Will this be the 2012 election map?
If the Obama administration keeps up their War on Coal (literally: they consider coal more dangerous than terrorism), quite possibly. And it may be at least partially because of coal. Continue reading Electoral implications of the Obama Administration’s War on Coal.
Yes. Yes, there really is no good answer to that question…
…which is why, of course, I am asking it. The background… comes in three parts:
Continue reading Will VAWA sponsor Joe Biden campaign with wife-beater Charlie Wilson in OH-06?
It’s like these people don’t do any vetting at all.
Let me present to you the amazing amount of scrutiny that apparently needs to go into a Barack Obama campaign ad, just to understand what it actually means.
Continue reading Obama’s new Ohio ad: just making stuff up at this point.
It’s all because of racism, of course:
But the main quarrels Democratic voters [in Jefferson County, Ohio] have with Mr. Obama have nothing to do with race. They include his rejection of one proposed route for the Keystone pipeline, a stance they say will harm this area, whose backbone, the Ohio River, is lined with metal mills and coal mines.
Oh, I’m sorry, but that was paragraph fifteen. Presumably the NYT decided that its readers weren’t going to read past paragraphs three and four: Continue reading The New York Times prepares its readers for the loss of Ohio.
A rather nasty war in Ohio is now over:
Under unrelenting pressure from Gov. John Kasich and his political aides, Kevin DeWine will announce his resignation tonight as chairman of the Ohio Republican Party.
DeWine, 44, has prepared a letter to the 66 members of the GOP state central committee, saying he will step down when the party’s governing body meets to reorganize on April 13.
And that’s more or less everything that I’m going to say on the subject, past the obligatory “Thank God it’s over.” It was… a bit of a mess.
[UPDATE: I’ve had folks note that the original map is not quite the same as the final, approved map. There’s been some tweaking of districts; not enough to particularly change any of the practical results found below, but enough to be noteworthy. Fair enough.]
I was over at Larry Sabato’s site today* and I came across this report that an attempt to referendum the Ohio redistricting map has failed miserably. That means that [a map similiar to] the map proposed earlier will now take effect: to summarize, it’s expected to result in a 12R/4D map. Two Republicans and two Democrats (one of whom is Dennis Kuchinich) will compete against each other in primaries; a D versus R race will take place under conditions favorable to the latter; and they carved out another majority-minority seat to keep the VRA happy. I called this result ‘subtle’ at the time; I see no reason why I should change that adjective, unless it’s to replace it with ‘successful.’ Continue reading Ohio redistricting referendum fails to make the ballot. [UPDATED]
(Via The Campaign Spot) And… it’s subtle. Executive summary:
As it happens, this Wall Street Journal article discussing Ohio’s (among other states’) credit upgrade by Standard & Poor – and Ohio’s fairly dramatic drop in unemployment in a year – came out the same day that I spoke with Governor Kasich about his budget and labor union reform successes. The latter (SB5, which was in many ways an even stronger reform package than Wisconsin’s) is up for ratification again by the voters, in the form of Issue 2; needless to say, the Democrats are particularly desperate to reverse it, pretty much for the exclusive benefit of their Big Labor cronies. The need to keep reform alive in Ohio was thus prominent in the below interview:
The primary pro-Issue 2 website (“Building a Better Ohio”) can be found here. I encourage folks to check it out.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
You know where this is going, right?
[UPDATE: I have been made aware that the individuals in this video are county employees, not state ones.]
OK, let me set the background. You are a public sector employee for the state of Ohio; this probably means that you are a Democrat. You are probably aware, however vaguely and dimly, that there is a group out there who went around a few years ago and got ACORN defunded by pretending to be a prostitute and her pimp who wished to get tax help for the former’s prostitution, not to mention tax help for their underaged El Salavadoran hooker enterprise. This was largely considered ‘bad.’ So, you’re working one day, and in walk two men with bad Russian accents who wants to apply for Medicaid benefits, even though one of the men owns a modified sports car with a gold-plated engine that’s been purchased with profits from their illicit drug business. And, oh yes: they need to know about getting public funding for abortions for their under-aged hooker sisters.
WHAT DO YOU DO? Continue reading Project Veritas. James O’Keefe. Russian drug-dealing Medicaid applicants.
Gov. Kasich is, of course, one of the freshmen Republican governors that took over large swathes of the Midwest last election cycle. We discussed both union reform (in the form of SB 5) and the upcoming budget battle – including about why both are so necessary for Ohio.
The Midwest is probably the most interesting region of the country right now, from a political science point of view: there are a lot of things being tried out in the social laboratories which are the individual states. It’s best that people pay as much attention as possible to what’s going on out there.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
