Republicans since the rise of former President Donald J. Trump.“If we’re going to have a real majority for Biden, we’ve got to figure out how we can get up to 52 to 53 seats, and that means Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin,” said Doug Thornell, a Democratic strategist. (Iowa, which has been as difficult for Democrats as Ohio in recent years, may be competitive as a Senate battleground, but only if its longtime Senator Charles E. Grassley, 87, retires.)Senator Rob Portman of Ohio announced he would not seek re-election in 2022, creating an open seat during the midterm elections.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBeyond the question of the Senate majority, how these states behave in 2022 could carry profound implications. If they revert to a more Democratic orientation in the aftermath of the Trump era, it would suggest that the rightward shift of working-class white voters in recent years was driven by affection for one outsize figure. If Republicans win across the region, though, it may portend a more enduring realignment and raise sobering questions for Democrats about the Senate and presidential maps.And few states, in the Midwest or beyond, have the symbolic resonance of Ohio, which for decades served as a political bellwether and swing-state proving ground. Now, however, even the most optimistic Ohio Democrats acknowledge that they reside in a Republican-leaning state and must take lessons on how to compete from their ideological counterparts in other precincts of red-state America.“We should look at how Democrats won in Montana and Kansas,” said Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, who is planning a run for governor next year. “That’s a new place for us to look because we’ve always been a battleground, but national messages don’t fit right into Ohio.”One of the most consequential questions for Ohio Democrats is out of their hands: What direction will Republicans take in the Biden era? “Where they land is going to be a big deal,” Ms. Whaley said.Had Mr. Portman run for re-election, this would have been a far less weighty question in Ohio. He and Gov. Mike DeWine, another establishment-aligned and well-known incumbent, would have campaigned on their own political brands, never confronting Mr. Trump but also never embracing him, either.Now, though, the open Senate seat is thrusting the loyalty-obsessed former president to the forefront of his party’s nascent primary, as the announced candidates compete to see who can hug Mr. Trump tightest.Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer who twice ran against Mr. Brown before withdrawing from the 2018 race and disappearing from public view, has resurfaced as an ardent MAGA man. In interviews and tweets since entering the race to succeed Mr. Portman, he has claimed that Mr. Trump’s second impeachment prompted him to run — never mind his previous two bids — and vowed to advance Mr. Trump’s “America First Agenda.”Perhaps more striking, though, is the maneuvering by Jane Timken, a wealthy executive who was elevated to the chair of the Ohio Republican Party in 2017 in part because Mr. Trump took the extraordinary step as president-elect to make calls to party activists on her behalf.Mr. Portman, hinting where his eventual preferences may lie, has praised Ms. Timken, saying that “over the last couple of years, she has somehow managed through her communications and her organizing to keep all wings of the party moving in the same direction.”Jane Timken, right, a wealthy executive who was elevated to the chair of the Ohio Republican Party in 2017, is expected to begin a campaign for the Senate seat.Credit…Aaron Doster/Associated PressYet Ms. Timken’s conduct since the start of this year illustrates the high-wire act Mr. Trump may force Republicans to execute in next year’s election.The weekend after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Ms. Timken, then still the state party chair, sent an email to Republicans urging them to “remember that whether it comes to our country or our party, our shared progress and prosperity is never about one person, one candidate or one government official.”A few weeks later, addressing a question about the decision by Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio to vote to impeach Mr. Trump, Ms. Timken said she was not sure she would have made the same choice but added that he had “a rational reason” for his vote. She called him “an effective legislator.”Ms. Timken changed her tune, however, just hours before quitting her state party post last month as she prepared to enter the Senate race.