The high mountain Ohio's GOP must climb

Yes, it's election time, where I where I state my prediction of the election outcome that will probably be wrong.  So here it is - the GOP, in Ohio at least, is probably going to get a shellacking.  It might be for the GOP in America as a whole.  After all, midterms are, by nature, usually not kind to the party holding the White House. It's not a constant, but it isn't unusual for them to lose overall.  But there are other issues going against the GOP, no matter how 'death to America and hurray for Islamic Communism!' the other side is becoming. 

First, there has been a general anti-Status quo, anti-establishment sentiment since the Obama era.  The press, which helped move America farther than ever into a post-Western world under Obama while everyone was looking, was nonetheless unable to get Hillary elected on Obama's coattails.  The strategy of moving against the West and the inheritance of America, and ignore any problems while attacking all critics as racist, didn't work.  Nor did it work in 2024.  Fact is, more and more people feel they are being left behind as things get worse, not better, and often it's whoever has a name in the 'incumbent box' who has a tall ladder to climb.  

This is especially true for the GOP in Ohio.  Like it or no, Republicans have been the dominant party in Ohio for most of the last several decades.  And things are far less than great in Ohio.  I know, the GOP recently boasted of the huge job creation and metropolitan growth in central Ohio, largely around Columbus. But here is the problem.  Many, if not most, of those jobs are service, or those white collar corporate jobs in non-unionized industries like healthcare and insurance and finance.  And while this might have looked like the ultimate reason for defending the safety and security of the status quo generations ago, it doesn't today. 

Because corporations often no longer pretend to care about customer or employee alike.  As my oldest noted, it isn't as if corporations were ever fonts of Gospel virtue, but they at least had to put on a positive spin.  Today they can wipe out thousands of employee's jobs just because and not only fail to put a positive spin on it, but gloat about doing so. Often in conjunction with reports on the latest record breaking quarterly profits. And all of this while producing less quality in smaller quantities at higher and higher prices because, on a global stage, what's a few thousand ticked off customers?  Besides, many of the street level companies are owned by the same corporations anyway.  

I hear a lot from adults about young Gen-Z types not being loyal to their places of employment.  But that street goes two ways.  Or, you might say, it goes no ways today.  The end result being that when Republicans are trying to tout increased jobs or higher employment, consider the jobs and the stability - or lack thereof - and why it might not be the selling point it once was. 

Then you have the Data Center debacle.  The GOP was supposed to have gotten the ultimate deal with Intel that was going to make Ohio the 'Silicon Valley of the Midwest'.  And boy did the current Ohio Republican Party boast about that.  It was going to be the gold medal Republican selling point for 2026 and beyond.  Well, it has definitely hit the skids, and who knows if and when it will ever go through.  This has left the GOP as merely the promoters of data centers and nothing more. 

Which speaks to a problem the Republicans always have. A big part of the problems the Republicans face is the ability of the press to still control the narrative, even if the press can't always contain it.  This is especially true when the Republicans seem to do their level best to live up to the narrative.  

Now, I usually don't comment about things like Data Centers since that is a topic lightyears outside of my understanding.  But clearly the Republicans are the ones trying to say Data Centers - hurray!  Which right now is like saying 'smallpox, hurray!'.  Thanks in large part to the media.  I personally don't get the details of the kerfuffle.  But if the rest of the country is like here in the Buckeye State, I can understand the outrage.  

A year ago, utility prices spiked in our area, and then months later, spiked again.  Everyone was asking what the heck is happening.  Then one morning, my wife and I were watching the local news.  They interviewed someone who explained what was happening.  Mind you, this fellow was defending what he said occurred to cause this spike.  Basically, to sweeten the deal for the data centers, the necessary explosion of utility usage would need to be paid for by someone else other than the data centers.  So they passed the cost on to the the average schmuck resident instead. Again, he was saying this unironically as he defended the deal.  My wife and I just looked at each other.  Gee.  We didn't want to turn away vast billion dollar corporate interests, so we shafted the little guy.  For some odd reason, that didn't fly among the residents.  

