For Attorney General: Steve Dettelbach
For Secretary of State: Kathleen Clyde
For Auditor: Zack Space
For Treasurer: Rob Richardson
Anyone remember 2006 and the “Coingate” scandal? This obscure scam by a Republican donor was enough of a sensation that, along with an extremist candidate for governor, it allowed Democrats to sweep almost all of Ohio’s statewide offices.
Anyone remember 2014 when the media worked itself into such a frenzy about Democratic candidate Ed FitzGerald’s lack of a driver’s license that it took down an entire slate of excellent Democratic candidates?
Now, someone explain to me how, in 2018, an entire Republican slate of candidates mired in TWO scandals — both easier to explain and with more direct impact on average Ohioans than Coingate — and an even stronger slate of Democrats, all these races are tied in the polls. The impact electing each of these two slates of candidates — governor, attorney general, secretary of state, auditor and treasurer — would have on Ohio is night and day.
Let’s start with the scandals. Every GOP candidate (except treasurer candidate Robert Sprague as far as we can tell) received large donations from William Lager, owner of the now-shuttered for-profit ECOT schools, which were not just failing the students enrolled but lying about the number of students attending in order to steal more state education money from public schools. And most of the candidates also received donations from the payday lending industry, whose shady, F.B.I.-investigated activities in Ohio caused Republican Speaker of the House Cliff Rosenberger to resign this past spring.
Most people don’t really know what the state auditor does, but his job is to track how state money is being spent. And until early this year, current state auditor Dave Yost, who received early $30,000 in donations from Lager, was a cheerleader for the schools, even, incredibly, giving them AWARDS for their shady bookkeeping and making praise-filled speeches at their graduations. Once the scandal broke in the last year or so, Yost has changed his tune. But this was going on for a decade, and Yost turned a bling eye while they were stealing money from the state.
Now he is running for attorney general, the office that holds entities legally responsible for their acts against the state and its citizens. That takes real chutzpah. Of all the candidates on the Republican slate, he’s probably the worst, outside of current attorney general Mike DeWine, running for governor after an eight-year run of ignoring the welfare of Ohioans to push his own religious agenda with our tax dollars.
Against the bought-and-paid-for slate of Yost, Keith Faber for state auditor, Frank LaRose for attorney general and Sprague for treasurer, Democrats are running former U.S. attorney under President Obama Steve Dettelbach; former congressman from southeast Ohio Zack Space for auditor; election integrity bulldog and current state representative from the Kent area Kathleen Clyde for secretary of state; and Rob Richardson of Cincinnati for treasurer. There’s not a scandal among them, and all are committed to properly funding public education, expanding access to affordable health care and growing living-wage jobs. They’ve demonstrated this during their terms in office (only Richardson has not held office before).
There’s an additional powerful reason to vote for Clyde and Space, along with Democrat Rich Cordray for governor. These offices are seats on the redistricting panel that will draw Ohio’s legislative and congressional lines in 2021. While ballot issues passed in 2015 and earlier this year (by overwhelming landslides) called for a less partisan, more voter-focused system of drawing districts, there are loopholes that could be exploited to continue the unrepresentative partisan slant. Ohio Republicans have demonstrated a commitment to exploiting such loopholes, and in the last three decades, have drawn increasingly lopsided maps. Cordray, Clyde and Space are all committed to following the process of drawing fairer maps.
Ohio has not prospered under eight years of total Republican rule. Poverty has increased, job growth and economic recovery have lagged the nation, education quality has plummeted in national rankings, and we are among the country’s leaders in infant mortality and opioid overdoses, hardly badges of pride. Ohio will continue to have an overwhelmingly Republican legislature for the next four years, thanks to gerrymandering, so electing Democrats to statewide offices will not hand THEIR party total power, only restore some balance. Then maybe our officeholders in Columbus will address REAL issues impacting Ohioans, instead of continuing to obsess about more restrictions on abortion and fewer on guns.
It’s time to change course. We recommend that voters choose Democrats for all statewide offices, and tell the scandal-ridden Ohio GOP slate to take a hike.