“Anthony Gonzalez made the wrong decision on impeachment and I disagree with his vote,” she said. “This sham impeachment is illegal and unconstitutional.”And then, just this week, Ms. Timken, under pressure to show her fealty to Mr. Trump, issued a statement demanding that Mr. Gonzalez resign from his seat. Her campaign, seeing private polling that showed an overwhelming majority of Ohio Republicans wanted to oust Mr. Gonzalez, realized it needed to put the issue to bed, according to one adviser.Tim Ryan, a Democrat who represents a district in northeastern Ohio in Congress, is considering a run for Senate in the stateCredit…Eric Thayer for The New York TimesA number of Ohio Republicans were struck by the speed of her shift, including one who may also enter the Senate race: Representative Steve Stivers, the former chair of the House G.O.P. campaign arm.“Wait till you quit before you attack somebody,” Mr. Stivers said of Ms. Timken’s broadside on Mr. Gonzalez.While he has yet to announce his intentions, Mr. Stivers, who has said he would prefer Mr. Trump to enjoy a quiet retirement à la George W. Bush, believes the competition to cozy up to the former president could leave an opening in the primary.“My lane is looking pretty empty,” he said. “I should be able to go about 180 miles per hour in it.”Though it’s uncertain how strong Mr. Trump’s political standing will be next year, particularly if he were to be indicted in one of the criminal investigations he faces, many veterans of Ohio politics believe the only path to the Republican Senate nomination is through the former president.“Jane would be honored to have the president’s endorsement,” said Corry Bliss, who ran Mr. Portman’s 2016 campaign and is advising Ms. Timken. He made sure to note that she had been Mr. Trump’s “handpicked chair.”To a number of Ohio Republicans, the importance of their eventual nominee pales in comparison to what they believe is the fundamental political math of a state that absorbs the Rust Belt and Appalachia. “Our suburban losses are dwarfed by their losses among working-class whites,” said Nick Everhart, a Columbus-based G.O.P. strategist.Ohio Democrats don’t deny that they are underdogs — or that to win, they may need the Republican Party to remain fractured.They point to the scandal-plagued Statehouse, where the House speaker is under federal indictment on corruption charges, as well as tensions between Trumpian legislators and the mild-mannered Mr. DeWine. Then there’s Mr. Trump and the widening gap between how he’s viewed by Republican activists and the broader electorate.“I don’t know if I’d call it a prerequisite for us to win, but their chaos is our opportunity,” said Liz Walters, the newly elected Ohio Democratic state chair.But Ohio Democrats may have their own drama.Emilia Strong Sykes, the state House minority leader, said progressive groups had encouraged her to run for the Senate seat.Credit…Paul Vernon/Associated PressWhile Representative Tim Ryan, a veteran Youngstown-area lawmaker, has been clear about his intent to run for Mr. Portman’s seat, he may face a primary that would highlight some of the tensions in the Democratic coalition.Lamenting how Mr. Trump had tapped into the “angst, anger and frustration” of onetime Ohio Democrats, longtime Representative Marcy Kaptur said that Mr. Ryan, who like her represents one of the lowest-income, predominantly white districts in the country, would “be able to reach people” the party has lost.A handful of other Democrats are considering entering the Senate race. They include Amy Acton, the former director of the state health department; Emilia Strong Sykes, the state House minority leader; and Kevin Boyce, a local official in Columbus who previously served in the state House. Ms. Sykes said the party’s turnout efforts in Ohio’s cities had been “awful” and called for a new approach.“Recreating Sherrod Brown — that doesn’t work because Sherrod Brown is Sherrod Brown,” she said, a barely veiled reference to Mr. Ryan’s attempt to pitch himself as a white populist. “We’re going to have to find a candidate who’s exciting and can appeal to women and people of color.”Ms. Sykes, who is Black, said she had been encouraged to run for the Senate by a handful of progressive advocacy groups and was assessing the landscape.She spoke for a number of Ohio Democrats when she said that Mr. Portman’s surprise retirement had prompted an otherwise depressed party to again place hope over history.“Had he not done that, it would’ve been a lost cause,” she said of the senator’s exit. “But now there’s new energy and we have to at least try.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tim Ryan Is Said to Plan Senate Bid

