The Buckeye of the GOP Storm
45:13 Share

If you're looking for an opportunity to make a difference in your life and the lives of others, if you want to make an impact on your community, on the world around you, the VA is a place to be. Not only is it a place to be, it's a place that needs you. Learn more at vacareers.va.gov.

How to have fun. Anytime. Anywhere. Step one. Go to ChumbaCasino.com. ChumbaCasino.com. Got it. Step two. Collect your welcome bonus. Come to Papa welcome bonus. Step three. Play hundreds of casino style games for free. That's a lot of games. All for free? Step four. Unleash your excitement. Woohoo! Choo-choo!

Chumba Casino has been delivering thrills for over a decade. So claim your free welcome bonus now and live the Chumba life. Visit ChumbaCasino.com. Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. The presidential nominating races are over, but we have loads of Senate and House primaries to go. This week, we'll look closely at Ohio's Tuesday Senate race. Let's dive in.

Well, if you're listening to this podcast, you're the sort of person who knows that so too means state of the union address. Yeah, that's what we're going to talk about today on my rant. The media has said that Joe Biden was great. Joe Biden showed passion. Joe Biden showed that he was able to put down his critics who said that his mental capacity was declining. It was a home run is what you heard a lot of people say. Question is, is that right?

What did we learn from Biden's State of the Union address? That's what I want to talk about today. The speech itself

tends not to be that special. For all of the reaction of did this speech or that speech do anything, the fact is historically they are rarely memorable. Most of the great presidential speeches aren't state of the union addresses, and they rarely lead to a lasting poll bump. Sometimes you'll see a little increase, sometimes you won't. So far the early polls

that have come back since then have shown little to no increase that for all of the media attention voters seem not to have changed their minds. So does that mean that it was a nothing burger? Does that mean that everyone made a mountain out of a molehill or better yet actually treated flat ground as if it had a bump? No, I don't think so because the important part of the State of Union Address isn't the immediate effect

But it's the telegraphing where the campaign is going to go. And I think what you saw was the beginnings of the clear statement of what Joe Biden's strategy is going to be. Biden is going to make this a race of very hard contrast. In other words, it's going to be a negative campaign.

He made it clear in what some Republican commentators believed was one of the most partisan State of the Union addresses that they had ever heard, that he's going to run against the man he called his predecessor and lay the blame for a lot of things on the predecessor and essentially say you can't possibly be thinking of electing this person again. Some of this will be a traditional Democratic attack.

That since 1932 in the Great Depression when Democrats get in trouble, they turn to the Herbert Hoover campaign. They don't mention Herbert Hoover anymore, although they did for decades. But essentially what they do is say, "We represent the many and they represent the few."

They represent the people who are greedy. We represent the people who are needy. And that's what Biden's budget in his talk on entitlements and taxes is meant to do. He's talking about billionaires paying their fair share. He talks about the programs he wants to spend on the Republicans or his predecessor, in other words, Donald Trump.

don't, the taxes he wants to levy on the rich that those other people don't. He made it very clear that he's going to run a traditional Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama, LBJ, JFK, you name it style campaign against Donald Trump and try and make that part of the campaign stick.

He's also got a new wrinkle on it, and that is the democracy versus authoritarianism thing. This has been a theme of Biden's throughout his presidency, which is to say Democrats are on the side of rule by the people and Republicans. Well,

They like them strong men, don't they? And they're going to do it on two grounds. One is domestic. They'll talk about January 6th a lot. They'll talk a lot about the things that Donald Trump didn't say afterwards and the way that many Republicans have not been willing to stand up and criticize him on that. And they'll tie it to foreign policy, that the fight in Ukraine is supposed to be a fight for democracy against the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.

And they'll note that Donald Trump has often said things like Victor Orban of Hungary is a wonderful leader or he could trust Kim Jong-un of North Korea and so forth or that Vladimir Putin is very smart. Now, one might take these as simply a businessman flattering his guest or his potential negotiating partner or one can take it as a serious sense of admiration.

Biden will paint it as the latter and say, you can't possibly think of making this man president again. Now, obviously, this is what Democrats want. The applause in the Capitol was rapturous. There's always a sense of obligatory applause from the party in power.

