Tag: Ohio Senate

I Support Josh Mandel for the Ohio Senate: It’s all about making elevator rides uncomfortable

I Support Josh Mandel for Ohio Senate

The upcoming senate race for Ohio to replace the Rob Portman seat is coming up fast.  There were some good elections in 2021, but that’s all behind us now.  It’s time to go or get off the pot for endorsing someone for the Ohio Senate Race of 2022.  I like many of the candidates; I think they all have some great attributes.  The key to something like this, which still has many months of campaigning, is to pick the person who will best serve that seat a few years from now, not necessarily where politics is presently.  And I think, especially after reading The Nixon Conspiracy by Geoff Shepard and The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that the political world of tomorrow will be much different than what it has been over the past decade.  Picking candidates for the climate we are coming into is essential because the political terrain will be robust with political stunts, media hype, and the ability to shame candidates on the senate floor and still ride the elevator back to the parking garage after.  It’s not going to be for the political lite but rather those who can most withstand betrayal and scandal and support the Trump America First Agenda without hesitation. And my pick to be that guy is Josh Mandel. 

I like Jane Timken a lot, but after meeting with her a few times and watching her campaigning now for several months, she’s too conventional. She’s a bridge-builder, and we’re talking about a senate that needs to get rid of people like Mitch McConnell in the leadership and who will instantly harass Chuck Schumer right out of the gate.  Even sitting in the bathroom stall, they need to shame all the comfortable senate members like Lindsey Graham.  Retaking the Senate as a Republican majority is a war, including even the RINOs who are there now who have not been protecting the American Constitution the way they need to.  Jane talks about herself being a fighter, and I think she is, perhaps for some time in the past or the future.  But not for the 2022 race extending past 2025. She’s just too nice for that environment, for what has to be done.  I have nothing against her, she has done an excellent job with the Republican Party in Ohio, and I think she can work the Trump endorsement that she no doubt would get once the primary is over. Still, she’s just too conventional to excite people into action.  

The other guy I had been rooting for whom I was happy to meet is J.D. Vance.  His problem is that he was a Never Trumper, and in a Trump-heavy election, that is coming back to bite him.  He has a lot of money pouring in to support him, a lot of the big conventional money would rather have a Trump hater than a Trump copy, so J.D. Vance is raising a lot of money and has a shot to keep things close.  But what it comes down to is he’s too nice of a guy.  Like Jane, he might make a great senator in a different time when people played nicely together, and a legislative agenda was more important.  But these are not those times; what matters is America First and nothing else, and the ability to fight with peers on the senate floor the way Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in the House.  Radicals have overtaken the Democrat Party, I would say for the last 40 or 50 years. 

The masks of communism are off now, but the radicalism is deep in their culture, especially as it extends into the media and global investment brokers.  To undo all that, it will take a lot of political theater and members on the Hill who will write legislation endorsed by the Trump White House and fight for it on the floor, perhaps even physically.  It’s not what you see on TV that anybody must worry about; it’s what happens in the halls, the offices, and during the commute that requires aggression and boisterousness.  The Democrats are the enemy, and the fight has to be taken to them.  J.D. Vance is a nice guy who does pretty well on Tucker Carlson and can come up with some one-liners.  But when it comes to fighting, he’s not the guy for the battlefield.  Like I said, maybe during a different time.    

The rest of them in the field, such as Mike Gibbons, are to the left of J.D. and Jane, and I don’t consider them relevant in this race.  They may make some noise, but they don’t have what it takes for this Senate seat that essentially needs to pressure Sharrod Brown’s supporters to fall off the earth.  None of this hand-holding that Rob Portman has started with the Brown camp is what Ohio voters have been wanting.  Democrat progressives need to be destroyed.  There were three things that Josh Mandel did that solidified my opinion about him.  He worked with Darby Boddi at Lakota in gaining the support of the growing number of angry moms there, and he did a fantastic job on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas to talk about it. I personally spoke to Josh at a Republican event privately and on stage in front of a really big audience with big-time Republican members in the audience such as Jim Jordan and Frank LaRose, about his commitment to the election fraud that robbed Trump of the Executive Branch in 2020.  And the third thing was an event at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe where he had the Tea Party religious right showing great support.  He appeared on stage with Jena Ellis from the Trump legal team and was very evangelical.  Now, that particular assemblage of the electorate is only about 30% of the total conservative vote, but they are passionate, and when they are winning, they are contagious.  When Trump gives out endorsements in the summer of 2022 after this primary race is over, it’s going to be Trump for Renacci for governor and Mandel for Senate, and these people will be the ground troops who fill the crowds. 