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTim Ryan, a Top Democrat in Ohio, Is Said to Plan Senate BidMr. Ryan, who mounted a long-shot campaign for president in 2019, plans to compete for the state’s open Senate seat. His campaign will test Democrats’ strength in a state tilting to the right.Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio has argued that Democrats will build enduring majorities only if they reclaim support from a multiracial, working-class coalition of voters.Credit…Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesFeb. 1, 2021, 5:34 p.m. ETRepresentative Tim Ryan of Ohio plans to run for his state’s open Senate seat, Democrats who have spoken with him said, a bid that would test whether even a Democrat with roots in the blue-collar Youngstown region and close ties to organized labor can win in the increasingly Republican state.Mr. Ryan, an 18-year House veteran, has reached out to a host of Ohio and national Democrats in recent days about the seat now held by Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who stunned officials in both parties by announcing last week that he would retire.Former Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, a Democrat who has been encouraging Mr. Ryan to run, said of the congressman, “I think he is the person with the best chance, given this political climate we’re in and given the way Ohio has been performing.”“He has the ability to appeal to a lot of independents, and Democrats will be very excited about this candidacy,” Mr. Strickland said.Mr. Ryan has also discussed his candidacy with Representative Marcy Kaptur, the longest-serving member in Ohio’s congressional delegation, and national labor leaders, including Lee Saunders of Afscme, while also receiving a nudge from Hillary Clinton.Asked about these conversations, Mr. Ryan said on Monday that he was “encouraged by their support, enthusiasm and commitment,” adding, “The U.S. Senate needs another working-class voice, and I’m very serious about the opportunity to continue representing the people of Ohio.”He is expected to declare his candidacy by the beginning of March, according to Democrats briefed on his planning.Long one of the country’s quintessential political battlegrounds, Ohio has turned sharply right since former President Donald J. Trump’s ascent. Mr. Trump carried the state by eight percentage points in 2016 and won it again by the same margin last year, even as Joseph R. Biden Jr. emphasized his working-class appeal and made a late push in the state.Senator Sherrod Brown is the only Democrat remaining in statewide office in Ohio. And even with his fiercely populist approach, Mr. Brown has lost ground among once-reliable Democrats in eastern Ohio, including those in the industrial area south of Lake Erie and in the more rural enclaves that trace the Ohio River.Mr. Ryan hails from Niles, Ohio, just north of Youngstown, a region filled with voters who are effectively Trump Democrats, many of them union members or retirees. He outperformed Mr. Biden in his district, but Democrats there suffered a series of losses in other down-ballot races.The question, should Mr. Ryan become his party’s nominee, is if he can win back these mostly white voters.Mr. Ryan has long considered running statewide, but in the past decided on seeking re-election to the House seat he first won in 2002, when he succeeded the famously fiery, and corrupt, James Traficant.Mr. Ryan mounted a long-shot bid for the presidency in 2019 with the same message he’s expected to carry into the Senate contest — that Democrats will build enduring majorities only if they reclaim support from a multiracial, working-class coalition of voters.Beyond elevating that argument, Mr. Ryan, 47, has another compelling reason to run for the Senate: As Republicans grow stronger in eastern Ohio, his district has become increasingly competitive, and the Republican Party could redraw the state’s districts to make it even more forbidding for him in 2022.While he has risen on the Appropriations Committee, Mr. Ryan has mostly given up on his hopes to join the House leadership, having been turned back in his 2016 challenge against Nancy Pelosi, then the minority leader.In Congress, Mr. Ryan has been a close ally of unions and has generally toed the Democratic line, shifting toward a stance in support of abortion rights in recent years. Even before formally announcing his bid, Mr. Ryan drew support from the state chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which on Monday released a letter endorsing his undeclared candidacy.Mr. Ryan will enter the Senate race as an early front-runner. He is one of the few Democrats left in the state’s congressional delegation, and represents a region of the state the party is desperate to reclaim. He also has deep relationships with national leaders.On Saturday, Mrs. Clinton publicly encouraged Mr. Ryan to run for the Senate, repaying him for his support for her when she ran against Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primary race.