Another problem?  Trump's success.  What? How can this be a problem?  Well, I wrote last year that the big rebound was not happening fast enough for people.  Many Trump supporters said just wait, things will improve.  Unfortunately for the GOP, they did.  By the end of last year, I could see noticeable improvements and things appeared to be getting better.  Not overnight, but it was on the right trajectory.  But then we went to war with Iran, and things have unraveled. I know we can talk of price gouging and exploiting the situation (evil corporate conspiracy talk).  The press will blame the war and blame tariffs and anything under the sun and avoid things such as price gouging like the plague.  After all, bad economy makes Trump look bad and if millions are suffering, so be it.  But the fact is, the economy is worse now than it was at the beginning of the year, so it's not easy to point past last year and go straight back to Biden.  Such tactics usually don't work anyway.  Blaming the previous administration usually works for a minority group - the most partisan of the party - but not the general population.  As Democrats learned in 2016 and 2024.  It's especially tough if between the last administration and now, things were improving but now they are going south.  

And finally, there is that classic Republican dumb.  Demonstrated in this election gubernatorial style.  Ramaswamy's whole campaign has been a dumpster fire. From the beginning, what should have been the number one attack on Amy Acton - that she had to quit her post during Covid because she couldn't take it - was barely mentioned.  I said Acton doing that was like a middle school football coach quitting due to the pressure and then wanting to be head coach for Ohio State.  She should be so easy to beat my neighbor could run against her and have a chance. 

But no.  Instead, for the longest time the Ramaswamy camp ran almost no ads at all, leaving it to different PACs.  And those were almost laughable, running with unsubstantiated rumors that someone saw her crying, or that police showed up one evening and she was mixing alcohol with medications (details never given), or that she tripped on a dog gate and missed a meeting.  I mean, what?  She tripped on a dog gate so don't elect her as governor?  What about the lockdowns, which finally have been mentioned but weren't for the longest time.  Or her aligning with BLM and similar radicalism, which has only been briefly touched on at best. Or the fact that she clearly doesn't have clue one about what to do if she's elected, and if elected it's anyone's guess as to who will be the actual governor in practice?  Only in the last week or so has this been brought up.    

Yet while this brilliant strategy continued to unfold as Acton pulled ahead in the polls, what did the Ramaswamy camp do?  Run an ad featuring Acton's estranged mother, found guilty of neglect while her husband was found guilty of sexual abuse of 12 year old Acton, and use her to attack Acton's honesty.  

I know.  Republicans have already come out with past cases of the Left using estranged or morally compromised family members to attack GOP candidates. I get the obvious hypocrisy. We live with it every day  It's as American in our modern age as apple pie used to be.  

But let's think this through.  At best your hope is that the court records and actual case were all false and Acton's accusations lies.  But that's saying a person who claims to have been abused as a child is lying about it.  You better darn well have proof that she lied and that the parents were innocent and pure as the wind driven snow.  At worst, Acton was sexually abused by her stepfather, her estranged mother stood by her husband while it happened, and therefore Acton was justly removed because of the obvious harm done by her parents.  And it's that same mother who endangered her abused daughter who you want as a character witness? 

The whole decision to run such an ad reminded me of this:

Then to add plutonium to the DeLorean, Vice President Vance comes in and basically tells Republicans who see the problem here to suck on it and stop whining about the ad.  Because apparently we're saying Acton was a 12 year old liar, or are we saying we don't care if our political opponents were abused as children, as long as the abusers help us win?  So for Halloween the GOP has decided to dress as their favorite Bond villains?  Geesh.  

Of course, I concede I could be wrong. The extreme anti-Western and anti-American radicalism of the emerging DSA, though swept under the carpet by the "news media", is still out there.  And memories can sometimes not be as short as we think.  The biggest problem with the economy is that we're going on six years of it, even if some of the indicators aren't technically as bad now as in 2022 or 2023.  But that's a long time for a lot of people, and I'm hearing whispers that more and more people are beginning to break under the financial strain.  Perhaps they will remember the source of it and vote accordingly.  That, with the extreme fanaticism of the emerging Ultra-Left, might be enough.  In any event, at the end of the day, we'll know in a week or so.