When people wonder if Josh Mandel can win the general election, as he obviously can win the primary, the answer to that will be yes.  Even though he will come across as weak and vulnerable in a general election to Democrats and media members, the people who actually vote will put everything on the table for a hard-core Trump supporter, especially as Trump does many campaign stops in Ohio during that election season.  Any scandal that follows Josh Mandel around, as he is a little on the wild side, won’t matter just as it hasn’t for Trump.  Mandel will have the evangelicals, and they will be his foot soldiers to success.  People in Ohio will vote for someone attached to Trump’s hip, and none of the candidates in this race has more openly embraced Trump than Josh Mandel by sticking to the election fraud issue more.  Trump will reward Josh with an open endorsement as he will be campaigning for Renacci anyway.  At that point in the race, the other candidates would be nowhere near as exciting to Ohio voters as someone who isn’t afraid of political stunts and sticking to them when the pressure is most significant.  And when it comes to taking the fight to the Senate floor in Washington D.C. I asked Josh the same thing. I asked the other candidates how prepared they were for the battle to come.  Only Josh Mandel gave me the correct answer about actually showing light in his eyes when the talk of fighting liberals personally and directly came up.  And I’m convinced that with Josh Mandel, there will be many uncomfortable elevator rides for the opposition in the years to come.     

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Matt Huffman Understands Good Government: Conflict is critical to a properly run republic

People like the Title to my New Book, for good reason

First, I have to say that I appreciate all the kind words I’ve received over the title of my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  As I said in the video above, they have been whispering to me their enjoyment, almost as if they were afraid to say it in public because the word “gun” is in it.  Yet, that is entirely on purpose.  A lot in The Gunfighter’s Guide will challenge previous assumptions, the most of which is the nature of conflict in business and why we as a culture need to embrace that conflict more as we have in years past.  For a long time now, where we have been going has led to so much corruption because the value systems have not been on success, but in getting along.  Strangely enough, I was at an event with Matt Huffman, the President of the Ohio Senate, and he gave an excellent speech that displayed his understanding of this very need for conflict in any civil exchange.  Politics is a blood sport and was always intended as such.  They fight so that we don’t have to in general society.  But this is also the expectation in business as well.  If there isn’t conflict in a discussion, then why have the conversation.  All the consensus-building efforts that we have seen coming out of our academia are out of step with the American way of doing things.  It’s like telling us that American football shouldn’t be about putting on pads and hitting the other guy as hard as you can to stop them from scoring a touchdown, but that we should all play flag football, and that scoring isn’t all that important.  The title of my book evokes a truth that many people understand, and I appreciate that this early in the process, people already understand the need for a philosophic presentation of this very American concept.

Matt Huffman has done great in Ohio as President of the Senate

I had wanted to tell Senator Huffman how proud I was of him and the Ohio Senate in general for passage of Senate Bill 22, which took away Governor DeWine’s health directives over Covid-19 and future overreaches with legislative control.  If Huffman, George Lang, Terry Johnston, and much of the senate body had not moved to pass S.B. 22, Ohio would have been impeded by the recent Biden push for mass closures and mask mandates over the recent Delta Variant.  I thought it was a big deal when the Senate did what they did, and the House followed quickly.  DeWine had cut the entire legislature out of any covid protocols allowing the Governor to become a ruthless dictator over rights of health decisions which put white coat bureaucrats entirely in charge of all our lives.  And it went on for way too long, essentially because nobody wanted to have a conflict with the Governor.  Yet nightly at the Ohio capital, on other things, there were riots and vandalism over social causes that nobody wanted to deal with, and times were looking very bleak.  Trump was being pushed out of office by a group of radicals who were not afraid of conflict. Conservatives were not being met in the same fashion, allowing activists to roll over logic and goodness without fear of reprisal.   You might remember around Christmas of 2020 going into 2021 when I mentioned that Matt Huffman might be the next president of the Senate and that Governor DeWine’s powers would finally be quelled after a year of behaving like a complete tyrant off the rails and out of control. That’s what happened, Huffman was sworn in during the early months of 2021, and he went right to work doing what the legislature had been hoping to do for a long time, stand up to DeWine and return Ohio to civility with a proper government. 

