Democrats Might Just Flip This GOP-Held House Seat In Ohio
DELAWARE, Ohio ― Gene Jackson was standing in his driveway clearing brush off the side of his white picket fence on July 28 when Danny O’Connor walked over to chat. Jackson, 68, was a registered Republican on O’Connor’s door knocking list.
After dispensing with some small talk, O’Connor, the Democratic nominee for Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, got to the point: Was Jackson planning to vote? “Always do,” Jackson replied in a rural Ohio drawl. Did he have any particular policy concerns? “Nothing really.” Jackson works with his sons at a tool and die-making business he owns in town. Business is pretty good, he told O’Connor.
With that, O’Connor made his pitch. “My focus on going to Washington is to get a little more done for people, especially on infrastructure. We could rebuild this country if we had the right leadership,” he said.
“Hell yeah,” Jackson responded. A few seconds later, Jackson, who voted for Donald Trump and is satisfied with his performance, told O’Connor he could count on his vote.
When HuffPost followed up to ask Jackson why he was opting for O’Connor if he had no major complaints about Trump, he described it as a gut feeling. “I kind of like his personality, myself,” he said with a laugh.
O’Connor, a 31-year-old attorney with a boyish grin, began his career in politics in 2016, when he won a race for Franklin County recorder.
Now, less than two years after occupying an office for which the primary role is processing real estate documents, O’Connor is quietly on the brink of flipping a House seat the GOP has held since 1982.
O’Connor faces state Sen. Troy Balderson, 56, in a special election on Tuesday to fill a seat that Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) vacated in January. Tiberi, a popular nine-term moderate, had endorsed Balderson in a contentious May primary that Balderson narrowly won.
The primary results are binding for both the special election and the general election. So regardless of the outcome on Tuesday, O’Connor and Balderson are due to face off again in November.
That makes the concrete stakes of Tuesday’s race relatively low. But as with the special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th in March, partisans on both sides are watching the outcome closely for still more evidence of a Democratic midterm wave.
By all rights, Ohio’s 12th, a vast C-shaped district gerrymandered to include well-off parts of Columbus, its affluent northern suburbs and parts of the industrial towns Mansfield and Zanesville, should be safe GOP territory.
Tiberi was re-elected there by 37 percentage points in 2016; Trump won the district by a more modest 11-point margin.
As a result, the surprising tightness of the race is all the more disquieting for Republicans, who have been forced to spend millions on Balderson’s behalf and deploy their top surrogates to stump for him.
The latest public poll has Balderson up by a single point, a decline from a 10-point lead he held a month ago in the same survey. In the hopes of changing that dynamic, Trump announced Wednesday that he’ll hold a rally in the district for Balderson on Saturday night.
“If the GOP were to lose this race, who would they blame or what would they blame? It would have to be a reflection on the Republican brand,” said Herb Asher, a political science professor at the Ohio State University.
Asher, who has donated to O’Connor’s campaign, argued that even a narrow Republican win would be “another indication that Democrats are more competitive in districts that have not been hospitable to them.”
Congressman Ted Lieu said: We don’t have to wait until November to make a difference. Ohio’s Special Election is just a few days away on August 7th, and Democrat Danny O’Connor is gaining ground every day.