But the looks on people's faces, the volume generated by the applause, this sort of red-blooded, enthusiastic, borderline frenzied attack striking progressive themes was exactly what the Democratic base wanted to hear. But...

in a general election, how much will that help? Traditionally, Democrats have had a large and significant voter identification edge. Going back to the late 1980s, Democrats have had the edge in the number of voters over Republicans by anywhere on average between three and seven points.

that there's usually if you rally the Democrats to your side and you split independents, the Democrat wins the popular vote. Okay? But that may not be the case anymore. Gallup survey show that Republicans had the edge in voter identification when you take independents who lean towards the Republicans into account. The 2022 electorate was the most Republican in decades at Republicans plus three.

Of course, that's a midterm, and the party out of power tends to turn out more in greater numbers in a midterm. But take a look at the most recent polls in the RealClearPolitics average. Three of them have the Republicans having a voter edge. Three of the other five have Democrats having an edge of one or one and a half points. If you average it all out, the Democratic edge in the eight most recent polls is

in the real clear politics average is plus one point. That would be only the second smallest in the last 40 years. And there's some evidence, again, to suggest that that might even be overstating it. So if you get Democrats excited

Is that enough? No. What you have to do is also split independents and probably win them by a little more than a couple of points given the electoral college tilt, which means that Donald Trump can win the electoral college without winning the popular vote. He probably can't lose it big, but we know that he won it by losing the popular vote by about three points in 2016. He probably would have won it

in 2020, losing the popular vote by three and a half. As non-whites move to voting more Republican, they tend to be disproportionately outside of swing states. So maybe Trump has to be within two points of Biden. But it's clear that Biden has to win the popular vote and not simply narrowly in order to have a shot at winning. And that makes his negative stance in the State of the Union address particularly interesting. And

I'm going to read you some numbers. And this is job approval ratings. Joe Biden's job approval rating as of March 13th is 39.9% in the real estate politics average. That is almost five points lower than Donald Trump's was on the same day four years ago, 44.6%. It is over seven points lower than Barack Obama's was on the same day.

In 2012, Obama had a 47.2 job approval rating, and it's nearly 10 points lower than George W. Bush in 2004. In fact, Barack Obama, George W. Bush both barely won the majority of the popular vote. Donald Trump obviously lost.

And Joe Biden is well behind both of them. Now, let me read you a couple more numbers. Is that Trump was 44.6 in his job approval rating on March 13th, 2020. He ended up at 45.9 percent. So he gained a little over it.

Obama also gained. He went from 47.2 to 50 by Election Day. Bush gained a little bit. He went from 49.4 to 50. So you look and say, OK, well, typically a president seems to look more popular as they go around to Election Day. So maybe Biden can get up to 41 or if he followed Obama, he could even get up to 43, you know, gain three points. Isn't that enough?

Well, Trump's job approval rating on Election Day was 45.9. He got 46.8% of the vote. Obama's was 50. He got 51%. Bush's was 50. He got 50.7. Do you see the pattern here? The president historically gets about 1% more than their final job approval rating.

If Joe Biden gets the best approval increase of the last decade and a half, he will still be projected to get only 44% of the popular vote. That means that he has to really either do one of two things. He has to get an unbelievable change in job approval rating, the sort that usually only changes with unusual events, you know, like

seeing down a nuclear crisis or something. The other thing that he has to do is convince lots and lots of people who don't want to re-elect him to vote for him over the opponent. And that's what the negative campaign really signifies, is that after spending eight months trying to improve his job approval rating, talking about Bidenomics, telling us that we ought to look more happy about the economy. We ought to be happy about all the things he's done for us.

The fact that the State of the Union address where the President of the United States talks to Congress about his plans for the next year was so negative

tells you that he's probably given up on the idea that he can have that record turn around and he's going to have to convince millions of people who don't like him today and aren't going to like him in November that they should dislike Donald Trump a lot more. Forget the media plaudits. Forget everything else. That's what you need to take home

from the State of the Union address. And how well Joe Biden makes that message stick over the eight months to come will go a long way to deciding whether or not he has a second term.

It can get lonely climbing Mount McKinley. So to entertain myself, I go to ChumbaCasino.com. At Chumba Casino, I can play hundreds of online casino-style games for free, like online slots, bingo, slingo, and more. Plus, I get a daily login bonus. It's just too bad that up here, I don't have anyone to share my excitement with. Live the Chumba life, anytime, anywhere. Play for free now at ChumbaCasino.com. BGW group, no purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. See terms and conditions 18+.