Huffman told his story a bit of how contentious it was standing up to Governor DeWine, who did not want a fellow Republican senate to override his veto of S.B. 22.  DeWine tried to use the necessity of a single point of action to manage emergencies, which was always part of the poison pill of Covid-19.  It was presented as beyond legislative control where the Dr. Fauci types would manage our lives instead of our elected government because of an emergency health crisis.  But our constitutions do not indicate that liberty and freedom are only temporary factors of our daily life.  Even during an emergency such as tornado impacts, hurricanes, or health crises, all people still have their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And sometimes, we have to fight to maintain those rights.  This is what Huffman, Lang, and the rest of the Senate did when they told Mike DeWine to pound sand and suck it up.  They were going to override the Governor’s veto and take away his health directives.  DeWine had abused his power, and he needed a slap down.  It was an example of how proper government should look. It was the suitable alternative to open warfare with people storming the capital to retake their rights over the Covid restrictions.  In every state, the House and Senate must fight like that on our behalf, and in Ohio, it happened.  Fighting is not a bad thing.  When fighting turns to permanent damage, that’s another story, but people who enter the bloodsport of politics should understand that’s the nature of the game.

That is, after all, the theme of my book and why people are saying under their breath that they like the title so much.  It alludes to the American understanding that conflict is at the heart of our “republic.” When the law wasn’t present in times past of western expansion, the gunfighter’s brought some form of order to those far-flung regions.  Many people were killed in cold blood and drunken violence, but the presence of conflict was the first foundation for law and order.  If someone did something to someone, the threat of a gunfight was a genuine menace, and people thought twice about it.  And if they were caught killing in cold blood, the community often hung people right there on the spot, killing them.  Many times, innocent people were hung.  But people did think twice before engaging in destructive behavior because people were not afraid of conflict as they are today.  In so many ways, you have to look at our academic approach to conflict during the last century and question whether or not we have all been poisoned with the pill of globalism so that our republic would fall under those same conditions.  So it is certainly my goal with The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business to resurrect the sentiment that conflict is good and healthy for maintaining a proper republic.  Not necessarily with violence, but in how Matt Huffman, George Lang, and others did with S.B. 22 in 2021, which has saved Ohio from a tyrannical Biden administration looking for ground cover for their many scandals.  Without the conflict with DeWine, Ohio would still be imprisoned by the white coats of bureaucracy.  It seems rare these days to see such conflict and courage, but it does happen; there are Matt Huffman’s out there who understand good government and utilize it to the proper effect.  And people understand that in my title, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, something important has been missing in our business and political cultures that need to be dusted off and resurrected to full effect.  And then, and only then, is when America is back and will sustain itself for the world well into the future.   

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

I Fully endorse George Lang for the Senate District 4 seat in Ohio

I was quite excited to learn that George Lang was running for the Senate seat that Bill Coley had been occupying in Ohio for several years. The seat itself was terming out and George let me know that on Monday at noon he was going to announce his run for it, and it brought a lot of joy to me. I first learned of his candidacy while on vacation with my family in Charleston, South Carolina touring sites that many were reviewing as the best in the world. I kept hearing while on my weeklong stay in Charleston that this neighborhood, this beach, this restaurant, this shipping lane, this and that were the best anywhere. I had to admit that everything was very nice. Property values were certainly great, and shipping vessels seemed to come into the harbor every 30 minutes loaded to their max. Even at 3 in the morning from our Mt Pleasant home I could hear the cranes working and I found all that economic activity very exciting. Yet the town of Mt Pleasant across the harbor from downtown Charleston was quiet and very chic at that time of night, just as it was all other hours of the day. The people there were prosperous and happy, no crime was in sight. Prosperity tends to do that to a community. So I was a little sad to leave and come home, but then for comparison as my family hit Cincinnati starting at Florence then going up I-71 to avoid the traffic on I-75 it was a startling comparison which culminated into our last moments of the journey travelling down Butler County Regional Highway where for as far as the eye could see, there was prosperity, especially in West Chester. After coming from an extremely wealthy area full of vibrant economic activity, it was obvious that my hometown of Butler County, Ohio was even greater and that is something the rest of the nation hasn’t been talking about. And for the last twenty years, it was my friend George Lang who has had a tremendous hand in that success, which was why I was elated that he was running for that Ohio Senate seat.

