3 DEMOCRATS VIE TO FACE JORDAN
The candidate casting the longest shadow in the Democratic primary for Ohio’s 4th district Congressional seat won’t even be on the same ballot.
Rep. Jim Jordan doesn’t have an opponent in the Republican primary, but three Democrats running for the chance to unseat him in November have largely focused their campaigns on the six-term incumbent from Urbana.
Cribbing from presidential candidates setting themselves up as the Democratic champion
to defeat President Donald Trump, Shannon Freshour, Mike Larsen and Jeff Sites are trying to position themselves as the best option to knock off one of Trump’s strongest allies on Capitol Hill.
Jordan has developed a national reputation as one of Trump’s fiercest defenders in the U.S. House. He was appointed as the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee after leading the party’s fight against the impeachment inquiry.
Their climb won’t be easy. The 4th district is better known as the “duck district,” named for the shape its gerrymandered borders form to favor Republicans. Jordan hasn’t received less than two-thirds of the vote there since 2012, when a Libertarian candidate siphoned votes from him during President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.
Democrats are hopeful a similar scenario, coupled with a voter backlash against Trump, could open the door for them to steal the seat before district boundaries are redrawn in 2021. Northwest Ohio farmer and former local GOP Chairman Chriss Gibbs is gathering signatures to run in the race as an independent candidate.
“We all believe that Jim Jordan is such a detriment to our district that getting rid of him is the overarching goal for all of us,” Freshour said.
Freshour, of Marysville, and Sites, of Lima, are positioning themselves as center-left Democrats who can appeal to other moderates who have grown disenchanted with Jordan.
“The division in politics and America right now is not the America I grew up in,” Sites said. “I want to reach out across the aisle and bring America back together so we can get something done.”
But Larsen said he is the most progressive candidate in the Democratic primary.
Larsen, 59, boomeranged back to politics after building a career as a comedy writer on the West Coast. He started performing stand-up when he was struggling to find a job on Capitol Hill after graduating from college and turned that into a profession that landed him with The Tonight Show and as a sitcom writer.
A former staffer for California Rep. Jackie Spier, Larsen moved to Plain City in 2017 to be closer to his wife’s family.
“I couldn’t believe how many Democrats had to run like half a Republican to win in their areas,” said Larsen, who traveled the district as communications director for Jordan’s previous opponent. “If you aren’t going to win anyway, why aren’t you going down swinging?”
Freshour, 45, was a litigation paralegal before starting her full-time campaign, which exploded when her tweet responding to West Wing actor Bradley Whitford’s question about who was running against Jordan went viral.
She said she wants to protect the programs that helped her and her single mother while growing up in Toledo, such as food stamps and Head Start, among others.
Sites, 53, said he spent about three years in the U.S. Army before returning to civilian life in 1990. He works in logistics for a Findlay company that provides air cleaners for automakers.
The candidates agree on key issues such as expanding access to broadband internet and attracting more health care facilities to rural areas of the district.
They all have questions or reservations about Medicare For All: how to pay for it, how it would affect millions of workers covered by private health insurers and whether the types of medical care
Medicare covers also would expand.
Larsen and Freshour both said they favor a public option. Sites wants to take a slower approach to a singlepayer system, graduating it from seniors to low-income people and then to others.
Only the 5th district in northwest Ohio has fewer uninsured people than the 4th, where the U.S. Census Bureau estimated in 2018 that 36,753 lack health insurance. More than 257,000 of the district’s residents are on public health insurance, about half the amount who have private health insurance.
The Democrats also agree that they want to enact tighter gun control without forcing owners to give up their firearms.
Larsen said “military style” weapons should be illegal and the federal government should adopt a buyback program to encourage the public to surrender them. Sites wants to reinstitute the assault weapons ban that was rolled back. Freshour said “common sense gun reforms,” such as universal background checks and red flag laws, are needed.