“You’re right, Kathy!” Mrs. Clinton wrote on Twitter, promoting a message from a Democratic activist in Ohio, Kathy DiCristofaro, who wrote that “Ohio needs leaders like @timryan to fight for working people.”Mr. Ryan also has an ally in the White House, having endorsed Mr. Biden in November 2019, a low ebb in the race for the candidate.It’s unlikely, though, that the congressman will run unopposed for the Senate nomination. One Democrat whose name has been floated for the seat, Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, said she was “thinking about it” when asked on the day Mr. Portman announced his retirement. Ms. Whaley is also considering a run for governor, though, and many Ohio Democrats believe she and Mr. Ryan would try to avoid clashing in a primary.Equally intriguing to some Democrats in the state is Dr. Amy Acton, who as the former director of Ohio’s Department of Health ran the coronavirus response effort last year for Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican. She is considering joining the race, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland reported last week, and received her own online boost when Connie Schultz, a longtime Ohio columnist and the wife of Mr. Brown, wrote on Twitter: “Imagine Dr. Amy Acton as Ohio’s next U.S. senator. I sure can.”The Republicans are likely to have an even more crowded primary field. The race appears to be wide open after the announcement last week by Representative Jim Jordan, the far-right Trump ally whom the former president awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, that he would remain in the House.A number of other House members may run, including Representative Steve Stivers, a Columbus-area lawmaker. A host of would-be self-funders are also eyeing the seat, including Jane Timken, the chair of the Ohio Republican Party.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Ohio nearly purged 10,000 voters who ended up casting 2020 ballots

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      More than 10,000 people who Ohio believed had “abandoned” their voter registration cast ballots in the 2020 election, raising more concern that officials are using an unreliable and inaccurate method to identify ineligible voters on the state’s rolls.In August, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, released a list of 115,816 people who were set to be purged after the November election because the election officials in each of Ohio’s 88 counties flagged them as inactive. Voters could remove their name from the list by taking a number of election-related actions, including voting, requesting an absentee ballot, or simply confirming their voter registration information.Last week, LaRose’s office announced that nearly 18,000 people on the initial list did not have their voter registration canceled, including 10,000 people who voted in the November election. About 98,000 registrations were ultimately removed from the state’s rolls, LaRose’s office announced last month. There are more than 8 million registered voters in the state.In a statement, LaRose said the fact that so many people prevented their voter registrations from being canceled is a success of the state’s unprecedented efforts to notify voters at risk of being purged. But voting rights groups say the fact that Ohio nearly purged thousands of eligible voters is deeply alarming and underscores the inaccurate and haphazard way the state goes about maintaining its voter rolls.“If we have 10,000 people who on their own volition are voting, we know that there’s probably many more who are still living, breathing, eligible Ohioans, who also have not moved, who also have been removed from the rolls,” said Jen Miller, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of the League of Women Voters.Federal law requires states to regularly review their voter lists for ineligible voters, but Ohio has one of the most aggressive processes for cancelling registrations in the United States. A voter can be removed from the rolls if they don’t vote or undertake any political activity for six consecutive years and fail to respond to a mailer asking to confirm their address after the first two.Voting advocates argue Ohio’s process essentially removes people from the rolls because they don’t vote, which is prohibited under federal law, and is more likely to target minorities and the poor. The US supreme court upheld the Ohio process in a 5-4 decision in 2018.Naila Awan, a lawyer at Demos, a civil rights thinktank that helped challenge the Ohio process at the US supreme court, said she wasn’t surprised that eligible voters were flagged on the August list of people at risk of being purged.