Well, the presidential races are all put to bed. Biden and Trump are the presumptive nominees, having clinched

the number of delegates each needs in order to be nominated at the party's convention. So does that mean that elections are kind of snoozing? No, not at all. This is America. We have primaries all the time that matter. Senate, House, Governor. And here to talk with us about the next important primaries is Mark Weaver, a longtime Ohio-based Republican strategist who will talk to us about Tuesday's Ohio primaries. Mark, welcome to Beyond the Polls.

Great to be with you. It's a timely topic and fun to talk about.

Well, let's just dive right in, you know, for my listeners who are not complete nerds, although a lot of my listeners are complete nerds, let's be honest. That's a three-way race for the Republican mob to take on multi-term incumbent Sherrod Brown, one of the key Republican targets. And it's a pretty hot and heavy race. Can you tell us a little bit about each of the candidates and what people in Ohio would have been seeing and hearing over the last month or so?

Well, I'd be happy to. I know all three of the Republicans well. I've worked with them in different capacities over the years, although I'm not currently working on any of their campaigns. So I don't have a, I don't really have a bias towards one of them or the other. They're all good leaders who have great things to offer. The one that might be best known by people outside of Ohio would be Frank LaRose. Frank is a

former Army Green Beret, and he was elected to the state Senate from the greater Akron area. Akron is Northeast Ohio. And then was elected our Secretary of State. In Ohio we elect that position, some states appoint it, and has successfully won twice statewide and is finishing, or I should say in the middle of his second term as Secretary of State.

So he's one of the candidates. The next one is Bernie Moreno. Bernie Moreno ran for Senate the last time there was a seat open where we eventually wound up getting J.D. Vance as our junior Ohio U.S. Senator. Bernie Moreno is a...

a legal immigrant who came here and started a life for himself and became an entrepreneur, coming up in the car business and eventually owning car dealerships. He also has really interesting ideas in the area of using blockchain technology on things like car titles and ways to track things other than Bitcoin through blockchain technology.

He's independently wealthy, very successful, and has run a strong campaign for the Senate. The third candidate, I'd be surprised if people outside of Ohio know him other than when I tell you his family connection. His name is Matt Dolan from Greater Cleveland, which is Northeast Ohio. His family owns what used to be called the Cleveland Indians, and they're now called the Cleveland Guardians.

And Matt is an attorney, the only attorney in the race. And he's also a longtime state legislator currently serving in the Ohio State Senate with significant experience and responsibilities in that job. Some people call him more moderate. He certainly did not latch on to the Trump train.

And so if that makes him more moderate, I suppose you could call him that. But he's a right of center conservative, just cut from a different cloth than Bernie or Frank.

So, funny you mention the Guardians. I was watching Major League for the first time about a month or so ago, when of course they were the Indians. But they show montage pictures of Cleveland. One of them had the Guardian of the Bridge. And I finally understood why they chose that new nickname. It is quite an imposing statue, protecting the bridge from whatever dangers, I guess, would attack bridges.

One of the things that stands out to those of us who aren't in Ohio is the endorsements that Bernie Moreno, who did run last time but dropped out before being on the ballot. Matt Dolan ran and finished third in the primary that J.D. Vance won. Moreno has the endorsement of Vance and Trump.

Whereas Dolan now has the endorsement of Governor Mike DeWine, who is himself a popular figure in Ohio, and former Ohio Senator Rob Portman. Can you assess, to the outsider, a lot of people would say, well, Moreno's got the Trump endorsement, that means he's going to win. So my first question to you is, are the outsiders right?

I think there's a lot more nuance to it than most people might think. It's true. Well, let's go back a few weeks, probably six weeks now that I think about it. A public poll came out showing Bernie behind.

And at that point, Frank LaRose appeared to be the frontrunner. If for no other reason, he's the only one of the three who has won statewide twice. And it gets in the news a lot because of his job as Secretary of State. I think there was some discussions with the Trump camp and the Moreno camp at that point where if you're going to get in, now's the time to get in. Bernie Moreno's daughter,

is married to Congressman Max Miller, who was a former top advance man for Donald Trump and very close to the former president. Some people think there might have been a phone call connected there. There were other reasons. Bernie Marino has come out and been very vocal for Trump.

For whatever reason, Trump immediately endorsed Moreno, creating some momentum for Bernie. It was helped by the Club for Growth coming in on behalf of Bernie with a lot of money. It probably as a way of making peace with Trump because there's been some historical differences of views between Trump and the Club for Growth.