It goes without saying then that I endorse George Lang for the Senate District 4 seat in Ohio, fully. I could tell stories all day about why he’s qualified, but the best part of his resume is in this opening paragraph. I had spent a week in one of America’s most prosperous communities and coming directly home to West Chester, where I work, and Liberty Township where I live it becomes obvious that we have it better than most anywhere else in the country and that is due to the very pro-business environment that Lang has championed for many years starting as a trustee in West Chester. Even when Lang was outvoted 2 to 1 on most issues in West Chester by the much more liberal trustees who were there at the time, Lee Wong being one of them, George managed to be a change agent for the betterment of business and the results are obvious today, and the spill over has poured over into neighboring Liberty Township and other regions connected directly to West Chester very positively.

I remember well when George benefited from Mark Welch getting elected into that second trustee seat knocking out a longtime incumbent so that a second vote could be obtained, and real growth could occur for business. For a few years George Lang and Mark Welch opened West Chester to a very positive pro-business culture that is now carrying over into our current conditions which rival any of the best in the entire country and now George wants to bring that culture to all of Ohio. When George was elected into the 52nd House of Representative seat, this was his ultimate goal which he has been working toward. However, as a Senator, he will have much greater leverage to make that pro-business platform more prominent and to take it above the noise of all the other political matters that permeate the state.

George really doesn’t have any competition for this spot, his rivals during the upcoming primary are Candice Keller out of Middletown, who I think is a wonderful person. But when it comes to experience, George has many of the same positions as her on conservative ideas, but his understanding of business and his pro-business platform just puts him on a higher level. Then as I’ve said about Lee Wong, he’s the kind of guy who is a liberal in a conservative area. He has no choice but to run as a Republican. His policy decisions are very much that of a Democrat. If he were running for office in Hamilton County or even Dayton, he’d be a Democrat without question. It was Lee who stood in the way of many of the growth ideas that George wanted to implement in West Chester. I seem to remember Wong’s campaign slogan was that you “Couldn’t go wrong with Wong.” Well, yes you can, in a big way. He’s a nice guy but he’s not on the level of Lang, in any category. In many ways Lee stood in the way of growth, it was George and Mark who broke through his resistance to give West Chester the great prosperity that it sees today.

So, if there is a theme to all this, management does matter and who we elect into these positions has a major impact on all our lives. Obviously in Charleston South Carolina they have a lot of good things going on. Essentially there they have a deep and rich history to draw from which has put politics on the efforts of preserving that history, and not getting in the way of businesses wanting to capitalize off that deep history. In West Chester, Ohio the situation was harder, while Butler County does have a great history going back to before the Revolution, just as Charleston does, we had to be good the old-fashioned way, in the middle of the country with great highway access. We needed our politicians to make the most of those advantages with low cost compliance and protections on upfront investment for businesses. In West Chester, George Lang alone for a long time, then later with a good support staff from a very good Republican Party presence, have created an economic boom that plugs straight into the Trump administration. There is a reason that President Trump enjoys coming to the southern Ohio area so much, and George Lang is more a part of that success than just about anybody. Not in what he has done, but in what he hasn’t.

Most politicians measure their success by what bills they sponsor and ultimately by how much they grow government. In George’s case, it’s the opposite, he measures his success by how much he can get government out of the way of business, allowing them to spend their time and energy on being profitable, which then allows a high quality of living for everyone. For people who have lived in the Butler County area for many years, its easy to take for granted just how good it is. But if you have traveled, the benefits are obvious in comparison. I am very excited to see George Lang do for Ohio as a Senator what he has done for West Chester. I personally think Ohio has an opportunity to become one of the great economic powerhouses of the world and it will take people like George to make it happen. So he has my endorsement and then some. I simply can’t wait to get him in that seat so he can start the work, for which we will all benefit.

 

Rich Hoffman

 

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House Bill 228: No more singing in the rain for bad guys

I am extremely proud of the current congress in Ohio as the gavel dropped in the affirmative on House Bill 228. I wasn’t too excited at first as several people were quick to let me know that the vote had been taken and passed as it happened. My response to them all was that we still had a liberal governor in Kasich so he’d veto it. The bill would arrive dead essentially. But over the last couple of days many from Columbus told me much better news, that they fully expected Kasich to veto Ohio’s new Stand Your Ground law, but that they had the votes to override the veto. Now that became an entirely different matter all together and the fact that the Ohio congress acted so boldly at the end of the session spoke a lot about what’s to come for the positive. Stand Your Ground laws are needed everywhere and they reinforce the Second Amendment in ways the Bill of Rights was always philosophically designed. I consider The Anti Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers to be some of the most joyous reading I’ve ever done in my life and there can be no understanding of American Constitutional law without accepting that the paramount epoxy of a proper structured society is the decentralization of law enforcement using the gun as the symbol of order. And for Ohio to take that proper step in making Stand Your Ground legislation the law of the land the state takes that critical step forward in raising the bar for a state that was being tempted to go purple to turning a nice bright red.

With a vote of 64 to 26 House Bill 228 passed comfortably showing great conviction. I know the House has had to sit on their attempts for a long time knowing that Kasich would prevent its advancement. But what was a surprise was that the House proved they could get the three fifths of the total vote count needed to override a veto, which in this case is 60 votes out of 99. With the 64 House of Representatives members who voted in favor o House Bill 228 they are already there. Then of course it will take 20 of 33 Senators to get passage of the bill without the governor’s signature. “Isn’t this exciting!” I learned from a good source that the senate was on board as well which was a stunning revelation. Of course, this boldness comes after the election before the newly elected congress takes over but its more than symbolic in nature. Kasich has prevented many of these conservative advancements and because many members of the House and Senate were up for election, they couldn’t afford to have Kasich pulling resources away from their re-elections. But it is refreshing to see that the moment they could, this congress acted and they did so boldly on legislation that is far from the type of change agent progressivism that has taken over Columbus in recent years like a vast sickness.

Stand Your Ground in Ohio is a big deal. The “duty to retreat” laws that have been in place were always dangerous and a real impediment to continued growth in both a population sense and in relation to business. With a “duty to retreat” it has added an unnecessary layer of burden to gun users when faced with hostile adversity. If something is going on that is hostile in nature a person acting in good faith should never have to worry about hesitating when faced with eminent threats. I can say I’ve been in those situations more than once and have not elected to use a gun because I did not want to go through the legal mess that always comes after. I have the fortune to have other tools to stay out of trouble and I use them more than I’d care to admit. But I do worry often about those tools not working and having to resort to a gun, and with Stand Your Ground, one less layer of concern has now been removed. House Bill 228 doesn’t allow people to have shoot outs in a Wal-Mart parking lot over parking spaces. But it does give gun defenders the ability to use deadly force to resolve a situation at the point of a threat. Under the “duty to retreat” obligation not only was a gun owner under a burden to diffuse a threat before using deadly force, but they had the burden on them to prove it. When some criminal loser is acting aggressively they don’t care often what happens next. They only live in the moment whereas their targets are at a tactical disadvantage of having to be put in a circumstance to think of the future while facing the possibility of everything coming to an end right then and there. If you do survive those moments, you might lose everything you own in law suit after lawsuit and many years in jail. “Duty to Retreat” favored a progressive vision of society where dissemination of activity, high taxes and massive government welfare has spawned sharp increases in criminal activity putting good people at a burden to deal with the conduct.

The way things have been reminded me of the book and movie, A Clockwork Orange, where young criminal gangs terrorize innocent people because they know that people who have built value of themselves in society are always at a disadvantage. A person who has nothing to lose always has leverage against people who have everything to lose. And progressive legislation, (regressive in human nature) favors the down and out of society, the criminally inclined and inherently lazy. Their premise is that all people are equal, and that property should be redistributed to all, so the criminal element helps them achieve this goal through open crime and theft. Obviously, they don’t want people of value to be able to defend themselves from people of little value with a gun so that is why there has been legislation in Ohio that favored “duty to retreat.” If a criminal wants what you have, then you have a duty to retreat to save the lives of everyone involved. These are the same kind of people who wanted to lower the criminalization standards in Ohio with Issue 1 over the last election. Their goals are to grow criminal conduct that redistributes property to those who need it—the down and out, and the poor—essentially the Robin Hood effect. Clockwork Orange was an interesting observation of the trend of these redistributive thoughts and in how they unleashed the worst elements of society. For the anarchist the criminal is a saint, to the builder of a republic, the criminal is a detriment, a cancer that must be eliminated.  The singing in the rain scene from that film shown above is specifically what I’m thinking about.  While the scene is a dramatized version of rape violence the behavior of the criminal mind I think is captured all too well in that Stanley Kubrick classic.  So the essence behind all such legislation is what kind of society we really want to have, a republic or a anarchists paradise that puts power in the hands of the criminal and ties the hands of the law binding and hard-working behind their backs while their assets are stolen from them. Before Ohio voted for this Stand Your Ground law, that was the philosophic premise of the previous progressive legislation.

The trend of our society in every American state is moving in the direction of the gun owners. Gun ownership is part of American life—its at the core of our philosophy. While pockets of our society are still functioning from European progressivism and the noise they leave behind sounds bigger than it really is on the nightly news, the real trend is toward more individual liberty and the protection of that liberty with a gun. If you plot out legislation history not just in the Ohio statehouse but also in Washington D.C. the trajectory of what guns mean philosophically to our society is headed away from confiscation and more gun control and toward more freedom, and many more of them in the hands of hard-working people who have something to defend. And that is great news for the good, and terrible news for the bad. While progressives hate judgements of people into such categories the gun then becomes the judge. If a bad person seeks to inflict harm on a good person who is just minding their business, now the gun can rectify that conduct. The burden is not on the good to prove that they didn’t suddenly become bad the moment they pulled the trigger. And that is historic in how humans deal with each other. Because good people don’t go around creating gun violence, but bad people do. And now we have a situational judgment that can root out the unnatural paradox. Which is a wonderful thing to behold. Nice job in the Ohio House! That is truly something to be proud of.

Rich Hoffman

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New Poll Shows Why Jim Renacci Will Beat Sherrod Brown in Ohio Senate Race: A statistical dead heat from a liberal sampling

I would think that with all the drama being created about possible congressional seats that are in close races giving Democrats hope for the upcoming midterms that the news would be reported the other way. But then again, of course not. One of the biggest races in the country which is threatening one of the Senate’s biggest liberals is that between Sherrod Brown and the conservative challenger Jim Renacci. Where was this news on Fox and the other networks? It’s one of the biggest political stories in the nation yet nobody is reporting it. Can you imagine the earthquake heard around the world if Sherrod Brown fell on election night in Ohio to a handpicked Trump senatorial candidate? Yet only 4% is all that stands between them taken from a liberal poll at the start of September 2018. As it stands Brown has 46% to Renacci’s 42% which is within the margin of error and can be said to be a tie statistically speaking. In the case of this poll sampling, the name recognition and demographics favor Brown by a lot, so to have a statistical tie is big news. Probably the biggest news of the election because it says a whole lot about the true nature of the midterm race.

http://innovationohio.org/2018/09/06/new-poll-shows-tied-gubernatorial-race-close-races-up-and-down-the-ballot/

Sherrod Brown is a liberal in the Senate at the level of an Al Franken or Elizabeth Warren—perhaps even as liberal as Bernie Sanders. In conservative Ohio Brown has managed to stay in office because of the large union vote north of Columbus. But just two years ago many of those union voters, particularly in Cuyahoga County had Trump signs in front of their homes meaning things have changed for the liberal Senator. Renacci is cut from the same cloth as Trump and isn’t an anti-union guy meaning that those typical Brown supporters can feel good about Renacci if they want to vote for a piece of Trump, who had won the state with a roughly double-digit margin over Hillary Clinton. It’s a new political era in Ohio and Brown’s long run as a sitting senator is coming to an end.

There is still a long road to the election, but this particular election has the feel of a football game where a favored team is on the ropes holding on to a slim point advantage. To protect their victory they have to go into a prevent defense which is usually a ticket to a loss from a team that can afford to take risks. In Renacci’s case, he is the aggressor and he has Trump on the sidelines. Brown can’t afford to make Trump supporters angry because he is going after the same voters in many cases that gave Trump that big lead in Ohio. So by attacking Renacci he attacks Trump and that is dangerous for Brown.

