12th bodes ill for GOP, but don’t count Trump out
AThomas Suddes
lthough it’s not official (it almost certainly will be), Zanesville Republican Troy Balderson has won a seat in the U.S. House for the next four-plus months in the Columbus region’s 12th Congressional District. And Columbus Democrat Danny O’Connor, Franklin County’s recorder, lost to Balderson.
Balderson, a state senator, drew about 50.15 percent of the 12th District’s vote. However in 2016, Balderson’s self-appointed cheerleader, Donald Trump, drew 53.2 percent of the district’s vote. And Trump led Hillary Clinton by 11.3 percentage points. On Tuesday, Balderson led Democrat O’Connor by just 0.9 percent.
To the extent that Balderson was a proxy for Trump in the heavily Republican district — and he was — the president may be in trouble in Ohio. If everything in America is as fabulous as the president’s fans claim, Balderson should have done at least as well Tuesday, districtwide, as Trump did in there in 2016. But Balderson didn’t.
No, that doesn’t mean Trump can’t win a second term. In the past 100 years, voters have denied only Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush second terms. So there’s that. (Gerald Ford wasn’t an elected president, so he’s hard to classify, but when Carter unseated Ford in 1976, the GOP’s Ford carried every county now in Balderson’s 12th District.)
There’ll be a BaldersonO’Connor rematch in November for a full, twoyear U.S. House term. Tuesday’s election was for the unexpired remainder of ex-Rep. Patrick Tiberi’s U.S. House term. Tiberi, a Genoa Township Republican, resigned from Congress on Jan. 15 to become president of the Ohio Business Roundtable. This fall’s Balderson-O’Connor rematch should be every bit as robust as the summer campaign.
The 12th Congressional District is composed of Delaware, Licking (Newark) and Morrow (Mount Gilead) counties, and parts of Franklin, Marion, Muskingum (Zanesville) and Richland (Mansfield) counties. Historically, Delaware County has been about as Republican as an Ohio county can get. As for Licking, from 1961 to mid1982, it was part of a district represented in Congress by nationally known conservative Republican John M. Ashbrook of Johnstown.
In 1972, Ashbrook challenged the GOP’s renomination of President Richard M. Nixon. Ashbrook charged Nixon’s administration had “nearly decapitated American conservatism,” the New York Times later reported. Ashbrook also opposed Nixon’s outreach to China’s communist dictatorship. Now, Donald Trump is playing trade-and-tariff poker with China.
Meanwhile, an out-ofstate tally likely of interest to Ohioans was Tuesday’s overwhelming decision by Missouri voters to kill a right-to-work law which the GOP-run Missouri General Assembly had passed and then-Gov. Eric Greitens signed. (Greitens, a Republican, resigned in May in the wake of a sex scandal.)
Missouri voters successfully petitioned to put the law on the statewide ballot so Missourians could vote right-to-work up or down. Of the 1.4 million Missourians voting on the issue, 67.5 percent voted no. The St. Louis PostDispatch reported that only 15 of Missouri’s 114 counties voted yes on right-to-work. The newspaper projected that as many as 331,000 Missouri Republicans “bolted from their party” to vote no on the ballot issue, known as Proposition A.
Now pending in Ohio’s House — but seemingly dead in the water — is a proposed right-to-work amendment to the Ohio Constitution. Republican Reps. John Becker of suburban Cincinnati and Craig Riedel of Defiance introduced the measure in December. Among co-sponsors is Rep. Kristina Roegner, a Hudson Republican who is running for the state Senate.
To reach the ballot, the Becker-Riedel plan would have to win at least 60 yes votes in the 99-member Ohio House and 20 votes in the 33-member state Senate and then win a majority of yes votes from those Ohioans voting on the measure in a statewide election. The one time that was tried in Ohio, in 1958, 63.3 percent of Ohioans voting on the proposal said no.
If you wonder why Ohio’s General Assembly (with a Senate that Republicans have run since November 1984 and a House that the GOP has run, except for two years, since November 1994) hasn’t passed right-to-work, 1958 is the answer — underlined last week by Missouri.