So that is the big endorsement in the race. You mentioned my former clients and friends, Rob Portman and Mike DeWine, both of whom I support and like. You mentioned their endorsements on behalf of Matt Dolan. When it comes to endorsements in Republican primaries, there's the Donald Trump endorsement, and then there's everything else. And there's a wide field between them. That doesn't mean that Mike DeWine or Rob Portman's endorsement doesn't mean anything. It just doesn't mean a lot compared to Trump's.

Having said that, Bernie Marino, although he's independently wealthy, has not put as much of his own family wealth into this race as Matt Dolan has. The reports keep shifting depending on the FEC reports we look at. But when this is all said and done, Matt Dolan will probably put in two to three times as much of his wealth as Bernie Marino has. And that might be making a difference because there's a new Emerson poll out today that essentially shows the race tied today.

when previous public polling had Bernie Marino in the lead. So I think the Trump endorsement matters. You'd be foolish to say it doesn't matter, but I think it'd be a little too broad brush to think that Trump endorses and that's the end of the equation. So the Marino poll, well not the Marino poll, the Emerson poll that has Dolan ahead by three, but that's within the statistical margin of error for a poll with that sample size.

At 32% undecided, that's awfully high for this late in the race. And millions of dollars have been spent by all three candidates combined, although both Marino and Dolan have now long outpaced LaRose in terms of how much they've spent on television. Do you believe a 32% undecided about probably by the time that came out of the field, seven to 10 days before Election Day?

Yeah, I looked at the Emerson poll. It is a pretty good sample size. I want to say it was 1,200, which is a pretty good sample size. I would like to quibble with the poll takers that this late in the race, they should have been polling likely primary voters, not just registered voters. So I think that was a mistake on their part, because when you only poll registered voters, you get rather fuzzy results.

And when I used to teach political polling at the graduate level, and so when I taught my students about polling, I said, we care about what likely voters think. We don't really care about what all voters think. And certainly in this election that's now coming up in just a few days, polling likely voters would have been a better barometer for this race. But let's use what we have. 32% undecided. In some races, that means nothing.

32% or a third of the people simply don't like the choices and they are unwilling to jump off the side of the pool and swim in any three of those lanes. I don't think that's what's happening here.

All three of these candidates are good candidates. All three of them could beat Sherrod Brown. Imagine we'll talk about that here in a moment. So the fact that a third of registered voters are still undecided is more relative to the notion that many voters have yet to tune in.

Now, you and I and anyone listening to this podcast would go, how could that be? You mean people don't read the congressional record every day and listen to podcasts and go right to Real Clear Politics in the morning to see what the updated polls are? Yeah, most voters don't do those things. And so they might just now be tuning in to this race, which is one of the reasons why Trump's appearance for Congress

Bernie Moreno this Saturday in Dayton, which is southwestern Ohio, is a very smart move because his appearance will dominate the news and the social media for the final hours before polling starts on Tuesday. Last question before I ask you the big question.

"What do you think will happen?" question. And that is early voting. That early voting is extensive in Ohio, primarily, I believe, on the Republican side in person rather than through the mails, but pretty large. It was, according to Secretary of State's LaRose office, as of March 4th, about 72,000 Republican ballots had already been cast.

1.1 million people voted in 2022. What do you think the effect of early voting is going to be? How many of those voters do you think will have voted by the time that Trump comes to do the rally? And what do you think turnout is going to be, higher, lower, about the same as it was two years ago?

Ohio has election months now. We don't have Election Day anymore, and it's very easy to vote. You can vote by mail, which my wife and I do, or on any business day in that month prior to the election, you can show up at your local board of elections and go in and vote on a voting machine the way you would on Election Day. So it's rather simple to early vote. Interesting, you mentioned the stats about mail-in votes versus in-person early voting.

Before 2020, the trend was Republicans were more likely to do mail-in voters and Democrats more likely to do in person. But because of Donald Trump's quibbling with mail-in voting in 2020, some of that fell off. And so I think we saw some early interest in early voting, if you will, back when it looked like Donald Trump might have a race for the nomination, back when Ron DeSantis was still

you know, hanging in there. And certainly Nikki Haley was hanging in there until recently. And so a strong percentage of our Republican electorate is very pro-Trump. So I think many of them did take advantage of early voting to get in their vote for Trump. Now that it's wrapped up, now that it's no question that he's going to be our nominee unless something happens crazy at the convention, I think a lot of

Trump voters maybe are not quite as motivated to go to the polls, and that's one of the problems Bernie Moreno has. He's got the Trump endorsement in hand, but some of the strongest Trump voters might take a pass on primary election day because their guy is already in the barn. So prediction, do you have one?