There are three debates planned between the two candidates and this is where Brown is very vulnerable, because Renacci has a business background specifically in accounting and can talk numbers in a way that Brown needs to avoid. So in looking at the polling data supplied by Innovation Ohio I would project Renacci to be around 7% above Brown in all actuality. Of course voter turnout will be the key in the end, but at this point Republicans are just as energized in Ohio as Democrats. The problem with the Democrats is that they are at the disadvantage of trying to hold a vulnerable seat as opposed to being able to loosely defend themselves, which is the case of many Republicans like Ted Cruz in Texas facing challenges. Only this race in Ohio is a much bigger story. While Ted Cruz will surely end up with a comfortable victory, Sherrod Brown is poised to lose to Renacci. There is too much time on the clock for Brown to defend his seat against a very sharp Jim Renacci, and a very aggressive candidate at that. Knowing a bit about Renacci that I’ve been able to learn over the course of this year is that he is very competitive. Like Trump he will do whatever it takes to win, he will pound the pavement, give the speeches, energize his base, he’ll do the work. The same can’t be said about Brown. He has grown to take his seat for granted except for election years and he is already on his heels in uncomfortable ways. If he’s hoping to run out the clock on Renacci, that is a sure strategy to defeat. But if he wants to fight Renacci, and indirectly Trump himself, then he risks alienating his union support. Brown is in a really bad position.

The difference with Renacci however as opposed to Trump is that he is pretty mild-mannered and is very likable. He’s a traditional business person who has done things in life for the right reasons and when people meet him, that is what comes across. He’s just so likeable, so the more he goes around Ohio and meets people, the instant association with Trump is a plus, but for his own standing, Jim Renacci is just a good person, and a dedicated fighter which people can trust. That is what is the biggest danger to Brown over the coming two months of the political chess game. Brown for so long has managed to be that “other” senator which allowed Ohioans to feel like a bipartisan state with federal representation. Rob Portman is the conservative senator in the state who doesn’t make much by way of waves, and Brown has been that more blue-collar representative. But times have changed and Renacci has a real blue-collar background which gives voters who lean to the political right as blue-collar union types a person they can vote for without betraying the union hall. For them Renacci is a win, win. For Brown that is a nightmare.

Without question the Ohio senate race is the biggest indicator of Trump’s strength as president and the fact that Renacci is doing so well against the entrenched Brown says everything. But with two months to go, all Brown can really do is try to keep everything in front of him in a prevent position. But that won’t win this game at all. Against a weaker candidate, it might, but not with Jim Renacci. Jim is just the kind of guy who can beat Brown and the old Senator knows it. If the poll had come from Fox News or even the Republican party these numbers might not mean so much, but from Innovation Ohio, its huge news. They are not friendly to conservatives in any way.

I can proudly say that my bet has been on Jim Renacci from the very beginning. When I first learned the strategy of what Trump wanted to do in Ohio I was very supportive of it. And over the months that have followed it was easy to see how smart it was. Renacci is not a loser and he is committed to winning that Democratic held Senate seat and there isn’t much Brown can do to stop him. And that should be the lead story on every network, even CNN. But like any crowd who is rooting for a team they think is a sure thing and are trying to hold a lead against a much more aggressive team, they can only sit there in silence and hope things stay the way they are. But in their gut, they know that’s not the case. Their team is going to lose and all they can do to meet that reality is to sit there in silence and pray.

Rich Hoffman

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Getting to Know Jim Renacci: Why he’s the best guy to unseat Sharrod Brown in Ohio

The last time I had seen Jim Renacci was when he was stepping off Air Force One with President Trump shortly after being asked directly by the president to run for the very important Senate seat in Ohio against the very liberal Sharrod Brown. Brown’s mission has been from the beginning several decades ago to turn Ohio from a red state to blue and after decades in public office has managed to help make it the color purple. Trump recognized that, and he looked at the map at where Senate seats could be picked up to help his agenda, and Sharrod Brown’s seat became part of his ambitious plan. When it was then considered who might have the fortitude and raw talent to take on such an entrenched incumbent the only name the President focused on was that of Jim Renacci—a self-made businessman with a background similar to Trump’s. Even more importantly to all that, Renacci like Trump has a history of winning what he does so for Jim to make a decision to abandon his run to become Ohio’s next governor he stepped up to the considerably harder task of unseating Sharrod Brown in what will prove to be one of the hottest national races in the upcoming midterm election. Before that happens though there is a primary to win and a lot of planning to do, so Renacci was in Mason, Ohio speaking to a very small, but important group of area Republicans.