“Voting inactivity is a really poor proxy for identifying individuals who may have become ineligible by reason of having moved. The data across the board shows that this is fundamentally a flawed process and there has to be something better to use,” she said.The recent purge marks the second time in recent memory that Ohio has nearly purged scores of eligible voters from its rolls. Months ahead of a scheduled purge in 2019, the state released a list of 235,000 people who were set to be removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups found more than 40,000 eligible voters included on it and were able to prevent them from being removed.Democratic and Republican officials alike have overseen purging for years in Ohio, but a 2016 Reuters analysis illustrated the way the practice can disproportionally hurt Democrats. In the state’s three largest counties, voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods were struck from the rolls at twice the rate of those in GOP areas, the analysis found. In heavily Black areas of Cincinnati, more than 10% of voters were removed from the rolls between 2012 and 2016 because of inactivity, compared with just 4% in one of the city’s suburbs.In the months before the 2020 election, Keizayla Fambro, an organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a grassroots group that focuses on empowering people of color in the state, was focused on voter registration in counties that are home to some of Ohio’s biggest cities. She estimated her group encountered one to two people a week who were on the purge list and whom they urged to update their voter registration.“We would check them on a name and we would be like, ‘Oh my God, your voter registration needs to be updated, you could have been purged,’” she said. “Honestly, it was coincidence.”For those who move a lot, updating a voter registration was often the last thing they were thinking about, Fambro said. “You’re thinking about, ‘Oh, I have to get my kid in this school. I have to make sure we have somewhere to sleep,’” she said.People of color, the poor, non-English speakers and minorities also tend to experience more severe barriers in getting to the polls, making them more likely to be flagged for purging under a system that relies on inactivity, Awan said.“When you’re using something like the number of elections a person has missed, you’re going to, by necessity almost, be disproportionately targeting people who experience more barriers getting to the polling locations to begin with,” she said.Miller and other voting advocates have praised LaRose for taking the unprecedented step of making the purge list public months ahead of the removals to give voters adequate time to check their voter registration. But simply making the list public isn’t adequate, they say, especially because the increased transparency has underscored the way Ohio’s process can flag eligible voters for potential cancellation.“Before LaRose, we didn’t have any transparency, so we appreciate that. But what the transparency is doing is actually confirming that there are a lot of living, breathing Ohioans who are getting wrapped up in this process who shouldn’t be,” Miller said.“It’s been frustrating because to me he’s gotten this false praise of, ‘Oh, he opened up the list for the first time,’ which is all fine and dandy. To me, opening up, being transparent, doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have accountability,” said Bride Rose Sweeney, a Democrat in the Ohio state house of representatives.LaRose has called for more reform, focusing on centralizing and updating Ohio’s voter registration system. He has backed adopting automatic voter registration, which would help prevent wrongful purging by requiring state agencies to automatically update voter registration when they interact with eligible voters. Currently, counties are responsible for maintaining their voter rolls and compiling lists of people eligible to be purged, a system LaRose told USA Today last year was “prone to error” and “unacceptably messy”.“The secretary believes there are improvements to be made to the process. I certainly hope you include them in your story,” Maggie Sheehan, a LaRose spokeswoman, told the Guardian.Some changes are already in place. While the state used to only send voters one notice asking them to confirm their voter registration records, it recently started sending a second, final confirmation notice 30-45 days before the purge takes place. The state also announced in 2018 that voters at risk of being purged could confirm their addresses when they updated their driver’s licenses.But the fact that Ohio flagged so many eligible voters for removal despite those reforms is still alarming, said Stuart Naifeh, another Demos lawyer involved in the 2018 supreme court case.LaRose has insisted the purge process is outlined in state law, limiting any changes he can make. But advocates dispute that characterization, noting that LaRose has the authority to improve the process. State law does require officials to remove anyone who receives a confirmation mailer and doesn’t vote for four consecutive years from the rolls, but it doesn’t specify what triggers the confirmation notice. By relying on more reliable evidence that someone has moved, instead of two years of voting inactivity, LaRose could significantly improve the accuracy of the purge process, critics say.“He is not required by law to do this … State law allows it, it’s not barred,” said Sweeney, the Ohio state representative. “He is choosing to make this a more expansive process.” More