You know, I think it's still trending Moreno, but a lot of his momentum has been lost. Had he spent as, you'll pardon the pun, liberally, as Matt Dolan had in his race, then Bernie's momentum would have decreased.

maintained. They probably did tracking polling for the last several weeks and they see that it is tightened. But your ability to inject a lot of money into a race in the last five days is limited because you can't mail in the last five days. So that takes out a huge voter contact method.

You can buy broadcast, but most of the news adjacency and news spots are already bought by candidates who were holding their money till the end. You can buy radio. There's radio available. You can do some digital, but your means of communications have narrowed in those last five days. And so even if Bernie were to wake up and write a check for $6 million to try to put it into this race, he literally couldn't spend it. It'd be too hard to spend. So I think his momentum has slowed. I think Matt Dolan has come on strong.

I still think it's Bernie Moreno. I wouldn't say by a nose, but probably by a length, to use a horse metaphor.

Yeah, and one of the things I saw recently is that Dolan is outspending Marino on the air, you know, like two or three to one right now. And they don't translate that into gross ratings points. I don't know how much of that is the campaign that gets the cheap rates versus the super PAC that gets the expensive rates. But it sounds like if I'm an average Ohio viewer, I'm seeing a lot more anti-Marino or pro-Dolan ads than I am seeing anti-Dolan or pro-Marino ads.

I think that's right. I think that's right. You know, when I'm advising a race and we have a lead near the end, my advice to the candidate always is we never let up. We never let up. We presume we're losing. But I've been involved with many campaigns where the opposite view is. Like, you know, why would we do a negative ad in the last week? Let's leave a nice aftertaste. Let's end on a high note. Let's do the family spot, the candidate walking with his wife and children by the creek. Let's

Let's do that. Wouldn't that be a great way to end the campaign? No. No, if contrast is your key to victory, then you contrast until the very end. Yeah, no, I mean, it's kind of like after Mace Windu attacked Chancellor Palpatine's office. You know, he's got him down with the lightsaber, and then he kind of lets him go. And, well, the Sith Lord comes back, throws him out the window, and the whole galaxy's history is changed. Too many people don't get rid of Palpatine when they've got him down.

I will take your words on the Star Wars metaphor, but certainly it sounds right to me.

So let's talk about Sherrod Brown. On the one hand, Sherrod Brown has won statewide elections. He beat Josh Mandel, a strong challenger, in 2012. He beat a candidate in... Thank you. It was expected to be a larger margin, but it's still seven, seven and a half points in 2018, I believe. He's got this reputation for being the Democrat who can win the blue-collar vote.

What stands out to me when I look at these public polls right now is that no public poll has shared around close to 50%.

that this is a senator who hasn't committed a massive faux pas, hasn't been arrested or caught cheating on his wife or anything, and isn't close to 15% against any of his Republican opponents. Is that as big of a warning sign as I take it to be, or am I exaggerating it?

No, it's every bit of a warning sign and then some. Sherrod Brown has been around Ohio politics for a long time. He first served in office when Richard Nixon was president. And that has created a reputation of him being a strong candidate. I would suggest he's a paper donkey. The kick is just not that dangerous. And here's why. Sherrod Brown has never won a Senate seat before.

absent one of two factors. Either a bad year for Republicans, think 06 when he beat Mike DeWine, the worst Republican year of the modern era,

or weak opponents and I would suggest both Josh Mandel and Jim Renacci were weak statewide opponents. They did not run strong, effective campaigns. So he's had the wind at his back or weak opponents all three times he's been up. He will have neither of those this cycle. He will have a strong Republican cycle. Trump won Ohio by eight points twice. He will win Ohio again, maybe not by eight, but he will win Ohio again.

And this notion of Sherrod Brown being the blue-collar guy, most blue-collars are now red-collars.