As readers here know I’m not an autograph seeking, name dropping, picture-taking kind of person when it comes to people of celebrity and social importance. I’ve personally met President Trump on several occasions as well as Newt Gingrich and several other top-tier politicians and I didn’t go out of my way to have a picture taken with them, but Jim Renacci is different. He’s a very tenacious guy whom I believe is extremely sincere in what gaining that Brown Senate seat means to the nation and I respect him as a person for it. Getting to know Renacci as a candidate over the last several months, first as a person challenging the governor’s seat, and now under President Trump’s direct request, running for the valued Senate seat in Ohio to share one of the two available. Rob Portman is the other Senator, so there is a real opportunity here to gain someone in the Senate of Jim’s caliber and to further the Trump agenda with business people who understand it. The videos below are from this meeting which was only a few people listening to Jim speak in a private kitchen. Recording this meeting was a rare opportunity for others to get to know Jim Renacci without the Fox Business Channel cameras, the big rallies, or the interpretations of a left-leaning media filtering out the information they think important. In these two videos Jim just talks about his background and why he is the best candidate of all the Republican challengers to unseat Sharrod Brown.

One of the last questions in this meeting was directed at what Renacci specifically has regarding talent to perform this important historic journey and Jim modestly didn’t answer the question as fully as he could. Being a business guy, he is happy to let his record speak for itself because he honestly likes the other Republicans who are also running for the opportunity to take on Sharrod Brown. After all, only Renacci has been personally endorsed by the President of the United States, so he let that question linger softly—but I’ll be happy to answer it on his behalf. One thing that Jim has that others don’t is that he’s good on television. He is a frequent guest on the Fox Business Channel and MSNBC—among many others and in this modern era of television communication, Jim is good on camera. He knows how to speak the language of television, which is in how to communicate in short segments and with using all the range that a blocked off face can deliver to a direct audience in their living rooms. When running against an entrenched incumbent that has the power of the entire Democratic Party using a friendly press to preserve their position, it takes being not just a great candidate to win a race like this—it will take someone who is fantastic on television, and Renacci is.

In those videos Renacci told the story of how he came into politics in the first place, and it’s a good one that everyone should hear. Jim could easily live a good life as a self-made person and stay out of the political theater, but like Trump he found himself entering politics to offer his unique skills where they were needed most. Jim had a Chevy dealership around the time that General Motors went bankrupt and at the time many dealerships were being forced to be closed. This activity had nothing to do with Jim’s business skills, as he had been very successful, it was simply that he was selected to be closed which went against everything he understood about how things should work. So he reached out to his local congressman for help only to have that person vote against his dealership. The congressman was a Democrat and from there Jim challenged that seat in the next election and won. He has been in congress ever since facing down severe oppositions in the process.

There were many more stories than that communicated in that cozy kitchen in Mason which no media outlet would cover. There isn’t time or enough print for most media to dedicate to those types of stories, leaving voters often mystified about the actual people running. That left this little event to have quite great importance to those lucky enough to attend. To me there isn’t a better positioned person for that Senate job, and Jim certainly has the right level of fight in him to be successful. He will do what needs to be done to win, much like Trump did in his election against Hillary Clinton. Ohio may be purple now politically, but as Jim said in his speech, its going back to red and this upcoming election for this particular Senate seat is the battle that will define that political movement. However, even more important than all that is that it will solidify Trump’s agenda with more help at the federal level with the kind of Republicans that Trump is bringing to the Party as a whole.

I’ve been in the Renacci camp for most of a year now, first as a candidate for governor, and now in his run for Senate. Few politicians excite me the way that Jim does, which is why I did take a picture next to him. I did it because I was proud of him for taking on this big role and I want to help him any way possible. It is my hope that once he is elected that more business professionals at the height of their careers, like Trump was and now Renacci will follow in their footsteps and offer their skills to the world of politics. When we complain that politics is full of unsavory characters it is because many of them are not battle hardened in the rules of business. They are simply referees in the games of life, they are not the superstars who make their livings accomplishing things. Renacci is a new kind of candidate that are emerging under the years of Trump to bring the best of American enterprise into the role of managing our federal government. And that is a great opportunity for America to finally be politically what it has been in all other sectors of private endeavor, which is why getting excited about Jim Renacci for the Ohio Senate seat in Washington D.C. is very easy to do.

Rich Hoffman

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