Speaking to hundreds of supporters on Saturday, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown acknowledged the deluge of Republican attack ads as he touted a long political career of standing up to corporate interests. 

“When you do that, they come after you,” the three-term Democrat said from the stage at a Columbus carpenter’s union training center. “So you may have noticed there have been a lot of ads on TV. Neutral fact checkers have said those ads are untrue, every one of them. So don’t believe them.”

As it works to stave off a challenge from Republican businessman Bernie Moreno, Brown’s campaign has been promoting recent news media fact checks rejecting attack ads that well-financed Republican groups have been running against Brown. The most prominent example is a TV ad Brown cut last week that said it’s a “total lie” to suggest that Brown had voted to allow transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports. The ad is similar to one released around the same time from Colin Allred, a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, who said he “doesn’t want boys playing girls’ sports.” While Brown’s response had a softer tone, both ads drew a similarly disappointed reaction from LGBTQ advocacy groups, who saw them as too accepting of Republican framing on the issue. 

The dynamic shows the cross-pressures faced by Democrats like Brown who need to win by winning over Republican-leaning voters. His speech otherwise was a vintage pro-union, pro-manufacturing populist economic message, including touting legislation that bailed out multi-state union pensions funds and that will subsidize the planned Intel plant outside Columbus. The event was the first legitimate political rally I’ve seen in this race, with a crowd of 200 or so drawn by Doug McCarron, the national leader of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, which has endorsed Brown.

Tying it back to Mansfield, his hometown, Brown blamed presidents “from Bush all the way to Biden” for selling out manufacturing communities by supporting international trade deals and doing “the bidding of corporate interests.”

“They don’t want me at the table,” Brown said. “They don’t want my voice. They don’t want your voice.”

Republicans stay on transgender issue

Republicans have used transgender issues as a cookie-cutter attack line recently against Democratic candidates at all levels of U.S. politics. A recent poll commissioned by Ideastream Public Media, WKYC and Signal Ohio helps explain why, finding Northeast Ohio voters to be broadly supportive of the Republican position, although LGBTQ advocates have said the issue is misunderstood by the public unless they have a personal connection. It’s unclear whether the attacks are actually effective though. Voters consistently rank issues like the economy as much more important. 

For the attacks against Brown, a longtime supporter of LGBTQ rights, Republicans have pointed to votes Brown took opposing Republican amendments that would have attached anti-transgender measures to broader funding bills and a letter Brown signed expressing opposition to bans on transgender affirming care for minors. Brown’s rebuttal ad describes Brown’s position as being like that of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, saying athletic eligibility should “be up to sports leagues, not politicians,” but doesn’t delve into the details. 

Moreno, like Brown has tacitly acknowledged an attack ad’s effectiveness by responding to it, although not nearly on the same scale. His campaign has cut multiple videos defending against Brown campaign ads calling attention to lawsuits filed from Moreno’s former employees seeking unpaid overtime. One of Moreno’s rebuttals features interviews with former employees calling him a good boss. 

Predicted population shifts could help Democrats 

The Columbus Dispatch recently published an interesting series of articles exploring a state government report predicting a 675,000-person drop in Ohio’s population by 2050, if current trends continue. 

It got me thinking: what kind of political impact would that have? 

I suspect such a shift may benefit Democrats, since the report projects significant growth in the Columbus area and steep declines in the Republican-voting eastern and southern portions of the state. Ohio Democrats have touted this trend as a reason for long-term optimism.

I conducted some quick-and-dirty calculations. I adjusted 2020 election results to match the report’s county-level 2050 population projections. They showed my initial thought was right: the shift, all else being equal, hypothetically helps Democrats. 

But not by much.

President Joe Biden would have lost Ohio by 7.3 percentage points, about 0.7 percent better than he actually did, if Ohio of 2020 looked like the possible Ohio of 2050. The simplest reason the shift didn’t help him more was the 18% population drop the state report projects the heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County will see over the next 26 years. 

David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, said that kind of shift only would help Democrats in close races, like former Gov. Ted Strickland’s re-election loss to John Kasich in 2010. 

But otherwise, he said his broader takeaway is that Ohio is in bad shape. Having to manage declining population would lump Ohio in politically more with states like West Virginia, rather than presidential swing states like Florida.

“If I were an Ohio political leader with interest in the long-term health of this state, I would be thinking of little else than this report,” Niven said.

Competing Issue 1 events 

One of state Republicans’ plans for defeating Issue 1, the proposal to change Ohio’s system of drawing political district maps, involves convincing some Black voters it’s a bad idea.

Their main argument: a similar reform approved by Michigan voters led to a drop in Black representatives. They also point to a federal court ruling finding a state legislative map there to be illegally influenced by race. 

In a news conference this week, a group of Democratic Black Ohio state lawmakers rebutted the argument in an interesting way. They suggested Black communities don’t necessarily need Black representatives to be represented adequately in Columbus. 

State Rep. Dontavius Jarrells, of Columbus, acknowledged the passage of Issue 1 could result in “composition changes” for the state legislature. But he said the status quo hasn’t delivered policies he said would help Black communities, like action addressing gun violence, climate change or shortages of foster care. 

“I’m angry,” he said. “I’m so tired of the arguments about Issue 1 being about the dilution of Black representation when we don’t have Black policy.” 

Another speaker at this week’s news conference, Deidra Reese, an official with the campaign working to pass Issue 1, said Ohio’s redistricting status quo keeps Black communities on the sidelines.  

“When you have representatives such as these, who are so far in the minority because you have a supermajority on the other side, they don’t even get to compete in the conversation,” Reese said. 

The news conference was a rebuttal to a series of news conferences last week from Black Issue 1 opponents, including state Sen. Michele Reynolds, a Columbus-area Republican.  

“Ohio’s Issue 1 could lead to a loss of representation for minority communities as seen in Michigan,” Reynolds said. “Instead of ensuring fairer maps, the reform could fragment cohesive minority blocs, diluting our political influence.”

How Michigan’s ‘Issue 1’ turned out 

In 2018, Michigan voters approved taking the power of drawing district maps away from elected officials and giving it to a newly created panel of citizens, similar to what Issue 1 would do in Ohio if voters approve it.  

The result is that Michigan today has five state House districts made up of at least 60% Black voters, compared to eight before, a change that accompanied a drop in the number of Black representatives.  

That’s because the new citizen’s redistricting commission in Michigan undid a previous Republican-drawn map that packed Black voters in Detroit into a relatively small number of districts. The new map combined those voters’ neighborhoods with outlying suburbs. A federal court rejected the revised map in response to a lawsuit from a group of Black Detroit residents, agreeing it was illegally influenced by race. The panel then revised the map again, and the court approved them.  

If Issue 1 passes, Ohio mapmakers likely would look at changing legislative and congressional districts around Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton – areas with the highest concentration of Black voters today –  to design more Democratic-leaning or at least more competitive districts. The Ohio measure also instructs the redistricting panel to disregard current lawmakers’ addresses, which could have unpredictable results for those incumbents.

Mark your calendar

Later today (Thursday): Campaign-finance filings are due for state candidates and groups supporting or opposing Issue 1 

Saturday, Oct. 26: Weekend early-in person voting starts. Boards of election are open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

Sunday, Oct. 27: Boards of election are open for early voting from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. 

Tuesday, Oct. 29: Absentee ballot applications must be received by county boards of election by 8:30 p.m.