I'm mixing my metaphors here because blue collar used to mean the color of shirt you wore to the factory. The white collar guys went up to the office and wore their white collar shirts with ties. And the blue collar guys went down to the shop and worked. That's where we get the term from, as you well know, Henry. But the notion of Sherrod Brown doing an impersonation of a working class white voter and connecting with them.

has long since left. His voting record is to the left of Bernie Sanders in many ways. And his go-to portion of the state for winning was the Mahoning Valley. This is greater Youngstown, far northeastern Ohio. And Othello ran last time from there against J.D. Vance,

And he is from that area, right? And he couldn't win the Moaning Valley anymore, which was famously Democrat for years.

And so if he couldn't win that part of the state, then neither is Sherrod Brown going to win the Honing Valley because it has turned Republican over the last several cycles. And even Sherrod Brown, with his vaunted connection, allegedly, with working class voters, because he is sided with the far left wing of his party, which are largely antithetical. The groups in that wing are antithetical to working class white voters.

I think he will not be able to count on the Mahoning Valley the way he has in the past. Yeah, and the Democratic strategy has tended to be, well, we'll talk tough on things like trade and China and try and connect with working class voters that way. And then we'll talk nice and culturally center left and pick up all these nice votes in the suburbs and all that. We're going to win.

Tim Ryan basically tried to do that against J.D. Vance, and you know, Vance had never run a campaign before, he had some rookie stumbles, although he did do rather well on the primary. And still, Vance won, I think, by four or five points, including winning these working class areas and the suburbs. So you have to ask, how is Sherrod Brown going to do better than Tim Ryan, given that he, unless Bernie Marino has these skeletons in his closet that nobody is using in the Republican primary,

Even Bernie Marino, for whom this is his real first campaign, having dropped out before the hot period of the campaign in 2022, even he presumably is as strong or stronger than Vance. One just has to ask, if it didn't work before, how is it going to work in a better year for Republicans?

I think that's smart insight. Tim Ryan is exactly who I was referencing earlier. He couldn't win the Mahoning Valley, and he's from the Mahoning Valley, and he was doing his best Sherrod Brown impression short of the gravelly voice and the goofy hair.

He did his best to mimic Sherrod Brown's message. And he, Tim, could not carry his own home area. Sherrod Brown will not cover that area, will not win that area. He will certainly win the urban cores, right, the blue cores of the state. He'll win Toledo.

Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Dayton. That's about it. He will win a little bit in some of the bluish suburbs, the closer-in suburbs, he meaning Sherry Brown. He will lose the exurbs. He will lose all the rural areas.

And he will lose the areas along the Lake Erie shoreline and the Ohio River to the eastern part of the state, which have been these traditional strongholds of often Catholic, certainly culturally conservative voters who simply don't think that Sherrod Brown aligns with them anymore. They like Trump. Sherrod Brown hates Trump.

He'll go along with Trump on the trade policy. He has trouble mentioning the T word when he talks about that. I don't mean trade. He wants the Trump cheesecake of being a tariff guy without having the Trump calories of being for Trump. And so Sherrod Brown tries to thread that needle not well. And I think he's going to meet his match no matter which of these three Republicans lines up against him.

Well, I'm just waiting for somebody to go up to a particular Lakeshore County and say that they are the MAGA candidates. Make Ashtabula great again. In Ashtabula, there probably is a hat that says that. I wouldn't be surprised.

So let's talk a little bit about the other primaries that are going on. It's not just the Senate. There's going to be a bunch of House races, a couple of safe seats that will basically be decided in the primary, and a couple of Democratic targets that Republicans want to have the right candidate to face, and that's Amelia Sykes in the Akron base 13th and Marcy Kaptur in the Toledo base 9th. Tell me a little bit, the Kaptur seat has gotten attention because of

The flamboyant J.R. Majewski, who has been the hokey-pokey candidate. He put his foot in, he put his foot out, he put his foot in and he shook it all about. But now he's out, although his name is on the ballot.

And that leaves Craig Riedel, the House Freedom Caucus-backed candidate who lost to Majewski last time with a base in Defiance County, and I believe the state speaker of the House. Derek Mirren was elected to be the speaker of the House by the Republican House Caucus in a private meeting, but when they took to the floor, the Democrats joined with a dissident group of Republicans and elected Jay Stevens of Lawrence County to be the House Speaker.

Okay, so he was the choice of the Republicans, but not of the House as a whole. He's running, and he has the backer of Speaker Mike Johnson. What's your take on that race?

That's one of the ones to watch in the general. There's a couple interesting ones in the primary we can talk about, but they're red districts, and as they go, it will be a Republican congressman. But that is the one to watch as far as the general election. Marcy Kaptur, one of the longest-serving members of Congress, certainly a fixture up there. But like Sherrod Brown, her voting record is well out of step with most of the voters in her district. Now, Majewski...

It's just an erratic candidate who was not suitable for running at that level. He would have been better off working out the kinks of his campaign as running for township trustee or village council or something where he would get used to what it's like to run for office. But there was such a big spotlight for him to run without having been very well schooled in how to be a candidate. So he has flamed out infamously and is maybe a factor, but not going to be the nominee.

This comes down to the battle we see in the U.S. House conference on the Republican side, which is the establishment versus the Freedom Caucus. And one of the two ones you mentioned, either Marin or Rydell, are going to be the candidate. I think either of them could beat Captor, given the kind of year we're going to see where Trump is going to do very well in Ohio. And a lot of Democrats will stay home because they simply cannot abide turning out for Joe Biden. And so...

I think that's a likely pickup for the Republicans. And this is one of, I think, the nine seats that Democrats hold that Trump carried in 2020. I think it's a Trump plus three district.

Yeah, it is. And it's probably getting redder as we speak. So it's one of the reasons why Republicans in D.C. who follow these races were so frustrated that Majewski got back in this year because they thought they were rid of him because he really was an embarrassment of a candidate, simply was not ready for primetime. He might be a good person. I've never met him. And perhaps he could run someday and do well, but not without smoothing out the rough edges.

So the other Republican primary in a swing seat is Amelia Sykes's seat. That's a Biden plus three seat. She won, I believe, the former state minority leader in the chamber and beat Trump endorsed former beauty queen Madison Chesioto Gilbert last year.

Now we've got two Republicans running in the primary. Does either one strike you as stronger than the other? Yeah, it's an interesting race. The aforementioned Madison Giseato, a former law student of mine. I taught at the Ohio State Law School for many years. She's a good person. I enjoyed having her in class. I don't keep up with her at all since class, but have watched from afar as she's made a career for herself. Good for her.

She's not in the race this time. I think she has a future in the party, so I'd keep an eye on her. But Amelia Sykes comes from black Democrat royalty in Ohio. Her father, Vernon Sykes, was a longtime state legislator from that area. And so the name is well known, and she's certainly popular within her party. But

On the Republican side, I think Kevin Coughlin is the one who's likely to emerge as her likely opponent. He's been a state legislator. He's pretty savvy when it comes—kind of like the opposite of Bajewski, if you will. Kevin has smoothed off whatever edges he had. We all have them as we grow up and has learned how to run a credible campaign. He's not been as well-funded as I think he'd like to be, but I wouldn't be surprised if he winds up being the opponent, and he will have a better-than-even shot at—

defeating Sykes, although I wouldn't put it in as strong a category as I do the pickup and captor seat. Yeah, I mean, I think if Sykes loses, it's an indication that's a pretty good year for Republicans across the board, because if you're beating an incumbent in a Biden plus three seat who has legitimate roots in the district, you're probably doing pretty well up and down the ballot, including electing President Trump nationally.

That's insightful. I think that's exactly right. It would, you know, people try to compare this to 1980. We have all of these comparisons. We have a president of the White House who's ineffectual. We have hostages in the Middle East that are Americans who can't be gotten out. We have inflation dogging Americans. We have problems with fuel and energy. And we have this malaise throughout the country. It sounds a lot like Jimmy Carter, but it's really Joe Biden. And then along comes Reagan. Now, Donald Trump is no Reagan.

Reagan was a unique personality, the greatest president of the 20th century. He only comes along every once in two or three generations. Having said that, the kind of victory that Reagan won against an incumbent president brought with him a pretty powerful group of folks. He won the Senate. He did not win the House in 1980, but it was enough of a boost, and he had enough of a coattail effect to bring in enough of a House to make...

the equation in Washington a little different. At least the, the, the tip O'Neill in the house had to deal with now a Republican president and a Republican Senate. So given that the Republicans currently hold the house and, uh, have a pretty good cycle on the Senate side, uh, if Trump does well in states like Ohio, he very well could, um, see a Republican Congress come in with him.

The other two safe seats, the Westrom seat in ex-urban Cincinnati going out down the river and the old Johnson seat, which is kind of like the archetypal Ohio River Valley seat that 15 years ago would have been swing to leaning blue-collar Democrat. Now it's deeply ruby red.

Is there any candidate that jumps out at you that people who aren't just following this should pay attention to? Somebody who's either weird and if they won, they'd make national headlines, kind of like the Lauren Boebert of the Ohio River Valley? Or is there somebody who you look at and say, "Hey, wait a minute. If this person gets to Congress, you'll hear about them because they're not weird and they're going places."

Both of these seats, just ironically, Henry, you have me on today, the incumbents are both clients of mine, or at least the previous incumbent, Bill Johnson. I was his consultant from the very beginning and advised him all the way through until he became the president of Youngstown State, which is why this seat is open now. I don't have a dog in that fight. I think Michael Rooley, who is a state senator and owner of a local grocery chain that people go to Rooley's for their groceries,

I think he's likely to win that race. He's middle-of-the-road conservative. He'll be perfectly fine in Congress. He'll do a good job. So I would keep your eye on Rooley. I think he'll govern in the same way Bill Johnson did. Bill Johnson was very popular. And remember, Bill Johnson beat a Democrat to win that seat in 2010 and then presided over the turning of those counties from blue to red, some of which was his doing, some of which was national trends doing.

The other race is my other client, Brad Wenstrip. Some of your listeners may know Brad as the former Army combat surgeon who was on the baseball field the day Steve Scalise was shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter there to kill Republicans. And even as the Capitol Hill police officers were telling everybody to get down, Brad ran out.

and brought his combat surgeon know-how and brought a tourniquet on to Steve Scalise and saved his life. At least that's how Scalise tells it. So Brad, who's a friend and a client, has little children, young children. He married late in life and he wants to be with them. One of those few politicians who leaves Congress saying, I want to be with my family more. When you've got, don't hold me to the ages, Monica, that's Brad's wife, eight-year-old and a 12-year-old, I want to say, they have.

I was just with them a couple months ago. They looked about 8 and 12. So Brad's leaving and leaving a very red seat. This is Ohio 2. It's a 11-way primary.

I do have a dog in the fight. We represent Larry Kidd from the eastern part of the district. He, a business owner very well known around the state, comes from the conservative establishment part of the party. He got known because he was the only congressional candidate in the country to file a friend of the court brief on behalf of Donald Trump in the Supreme Court to keep Trump on the ballot.

And the arguments made by Larry Kidd in his brief were adopted by the Supreme Court. So Larry Kidd got a little notoriety out of that. The one that's a little quirky, and although I'm a lawyer, I don't like litigation, so I'll be careful how I describe him. There's a fellow named Derek Myers running who has had a very interesting past. Local papers did a story yesterday about him. Your readers can find it. Derek Myers. He's been a stealth-style journalist.

He sought a job with George Santos, which created some animosity between them. He's had several lawsuits. He has an explanation for all these things. I'm not going to offer an opinion about who's right or wrong. Certainly an interesting character. I don't think he's going to win. He's certainly not doing much advertising. I think Larry Kidd is the likely candidate to come through that. But if he did, you would have a very followable, interesting congressman from Southern Ohio.

Well, I didn't know you had a dog in the hunt down there, but I will certainly follow it more intelligently, having had the dog packmaster lead me through the canines.

So, Mark, how can my listeners follow your work, both what you do in Ohio and elsewhere? Well, thank you. I wrote a book called A Wordsmith's Work on how to be a better writer, whether it's writing op-eds, which I do a lot of for places like Newsweek and The Washington Post, USA Today, or doing crisis communication. So that's on Amazon. It's called A Wordsmith's Work.

And I'm on X. The handle is at Mark R. Weaver. And so check it out and enjoy being invited on. You certainly are a knowledgeable podcast host. Not every podcast I listen to has the understanding of American politics. You clearly do. I can tell you follow this closely.

Ah, too closely, my friend. Probably not as closely as you follow your races, but when you've got an addiction, as you know, you have to feed the beast. But thank you very much. I will be thinking of you. I will be following you on Tuesday night, and I hope to have you back on Beyond the Polls. Thank you, Henry.

That's it for this week. Join me next week as we start to look to the fall on what each party has to fear and what they have to hope for. Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we journey beyond the polls. Ricochet! Join the conversation. With Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.

This is your captain speaking. We've got clear runway and the weather's fine, but we're just going to circle up here a while and get lucky. No, no, nothing like that. It's just these cash prizes add up quick. So I suggest you sit back, keep your tray table upright, and start getting lucky. Play for free at LuckyLandSlots.com. Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary. BGW grip. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply.