Tag: Ohio

The Strength of a Trump Endorsement: What does it tell us about the world of politics

In many ways, the story of the 22 Trump endorsements that all won in the primary elections across Ohio and Indiana is the biggest story of the week. It’s bigger than the Supreme Court leak over abortion, more significant than the 2000 Mules film, which provides evidence of election fraud in the 2020 election, and bigger than any Ukraine news. More important than the failing Biden administration and its out-of-control inflation numbers. Bigger than the stock market tanking ahead of continued bad economic news by a socialist, globalist organization run by the Desecrators of Davos. The Trump victories, of which J.D. Vance was the biggest, are a superb indicator of where America is and the rules of conduct for the world in the coming months. As much as the plans for a Great Reset have been by Klaus Schwab and the gang in the Davos party, and the many mechanisms of manipulation that they are employing to destroy the world so they can remake it, what was evident on the election day of May 3rd, 2022 was that Americans were following a course of action started well over a decade ago, with the Tea Party movement, and that the trajectory of that course was irreversible. Trump was a product of that movement, and it would certainly live on well beyond him. But in the here and now, despite all the ad dollars, the liberal controls of the media, of all the communist attempts over a century to completely take over the human race, it was failing and failing in a big way. 

I watched the most baffling conversation on Monday evening during a Fox News broadcast between Bret Baier and Brit Hume, where they discussed that they thought the Republican Party was moving on beyond Trump. It had, after all, been a year and a half since Trump had left office, and it was time for him to disappear over the horizon as all former presidents do. It was time essentially to lick his wounds, build a library, and just disappear into the history books. Brit, in fact, said at least three times in this discussion on Fox that he thought the election on May 3rd would show that voters were ready to “move on.” I kept thinking, “what planet are these guys on?” Did they know something I don’t? Are they looking at data I hadn’t seen? Perhaps, after all, it’s their business to know things that nobody else does. So I held my tongue and waited to see the election results, thinking maybe they had some inside baseball information that would lead to several Trump losses. They were ready to pounce as a media organization on so they could claim that all was back to normal. Ad revenue could resume based on a Karl Rove view of the world. Club For Growth would destroy Vance and all the future MAGA candidates, and life would be good at Fox News and the other mainstreamers. 

Of course, what happened was much different and perplexing to the establishment. It led to falsely installed president Joe Biden to say that the MAGA movement was the most dangerous political movement in the history of the United States. Well, if the destruction of America is the goal of the modern Democrat Party, then yes, MAGA could be viewed as dangerous to them. The preservation of America and making it great again would be dangerous if the plans were its destruction. But the strength of the Trump brand after all they had done to it, the conventional Republicans and the Democrats, was beyond comprehension for them.   Even Mitt Romney was starting to see the light of the issue. “If Trump wants to run in 2024, he can.” Do ya’ think, Mitt? Wow, there is some good inside baseball indeed, coming from a sitting senator at the federal level. But it says just how little these “insiders” really know about what’s going on in the outside world. I could tell them all day long, and so could many others. In Ohio, where DeWine held off challengers with only 48% of the vote out of a million Republican primary voters, many who flipped for the election from Democrat to put their support behind the very RINO incumbent governor, the tolerance for convention has well expired. People are voting for MAGA candidates in the Republican Party. They may not always agree on who those MAGA candidates are. But when Trump puts his official endorsement behind one of them, they win their election. That was certainly the case with J.D. Vance.

Before Trump provided his endorsement, J.D. was down in the polls, well behind Josh Mandel. I saw the impact right away. I ended up voting for Josh Mandel anyway, as did many, but J.D. Vance had a comfortable lead from the endorsement to the actual vote count that never went away, completely off the strength of Trump’s endorsement. That really spooked the Beltway insiders in the aftermath of the election. How could Trump have that much power, still? Well, I would say that Trump’s brand is strong by itself. He had built it over a lifetime, and there isn’t anything else like it in politics. From the Trump Tower building in the 80s to all the books, appearances in movies, and his WWE activities, Trump has always oozed Make America Great. But it’s more than that. In the Tea Party days, I remember when Trump struggled to get 100 people to gather in front of a stage, he was speaking at. Trump had to come to the Tea Party movement; they didn’t go to him. Trump had to stay married, to get more conservative.

Trump needed to start attacking Barack Obama, whom everyone at that time who hated him knew was a political plant from the Weather Underground. Obama began his political life in the living room of Bill Ayers. When Trump got blasted by Obama by accepting an invite to the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, it changed life forever. Trump went and was grilled by Obama ferociously. Trump then endeavored to get revenge by running for president to knock down Obama and all his plans, which are still unfolding today. Obama is the mouth behind Joe Biden, and that battle is still very much in the news daily. The Tea Party admired how Trump was willing to go after Obama, so they threw their support behind him, and the rest is history. The Tea Party never went away. It just became MAGA, and it’s stronger by far now than it was in 2011 or 2009. Now it’s mainstream, whereas it seemed like a fringe movement of grandparents and concerned constitutionalists back then. 

The Karl Rove types and the Brit Hume personalities have never figured it out. They keep thinking that, like some kind of rubberband, society will snap back into 1963. Democrats would become the party of the poor and Republicans of those evil businesses. Instead, we have something in 2022 that is very different, and they can’t get their minds around it. Few in Washington D.C. can. There are many reasons for it, but for the purpose of this election, the Beltway culture from all political parties was baffled by the results. But those results were real. They displayed an undercurrent of political sentiment that extended from local school boards to presidents of nations, and people were voting for change

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Ohio is Now a Blue State: Thanks to Joe Blystone, Republicans have lost the executive branch

First of all, regarding the Ohio governor’s race, the primary, Joe Blystone should feel ashamed of himself for staying in the race and splitting the vote the way he did. I may like the platform of Blystone; he might be my kind of guy. But he never had a chance to win in the primary, and he knew it going into election day. Only Jim Renacci had an opportunity to beat DeWine, and everyone knew it. Even Ron Hood should have stepped out of the race and supported Renacci. Mike DeWine, a sitting governor running for his second term, only had 48% of roughly a million Republican primary voters supporting him in this 2022 election. Renacci pulled in around 28%, while Blystone had 21%. A Trump endorsement would have put Renacci over the top, but I can hear Trump saying right now, “Renacci isn’t a closer. Nice guy, but he can’t close.” What should have happened was Renacci’s task, which they tried several times, was to pull the other candidates under the Renacci ticket. Only on a united front were they going to beat Mike DeWine’s establishment machine. And because everyone didn’t unite, now Republicans have a real problem holding the governor’s seat. Nan Whaley, the former gun-grabbing mayor of Dayton, won her race easily and will now go up against DeWine. So we end up with a Democrat and a Democrat, even though DeWine calls himself a Republican. We have seen enough of him to know he’s no Republican, and to all those conservatives who voted for him, you might as well have voted for Nan Whaley.   DeWine is a criminal, and he must be punished for what he did to Ohio over Covid. He did not win with any kind of mandate; he had less than half the total vote count for an incumbent, which is horrendous. Like me, many conservatives will never punch a ticket for DeWine. I will leave his space blank when it comes time to vote because I will never vote for the criminal Mike DeWine. And there will be many people like me who will do the same thing, which will only help the treacherous liberal Nan Whaley. If she wins, it’s on all those people who voted for Mike DeWine. 

I talked to many people on election day, and I was amazed at how many people were going to the polls uncertain who they were going to vote for in the senate race. Even with Trump’s endorsement of J.D. Vance, I still voted for Josh Mandel. I endorsed him early, and I liked some of the fights he got into. That’s what I think the senate needs, so I stuck with Josh Mandel. I liked J.D. Vance more and more as the race went on. I will have no problem voting for him in the senate race in November, and I’ll enjoy doing it. My wife liked so many of them and personally met the candidates that she struggled with the final decision. I spoke to people that election day who I would say are “extreme” political insiders, who should know their stuff, even if they were last-minute decisions on that race. The critical reason is that come in November, when these same people will have to choose between Mike DeWine, even with a Trump endorsement, they will likely struggle whether or not to actually put a check next to his name or to leave it blank. And I think as high as 20% of the 51% who voted for other people besides DeWine will not cast a decision for governor one way or another. The general convention in politics is that the Republican party will unite behind one candidate. But that is not possible with DeWine. Many of us held our noses and voted for him the first time. But he let us down, and we won’t be suckers again. So, where does that leave the party for that position? In big trouble. 

Of course, liberals are happy about this. They now have a real shot at putting a Democrat into an executive seat in an intensely red Trump state. It’s a lot like playing Fortnite’s Battle Royale and waiting in a bush until the end letting everyone else kill each other off. That is how DeWine won in the primary by hiding in a bush while Blystone attacked Renacci. Then Nan Whaley will do the same to DeWine. All she must do is show up; while in the Republican party, there is an obvious civil war, the squishy establishment types up against the MAGA movement. MAGA rallied behind DeWine the first time, but the Club For Growth types assumes that the same will happen again. Well, no, it won’t. The hatred of DeWine is deep. I think his wife makes good cookies; I’ve had a few. I think Mike DeWine is a nice guy. But he’s a criminal, and he must be punished for breaking our constitutional laws and hurting so many people with bad government policy. Nobody of a reasonable mind could vote for Mike DeWine, meaning many will just not vote this November due to their uncertainty about how to behave. If people struggled on who to vote for in the Senate primary, they would undoubtedly struggle over DeWine.

In my mind, Republicans surrendered the governor’s seat in 2022. I don’t think DeWine can win re-election. Not because Nan Whaley is a good candidate, but she will get her 45% by nature. Republicans could have 10% to 20% of their 55% who just leave DeWine blank on the ballot, as many did in this year’s senate race because they couldn’t make up their minds. But even if DeWine did manage to get re-elected, he still governs like a Democrat. So, Republicans lose either way. And if Joe Blystone were such a cowboy hat-wearing patriot, like he says he is, he would have seen what his name on the ballot was going to do to Ohio. By presenting a “rebel” vote, he just managed to get Democrats into a position to run the state. Hey, I’ve been through this before with Ross Perot. I worked on that campaign back in 1992, and I remember how it felt. It was a gut punch I will never forget; that is how the Clinton dynasty started, with less than 50% of the vote electing the president.  Joe Blystone knew where his polling was a week before the election. If he wanted to defeat DeWine, he should have joined Renacci.

Renacci should have been able to make that happen with a deal of some kind also. But their failure to unite and beat DeWine essentially just ruined the chance of Republicans running the governor’s seat and the media is loving it. Like the campers in Fortnite, they have just lurked in the bushes waiting for everyone else to kill each other off. And just like that, to the national media, Ohio is a very blue state, when in reality, it’s far from it. That is what happens when a political party is in a civil war and assumes that everyone will unite behind the eventual winner. These are not conventional times. And when there is a MAGA rebellion, failure to join the efforts will elect the establishment every single time. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Todd Minniear Seeks to Protect Liberty Township: When progressives are angry it means that the right thing is happening

I said it when he was overwhelmingly elected in November of 2021, and I’m still saying it, I love Todd Minniear as the new trustee of Liberty Township, Ohio. He ran on a freedom platform, and he’s living up to it by proposing a resolution at the May 3rd, 2022, trustee meeting to make Liberty Township a “constitutional township,” with a written promise. However, for some reason, the sweat bees of Lakota are going crazy over the idea, which is very interesting.   When I first heard about the resolution, I thought it was a great idea but wondered why it was needed. After all, isn’t all townships supposed to be “constitutional townships?” Well, yeah, of course. So why was something like this proposal needed at all? In 2020, when the government made lots of mistakes over Covid, it was up to the local governments to step in and challenge the governor’s actions. In this case, the governor took on emergency powers and bypassed the legislature to assume powers that Governor DeWine did not have. The lockdowns and mask mandates that destroyed so many businesses were unconstitutional. None of them could be defended in court, and so far, all the cases have been lost and looking back on what went wrong, it’s clear that local trustees should have pushed back against the governor. One person can’t be allowed to ruin the lives of so many people with a bad decision. That’s why we have a republic and not some flea-bitten democracy in America. We have a local government that is accountable to the people instead of some top-down kingship, which is how Mike DeWine behaved. Joe Biden crossed those same lines with vaccine mandates and mask requirements, built entirely off misinformation and science in the pocket of big pharma. 

Yet, the same people who have been giving Darbi Boddy of the Lakota school board a hard time for trying to remove the mask mandates in the school as one of her first official duties newly elected are now going after Todd. Notice how arrogant they are and how condescending in their online postings. These are the same people who think that mask mandates should be forever, that sexual indoctrination of our kids in grade school should be normalized and that Joe Biden should be president. These people have had control of the political process for far too long because they make so much noise, but they are actually a small minority. In a community like Liberty Township, they can find a few thousand people who think the way they do. But Todd Minniear and Darbi Boddy were elected by many more thousands, both gaining the most vote totals in the last election. So plenty of people want to see these kinds of challenges to federal and state power. People did not like the way things happened with Covid and how vulnerable they were to an out-of-control government, and they wanted to see these new politicians representing their interests. Of course, these progressive lunatics don’t want to lose control of the process. They love to harass people into doing what they want to see done with threats and public attacks, which is why it’s so wonderful that we finally have some politicians who are willing to do the hard work. When I heard Todd wanted to make this resolution, I didn’t think it was a big deal at all. But he knew that there would be those same opposing voices who would come armed with their name-calling and arrogant slanders. 

So why is something like this resolution for a “constitutional township” needed. Investors in the community, including homeowners, need to know that the trustees can provide a stable environment from intrusive government. Mike DeWine wasn’t accountable to people in Ohio, but their local representatives were. When a governor like DeWine takes action on his own to cut out our elected representatives in the legislature, we must have some mechanisms to resist the intrusion. For Todd Minniear, he looks to the great book The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates for how our constitutional republic is supposed to function. The book is a proper resistance to tyranny and a repudiation of unlimited obedience to civil government. The example given in the book is about a church leader who is taking money from the collection plate and should expect their congregation to question them should they skim from the pot. Human beings can fail, especially in intellect, and the purpose of our government is to keep innocent people free of those mistakes as much as possible. And as a trustee, Todd ran on a platform to keep Liberty Township free of those kinds of failures in government. Such a declaration like what Todd proposed is necessary so that the people of Liberty Township can feel some sense of protection from the government by their local representatives since our state and federal governments have failed us so obviously. 

The sweat bee progressives of Liberty Township are so upset because they have in mind the complete desecration of our republic and a merge into the chaos of a democracy which would then propel us into the Vico Cycle, which has destroyed so many civilizations over the years. The Vico Cycle is a theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, then anarchy. So if they are upset by this “constitutional township” resolution, that means it’s a great thing. When these people hate what you are doing, you know you are on the right side of history and doing what voters elected people like Todd Minniear to do. Traditionally, they have attacked people like Todd and Darbi, who have only been on the job for a few months. In Lakota, they already have a petition to get rid of her because she pushed for removing the mask mandates. And you see by their comments about this “constitutional township” resolution that they find it a threat to go back against centralized control. Because as liberals, that’s what they want, and for far too many years, politicians have given them the benefit of the doubt.   But we’ve seen where that takes us, and Covid showed us too much of what we didn’t want to know. Those same people felt the power of a centralized government that was out of control, and they liked it. They never want it to stop. And now that people are returning to normal and are electing people like Todd Minniear to represent them, instead of the classic politician of least resistance, they are worried about losing their power. 

All the noise aside, our task in Liberty Township is to provide stability for business investment and residential ownership. And to give that stability, we must remove the intrusive elements of government from some faraway land that is not accountable to us, who can then destroy our community with just the swipe of a pen. A mask mandate here, a lockdown there, a created crisis to hide bad inflation numbers, Liberty Township deserves to be free of the kinds of corruption we always see in centralized governments because accountability is often missing. Todd Minniear and the other Liberty Township trustees are accountable to their neighbors, which is how it should be. And the next time some government overreach occurs, we need to know that our trustees will follow the Ohio and federal constitutions. They didn’t in 2020. Nobody knew what to do because we had never seen such a thing before. But now we do know. We know all about Covid and how the government made it and managed it. And we saw what it did to all our lives. So, we deserve to be free of those intrusions in the future. And the more that the political left screams about it, the more of that kind of thing we should do because it just validates why it was so important in the first place. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Mike DeWine Ruined Kings Island’s 2020 Season: The danger of an out-of-control government ran by losers like the current Ohio governor

As if anybody needed a reminder about just how terrible Mike DeWine has been as governor. Apparently, there are people out there with the memory of a goldfish, so they need the reminder. Just remember on election day of May 3rd, 2022, that Kings Island, one of the greatest amusement parks in the country, in the world for that matter, is currently under a big lawsuit from season pass holders from the 2020 season who wanted a refund, and are now taking the Cincinnati treasure to court over how the parent company, Cedar Fair Amusements handled the government imposed business shutdowns during the fake Covid pandemic. Now for those who aren’t regular readers, you probably know people who were sick over Covid, who may have died. Remember about Covid, which Governor DeWine was one of the first in the country to be suckered into the Bill Gates power grab for which Covid was created. Covid-19 was made in a lab in Wuhan, China. Dr. Fauci knew about it. He and Bill Gates knew some medicines could have stopped the virus, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Still, they deliberately suppressed that information from the public with donations made by Bill Gates to manipulate the media coverage and steer the public toward government-mandated vaccines, a multi-decade project that Bill Gates personally has funded so to usher the world toward a one-world government run by the United Nations steered by the Desecrators of Davos party. The same minds have now brought us the crises in Ukraine. And regarding Covid, the government reaction to the virus caused trillions of dollars of damage, ruined many lives, destroyed jobs, and broke the laws of our constitutions in gross ways that many thought was impossible before 2020. Kings Island in northern Cincinnati is an example of how government can ruin lives when it is unchecked and has too much power, for which Governor DeWine is guilty. 

I was on several conference calls with Ceder Fair Amusements and Governor DeWine during the spring of 2020 when the entertainment giant was making its plea to get some visibility to schedule when they could reopen operations. At that time, it was May. Being a seasonal company operating two very large amusement parks in Ohio, which Mike DeWine had prevented from opening by abusing his emergency powers as governor, Cedar Fair Amusements needed answers from the government-created travesty. They had no idea when they could open Kings Island or Cedar Point, and being a seasonal company, they were already hurt in acquiring employees for the season. On that conference call, Mike DeWine was strutting his authority under emergency powers, and it was apparent that he never planned to give up those powers. Now two years later, we still have the pandemic going. The Democrats want desperately to use Covid emergencies to shield them from election results they don’t like. That was certainly the case in 2020 when they wanted Donald Trump out of office. And it’s the case now in 2022, with midterms shaping up to be really devastating for Democrats and the terrible job they have done at the national level possessing all three houses of government, Blue state governors are still looking for Covid to shield them from poor performances. And out of all the governors in the country, Mike DeWine has governed as a blue state governor, certainly not a Republican. And on that phone call, he could not tell Cedar Fair Amusements when they could open or the plan for them ever to do so. DeWine was utterly unsympathetic to the business community’s needs and showed everyone just how dangerous government could be when it was out of control. 

That year Kings Island finally was able to open with horrendous restrictions to the public by July, after half the season was over. That year also, Kings Island had to shut down their Halloween Haunt weekend schedule and their Winterfest activities. So Kings Island was open from July 4th essentially to Labor Day. And before DeWine would let them do that, they had to agree to all kinds of unscientific social distancing rules and mask mandates after having to scramble to find enough employees even to open the park, let alone to give the customers the amusement park experience that they were craving. Kings Island was trying to open one of their big multi-million dollar Giga coasters, and the steam of the whole event was completely destroyed by what DeWine himself had done. Under emergency powers, he cut out the legislature. He took complete command of Ohio’s economy, which he didn’t have the right to do. He took hundreds of millions of dollars from Kings Island in opportunity cost. For Cedar Fair Amusements, it was a devastating summer, just as it was for many hundreds of thousands of other companies, large and small, who struggled to survive the ominous behavior of government exerting powers it didn’t have for the destruction of the people they were supposed to serve. If Covid was a virus that was built by our own Defense Department, funded by Dr. Fauci, and released by China as a bioweapon, and it robbed us of our taste buds, our health, and happiness, the government reaction to it with all the rules and regulations was far more dangerous. People might say that Cedar Fair Amusements is a wealthy company with all the money to absorb the costs. Those would be people who have no idea how much money it takes to run an amusement park. 

I thought what Kings Island did that year was good; they essentially gave all season pass holders for the 2020 season a free renewal of the 2021 pass. Even that following year, Covid was still a problem, and DeWine had just reopened the state against his will. The Senate passed a bill to take those emergency powers away from DeWine, and it finally went into effect in June of 2021, and then and only then did DeWine step away from the lockdowns. The government had spent over a year terrifying people over Covid, which certainly hurt Kings Island’s business model. It will likely take them a decade to recover what was lost in just that one year. The current lawsuit is over how Cedar Fair Amusements managed Covid, which was entirely out of their control. Some people wanted a refund of their 2020 passes because they couldn’t use them. My wife and I went one time to ride the new Orian ride but didn’t go the rest of the year because the mask mandate was impossible to deal with in the hot summer sun, and it wasn’t worth it to us. We thought it was nice that Kings Island honored our passes for the following year. In 2021 we went often but noticed that many of the normal crowd had not returned. Some people were still worried about Covid, and they might never feel comfortable going out in public again. Those are the people suing Kings Island because they wanted a complete refund of their passes for 2020. The government had so terrified those people that they were permanently damaged. So now, with the summer of 2022 coming, Mike DeWine is running for a second term. And Kings Island is in court trying to defend itself from actions that Governor DeWine caused by his horrible mismanagement of Covid in the summer of 2020. Anybody who votes for him after that terrible performance is an idiot and an enabler of abuse.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

President Trump Endorses J.D. Vance: Rolling the dice for the ultimate jackpot, Saving America

It will indeed test how much a Trump endorsement means to candidates such as J.D. Vance for the Ohio Senate. Because with less than a month out from the May 3rd primary election, J.D. Vance is fighting with several other candidates for the old Rob Portman seat, and among them, Mike Gibbons appears by polling to be in the lead. I have been on the fence with Jane Timken, Josh Mandel, and J.D. Vance from the beginning of the race. I’ve come to know all of them, and I like them. Mike Gibbons, for me, was a distant fourth place; he is way too squishy for me. But he’s not the worst in the world. For me, this race came down to who would be a good fighter who would push back against Mitch McConnell for the leadership role again and who could fight with MAGA in the senate and start to turn the tide in ways that Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have not yet managed to accomplish. I’ve had my eye on Josh Mandel for that kind of combat. He’s shown that he’s willing to fight and make things uncomfortable for opponents, which I think the next senate term will need. But obviously, Trump has other ideas. I’m sure Marjorie Taylor Green’s endorsement of J.D. Vance helped Trump’s decision, along with his son, Don Jr., and the billionaire tycoon, Peter Theil. I see a strategy evolving, and J.D. Vance wouldn’t be bad for that strategy, so while I was surprised to see President Trump endorse anybody in the senate race, particularly J.D. Vance, the overall strategy could be a good one. And it says a lot about what kind of message Trump intends to sell about his next term and the kind of America we are likely to be when we get there. 

J.D. Vance has been a never-Trumper, much like Glenn Beck was. Trump has come around to forgiving Beck. It has taken me longer to even listen to Beck again, sometimes, because of how he was against Trump in 2016. Things were very personal back then. I was one of the few people who openly supported Trump during the Republican primary, and I remember what people said and did against him. I was not for the Trump dinner endorsement with Mitt Romney, which turned out to be such a disaster. As much as I like him, Trump has a personality trait that some might call a weakness; he wants to convert people over to his way of thinking. He likes to be liked, although he doesn’t let being liked alter his management style. So, he gets away with a weakness for love of likeability, and the J.D. Vance story is one of those Trump success stories. Does it look better in 2024 to put people close to you from the beginning, like Jane Timken or Josh Mandel, or to convert a friend from Never-Trumper to ally in the senate? Trump thinks the conversion is better. I think the loyalty is. I would have picked Josh Mandel if I was Trump because he was always with Trump, even when it wasn’t popular in 2016.

But Trump has plenty of people in his camp who were loyal when it was hard. What will likely mean more in uniting the country after the 2022 midterms shows that people who used to not like Trump are suddenly very pro-Trump, and that is what J.D. Vance has been? I’ve met J.D. Vance a few times through a very dear friend where I could talk to him personally. He’s a very nice young man who certainly has the kind of tenacity that you’d like to see representing Ohio in the senate. The movie based on his life, Hillbilly Elegy, and the book he wrote of the same title tells a very compelling story of a struggling blue-collar family from my backyard of Middletown, Ohio, that I think will keep Vance from being pulled into any corruption in Washington D.C.  J.D. Vance doesn’t need politics to define him as a person, which I can’t say the same about Rob Portman in the beginning. I was with Portman when he first started; he needed politics to define him as a person. I set up the WLW interview where Portman debated a similar panel of Republicans all wanting to take a vacating House seat back in 1993 when his political career was just starting. I wondered about Portman even back then. He said all the right things. He hung around with the disparaged Ross Perot supporters as kind of a fringe Reform Party candidate. But as we saw over the next several decades, he became one of the biggest RINOs in Ohio. He worked too well with the far-left progressive Sharrod Brown. Obviously, we’d like to seem more of a fighter than a bridgebuilder for his replacement. 

When it comes to politics, it’s always about how the game will be played, not necessarily how it is played today. With what we know, election fraud, government corruption, and globalism on every front, we are shocked to see what we always suspected was just under the surface. Trump looks to have a clear strategy for tackling the problem of Saving America. Not just Making it Great Again, but saving it from all three branches of government led by a knowledgeable executive branch, where an understanding of trade tariffs will be critical to those battles to come. Perhaps J.D. Vance will be able to go on prime-time television and sell just how America can get 10 trillion dollars in damages from China to begin to pay for the massive damage to our economy from the Covid attack. Or perhaps J.D. Vance will be another Romney dud. Whatever the case, what’s clear is that Trump isn’t playing it safe. If Trump wanted to show how many victories he could get with his endorsement, J.D. Vance was not the safe pick. It’s somewhat risky. 

It should be an exciting primary. Trump’s visit to Delaware, Ohio, will undoubtedly help get voters out in what is typically a lite primary election. And higher voters mean more votes for the fewer establishment candidates, which is a marvelous thing. We should all be much better off than when we started the year. With a higher turnout, we’ll have a more representative government, so however things come out on the 3rd, we’ll have a good idea of how 2022 will shape up. Trump could have played it safe and stayed out of the primary until the results were announced, then supported the Republican, whoever it ended up being. But by picking J.D. Vance, he decided to make a high stake bet. And that is something I can respect, even if J.D. Vance wasn’t my pick. I can appreciate the chance Trump is willing to make when he didn’t need to make it. If he were a typical politician playing politics the way it is typically played, such an endorsement never would have happened. And since it did, we can at least see that Trump isn’t afraid to roll the dice for a big jackpot. And the winner of this jackpot means nothing less than Saving America for generations to come. 

Rich Hoffman

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Butler Country Republican Party Endorses Jim Renacci for Governor: President Trump is coming to Delaware, Ohio on April 23rd, get your tickets

It was quite remarkable that the Butler County Republican Party endorsed Jim Renacci for Governor of Ohio during the upcoming primary vote. Butler County isn’t the only endorsement for Renacci; he is picking them up at an increasing pace as the stretch toward election day has come closer. However, the Butler County Republican Party is one of the strongest conservative forces for good in the nation. Every officeholder in Butler County, which has over 400,000 people, is a Republican. Butler County likes its Republicans, and to turn away from the current governor and political heavyweight Mike DeWine is quite a public statement. It shows the tremendous Republican strength of Jim Renacci, but it also indicates to what degree Mike DeWine has lost the conservative base, and deservedly so. DeWine has operated as a Democrat. He was horrible during the Covid crisis. In many ways, he led all the blue states in lockdowns and has been a complete embarrassment to the Republican Party. If there were a picture of what a RINO looked like (a Republican in name only), Mike DeWine’s face would be their despicable example. But an endorsement from the Butler County Republican Party was no easy thing to give to Renacci. The DeWine name has been in politics for a long time, and in a less turbulent time, an endorsement of the incumbent governor would be assured. However, the times are turbulent, and Mike DeWine has led disaster straight to all our doorsteps by letting global oriented health experts tie Ohio to the sinking ship of lockdowns and mask mandates destroying businesses and people’s lives ruthlessly as the grips of authoritarian power seized all rational thought and turned DeWine into a modern version of the insane Roman emperor, Nero. Jim Renacci was a chance to start over, and when the Republican Party of Butler County was ready to make that change, it’s quite clear that the rest of Ohio was too.

I have loved Jim Renacci from the beginning and spoke to him personally during his campaign several times. He is poised to bring a Jim Renacci version of Florida’s Ron DeSantis to Ohio. I think Jim can be better than DeSantis, who has set a very high bar in many ways. Just a few days ago, I had a chance to talk to Jim Renacci again, this time for a long time in a somewhat private setting, and we talked about Trump. He didn’t want to say if he would get a Trump endorsement at that time. We talked about how tough it would be for Trump to pick anybody as an endorsement because if the other guy won, Trump would have to work with the loser when he returns to the White House in 2024 after the shellacking that is planned for the insurgent Democrats after this upcoming 2022 election. Jim Renacci was undoubtedly part of the puzzle in retaking America from the grips of Democrat activism. But again, DeWine has been in politics for a long time and has worked with the Trump administration before. In public, the relationship was workable, but behind the scenes, not so much. At one of the last campaign events Trump held in Ohio when DeWine tried to get on the stage with the president, the public booed him off, embarrassing DeWine tremendously. Trump supporters had not forgotten what DeWine did to Ohio during Covid, and they let him hear about it. A few weeks ago, I had a chance to meet the governor in Columbus, and it was evident that he was a shell of his former personality. He knew he was in political trouble. He screwed up Ohio under his first term, and he would have to pay for it. So to answer the question of endorsements, Trump is coming to Ohio on April 23rd to Delaware, just north of Columbus. Renacci will be at that event to meet with his old friend, Donald J. Trump. Get your tickets and witness history. 

So now is the time for Joe Blystone and others who are also running for governor to put their name behind Jim Renacci. They are polling at 20% or less and are not picking up endorsements, which is an early indicator of people’s voting in the primary. Joe Blystone might be a good guy with conservative policies, but he doesn’t have the depth that Renacci brings to the table, and he’s not going to get it a month before the election. Instead, he could hurt the sizable lead that Renacci does have over DeWine by staying in the race. There is undoubtedly a home for good people like Blystone in a state run by Jim Renacci. He would essentially be an extension of the Trump administration, just as Florida is presently. But splitting up that Republican vote by skimming away 20% off the top would serve only one purpose, the chance that Mike DeWine might squeak in under the door due to a split-up conservative movement. That is undoubtedly the situation with the top four candidates for the Senate, one of the primary reasons Trump is coming to Ohio on the 23rd to settle a tight race so the party can unite behind his pick. Voters want to know who Trump wants to work with within the coming days, so the need to clarify things just a few weeks ahead of the primary election is necessary. Of course, it’s risky for President Trump to put his name behind anybody since all four of the candidates are running on a Trump platform of America first. But Trump isn’t afraid of risks, and this visit to Delaware shows it and the kind of leadership that a real leader brings to politics.

That is the same situation for candidate for governor Ron Hood and his running mate Candice Keller. I think they have value, and I’d hate to see them waste it fighting against Renacci for some slice of the Trump vote when the real villain in the race is Mike DeWine. Everyone needs to unite to ensure that Mike DeWine is defeated, especially with an upcoming Trump visit to back candidates and endorsements like Jim Renacci has with the Republican Party. There are still plenty of Never Trumper RINOs in the Republican Party who will show up and vote for Mike DeWine. Even though Blystone and Hood have no chance of catching up to Renacci before the election, if they were ever going to, it would have been before now; being in the race forces Renacci to have an unreasonable lead over DeWine to win the election. Without them in the race, Renacci would win for sure. So there could be only one reason they would stay in the race because they secretly want to help DeWine, which would then destroy their brand for any hope of a political future. It’s time for them to pick sides and back a winner. In this case, it’s Jim Renacci. It really shouldn’t be hard for them; whether the issue is constitutional conservativism or abortion rights, Renacci is so much like Trump policy-wise; he will listen to people who are further in the conservative movement than he is. But DeWine isn’t. So it should be an easy decision if those candidates genuinely want what’s best for Ohio. Once the Republican Party of Butler County makes their pick, it’s a good indication of what Ohio is going to do. And they have great things to offer the Republican Party; they should be involved once Jim Renacci is elected governor, and Ohio can then become much more of a MAGA state than it is now. We can then become the Florida of the north and perhaps do even better.

Rich Hoffman

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The Lincoln Day Dinner of 2022: Battles coming, going, and brewing

It’s always good to talk about nice things, and the Lincoln Day Dinner for 2022 for the Butler County Republican Party was undoubtedly something good to talk about. Like I say all the time, politics is a blood sport. People aren’t always supposed to get along. So it’s not the function of a prominent Republican gathering at the Savanah Center in West Chester to just have everyone get along, even though they did. The goal of politics is to get the best people into public offices that can be obtained. Often the best management of any resource involves pressure applied to individual vision to draw it out for the public’s benefit. In Butler County, with Todd Hall as the party’s Chairman, it has undoubtedly been a success story. Butler County is a large, wealthy county in Ohio; it has over 400,000 people and a major national university. And every officeholder position in the county is held by a Republican. That is something to say and provides a good indication of what the people of Butler County are really like. But it’s not easy to manage all the ‘A type” personalities who get into politics for their communities. The people who run for office don’t tend to be the shy types, so managing all those personalities, especially when they sometimes get cross with each other, is quite a challenge, and Todd Hall does the job well, which culminated in the evening at that dinner which was nothing short of magnificent. 

Mike Pompeo came in to speak at this Lincoln Day event, along with the nationally bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, who managed to find time between Fox News media appearances to give a rousing speech to a hungry room of freedom fighters. Warren Davidson, of course, was there and was instrumental in bringing Mike Pompeo in, fresh from the Trump administration, where we all had the feeling of reloading for the next round of political battles that were coming next. I had a chance to talk to Jim Renacci a lot as he came down from his campaign for governor of Ohio, which is going well. There were many people from all over the state of Ohio who came to this Butler County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner, which filled the Savannah Center into every crevasse. It was great to see so many friends in one place simultaneously. The battles that everyone fights for are worth it, especially on evenings like that one. During primary season, like the one we have this year where there are so many contentious races, such as the governor race where Mike DeWine is running for re-election, and Jim Renacci was challenging him, it would be easy to have factions of discontent which wouldn’t even be able to shake hands. But the event’s mood, led by Todd Hall and guided by the diligent hands of hundreds of volunteers who worked behind the scenes for the party’s best interests, provided an atmosphere that felt more like Mar-a-Lago from Trump’s Florida home than just another political gathering. Every last touch had behind it a love of country and an intention to do good in the world. Different people, of course, have different ideas about what good is, but the pursuit of it was apparent for all to see. 

It’s not like the Butler County Republican Party was playing things easy; they recently endorsed Jim Renacci for governor over the incumbent. In the audience was Justice Pat DeWine, the son of the governor.  Jane Timken was in the audience, and Mike Gibbons, who are both running for the hotly contested Senate seat soon to be vacated by Rob Portman. There were literally hundreds of contentious side stories that could fill novels that interacted in the halls of that grand event, but what impressed me was the candor with which it was all presented. Todd Hall’s management style with all these unique personalities allows for hotly contested debate and personal battles that still celebrates the achievement voters get in the end, and that is something special. Politics is tricky under the best of circumstances, but routinely pulling off successes like what Butler County enjoys is quite an accomplishment. Of course, behind the scenes come the unifying elements of Ann Becker, whom I’ve known for many years now, going back to the Cincinnati Tea Party, which she led. Debbie Lang who always brings energy to everything she’s around. Joe Statzer and Mark Murphy work on all the details. There is a long list of people behind the scenes who make the Republican Party of Butler County, such a great organization. I single out Todd Hall because it takes a unique person to give all these diverse personalities autonomy and to trust that people will find common ground and build from that position rather than break out in fistfights from the many different perspectives that so many officeholders have. Guided by a less skilled hand, everything could turn out to be a disaster rather than the success story that it continues to be. 

Ultimately, the Lincoln Day event is a good team builder, and they are always nice to go to when the people putting them on so much love what they do. But what the public gets is a strong party that represents them where it matters most. Contention in politics is good; it forces the best people and best ideas to the surface to manage on behalf of the voters, and Butler County is an example of how it should be done everywhere in the country. The Butler County Republican Party is the example that everyone should be following, especially in the newly Trump-led Republican party. The management style it takes to unify so many diverse personalities is the stuff success seminars are built on. To have an evening in the height of election season just to take a breath of fresh air is nice. But the reminder of why so many people get into public office and how an army of volunteers behind the scenes contribute their time and energy without ever thinking about pay tells a story that is worth recognizing. If not for them and the tireless hours of work that go on behind the scenes, there would not be a great Republican Party of Butler County. There would not be a Republican in every Butler County political office. The strength of the party is because of all the effort that countless people put into it, and by the leadership of Todd Hall to have just enough guiding force to keep people together just enough but not to impose on them any dictates which might threaten their unique gifts for which voters could then select as representatives. The whole evening was just as impressive as the Butler County Republican Party is itself. It reflected many thousands of hours of hard work and an ambitious eye toward tomorrow; whereas bad as things look on the national horizon, in Butler County, Ohio, all is great and getting better. If such a formula could project itself nationwide under the next Trump presidency, there is a lot to be excited about in the years to come. Because ultimately, politics is there to serve the Republic for which we all fight to make a stand, and the voters are in charge and respected by the guiding light of hard-working people who genuinely understand how to do it right.

Rich Hoffman

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Why I Am Proud of Vivek Ramaswamy: The New Declaration of Independence

When I saw Vivek Ramaswamy at the Lincoln Day Dinner 2022 in Butler County, Ohio, I brought my copy of his book Woke, Inc for him to sign. I had a VIP pass, so I figured at some point I’d get a chance to see him behind the scenes, and I had to take that opportunity to get him to sign what I think will be a book that will define our age, this weird kind of financial war America is in with the rest of the world. Getting books signed isn’t a usual thing for me; I have to be very impressed with the author even to seek a signature, and my reason for doing this one with Vivek was I knew my great-grandchildren would be going through my books a century or two from now wanting to understand me and all the things I was involved in during my life. I wanted them to see Vivek’s signature to understand the magnitude of what was coming next. These many steps would occur over the next decade to save America for the world to enjoy, and knowing that the book Woke, Inc played a significant part in that effort, I put more emphasis on it than I otherwise would. I’ve read Woke, Inc at least nine times that I can remember, and many more times I’ve read sections of it because it has turned out to be a skeleton key to hundreds of other books that I have read, which sort of circled the drain, but never quite got to where they needed to go, including Klaus Schwab’s The Great Reset, and most recently, The Great Narrative. I would also put The Lords of Easy Money into that book category brought together by Vivek’s masterpiece, Woke, Inc. It had been a journey since I last spoke to Vivek Ramaswamy at the Middletown Republican Headquarters for a special event where he talked about his upcoming book, and during that, he gave me a little promo card that I had kept on my desk since then. At the time, our meeting was unremarkable, but I felt that he was performing a kind of Paul Revere task in a new type of revolution, so I made a point to read his book the day it came out. I was very glad I did.

Since August of 2021, Vivek has been talking about his new book all over the media, and I was proud of him. He came from my area; he actually went to Lakota schools for a short time in his youth before moving to Evendale, where his father worked at GE. Vivek grew up and made well for himself, working on Wall Street and becoming a CEO of a few companies in biotech. We ran into each other a few times before the Covid pandemic, and during that time, he came up with this idea to tackle woke culture in our corporations just as the world was going into lockdowns over the pandemic. When I ran into Vivek again at the Middletown event, he was on to something that was just then becoming a recognizable problem, the takeover of American corporations by liberal politics that were backdooring our Constitution and imposing themselves beyond our politics for the destruction of our society. I thought his speech was compelling, so when he did his book tour on Fox News and many other places, I tried to catch every interview with him that I could, and I continued to be increasingly impressed, especially as we saw what The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab had been building up to in a post-Covid economy. Vivek had been more correct about things than anybody could have imagined. He took his insider knowledge of how Wall Street worked, and with Woke, Inc, he got in front of a significant attack on our way of life in America, and he really earned my respect. This respect culminated after rereading Woke, Inc after watching Vivek at the 2022 CPAC in Florida. That’s when it was clear that America was under attack not with tanks and troops but through finance and international progressivism. Before anybody knew what was coming, Vivek had his finger on it. 

But what made me want to get his signature wasn’t any of those things. By all measures of success, Vivek had hit the jackpot with Woke, Inc. But so do many other writers. It was a successful book that had been on the bestseller’s list for many months.   But that wasn’t why Vivek was doing what he was doing. The book was just the first step in the ultimate solution. When I found out about that, I grew very excited and determined that I would get him to sign my book the next time I saw him. Many people don’t understand the world of money management, which most of us have to interact with, and unfortunately, they have all turned radically to the political left. While we are arguing about politics and election results, these radical left-wingers have taken over all of finance. It doesn’t matter if its Larry Fink’s BlackRock, but State Street, Vanguard, and dozens of others at the top which all our 401K plans flow through are forcing us to hold our nose and put up with it because literally all our life’s work is often entangled in these liberal companies. They have shown that they are attacking our culture where it hurts most, through our economy. That is why Disney is bent over backward presently because their executives have all been put in place to satisfy ESG scores. Power plants are closing in Ohio because BlackRock owns a majority share of stock and can now command how the company has been run. In Larry Fink’s case, he has had a very incestuous relationship with the Federal Reserve, with Ben Bernake, Janet Yellon, and now Jerome Powell. They have printed money for Wall Street to build up a massive artificial asset bubble that has allowed these money management firms to buy up all these key stocks to liberalize the companies. So this isn’t small stuff, it’s all big, and there hasn’t been a solution until Vivek Ramaswamy brought his tireless energy and talent to the problem and is essentially changing the world for the better.

At this point, I’m not going to get into the details until Vivek is ready. But what makes me so proud of him is that he is working very hard to give people a choice, which is the key to American society. When it comes to money managers, they are all currently liberalized. To deal with them, we are forced to deal with progressive politics, ESG scores, and the nightmare of international controls that even makes Klaus Schwab blush. The point of Woke, Inc for Vivek Ramaswamy has been to create an option to that problem, to give people an off-ramp for their investments that do not involve woke politics, and to allow investments to flourish in measures of actual value instead of climate change initiatives and global power politics set by radicals like Al Gore. And that option is being created as we speak, and I think it will save our country from the financial side of things. That is why I couldn’t wait to have Vivek sign my book, why I am proud to have it, and why I think my great-grandchildren will find that information valuable. They’ll understand how things occurred when they want to know why I spent the kind of time I do on these things as history reflects on it and see Vivek’s signature in that book on my vast bookshelf. We can win elections. We can fight for liberty around the world. But if we let the monsters of finance run our lives through our money, we will be held hostage to value for which the bad guys determine it. And that isn’t freedom; it’s slavery.   If we want to remain free, we must defend our financial system, our corporations, and our national economy, where we control the standard. Not Klaus Schwab, not Larry Fink, and certainly not the maniacal lunatics from Chatham House in London, where they plot to rule the world through interconnected banking and ESG manipulations. Vivek Ramaswamy is working to give us a choice, and for that, the key to saving America resides. And I am very proud of him for what he has done.

Rich Hoffman

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Middletown BMV Closes Due to Government Stupidity: The bad service they give you with smiles on their vengeful, lazy faces

It’s bad enough that Biden managed to twist a few Republican arms to get his radical lunatic Supreme Court Justice approved. The 5th Circuit Appeals Court kept Biden’s ridiculous executive order on Covid vaccines alive. Even though an illegal president obviously created both those things, now that we see the evidence of election fraud in 2020, Biden was not elected by voters but was inserted by an investment class with goals from outside our country. So Constitutionally, Biden isn’t qualified to make any decisions. The war with Ukraine and Russia is Biden’s fault. The inflation rate is Biden’s fault. The high gas prices are Biden’s fault. But we can typically ignore some of those things to some extent. The worst thing that is the fault of Joe Biden and the progressive losers of doom in his administration is essential government services like interactions with the IRS and our local BMV (Bureau of Motor Vehicles.)  When Democrats run the government, the benefit you get is much more like when traveling Europe, where service is terrible. There is no motivation to serve. And everything is lackadaisical. Since the massive mismanagement by the Biden administration on Covid, the employment force of America has deteriorated tremendously. In their quest for student debt forgiveness and a socialized universal wage and minimum wage increases that are preposterously too high, the Biden administration has polluted the workforce to the point where few people want to work. We can see this in local instances, such as what has happened near me, where a local BMV is closing in Middletown, Ohio, due to staffing shortages. Their employee attendance is so bad that they just closed that agency as a reaction. 

This Covid impact on the employee workforce is entirely the fault of the Biden administration. The Trump administration wanted to have everything in our economy back open after the initial 15 days to slow the spread. Remember that? Trump figured out that Democrats wanted Covid to harm the economy and get him out of office, so he pushed to open our economy by Easter of 2020. Of course, the Democrats fed by Bill Gates money had captured the airwaves and convinced everyone that people would die if we reopened our economy. Well, people did die, but not because of Covid; it was because Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci deliberately kept medicine to treat Covid-19 from the public, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which allowed the virus to spread to virtually everyone, and kept our nation locked down for an additional year and a half. In that period, a sector of our economy was permanently destroyed, never to recover. Because of the government policies of calling off work for every little sniffle, and the stay at home quarantining, the work from home concept, the push for a “new normal,” what we have now in 2022 is a workforce that is poorly engaged, slow to meet market demands, and much worse than even the most complacent unionized worker who just meanders through their day only to collect a paycheck, but cares nothing for the work they do, or why they must do it. What we saw with Covid-19 was government-sponsored terrorism that was intent on destroying our economy in America for all sorts of nefarious reasons. 

I have a few cases I’m working on that deal with large sums of money tied up by the IRS that are over a year late because the ridiculous tax-collecting agency indicates they are still short-staffed due to Covid restrictions. They have never been able to get a full IRS staff back to work, so their tasks are as slow as frozen maple syrup, and they expect us all to be okay with their cumbersome response. They think it’s acceptable to hold on to our money interest-free for ridiculous amounts of time and to like it as if they are doing us some kind of favor. Dealing with them is like dealing with some snooty waiter at an outdoor street café in Paris, slow, playing on their phone during the entire service, and not caring how you feel about your experience because they don’t get a tip in Europe, so they don’t care about the service experience. Government is the same way, they are just there for a paycheck, and they don’t care how your service experience goes. And when pressed, they all point to the White House, who has general jurisdiction on these kinds of matters, as the pacesetter.   Dealing with the government on any matter is embarrassingly painful; the incompetence is unbelievable, and that was before Covid. Now, Covid is the excuse of their industry. We were all supposed to accept this “new normal” life that the Klaus Schwab Desecrators of Davos losers created for the illegal Biden administration and have brought to America. 

It really hits home when you need to go to an agency office like the BMV in Middletown to get new plates for your RV or to conduct some title work, and the place isn’t open. It’s closed because of government mismanagement in handling the fake pandemic of Covid, created entirely by government stupidity, only to produce more government stupidity which you then have no choice but to interact with. Now all that work that Middletown used to handle, which is closest to my house, must now go to a neighboring city that has become more crowded with crybaby employees sitting around lazily telling you to take a number. They’ll get to you when they get to you. Nothing says liberal like that phrase, “we’ll get to you when we get to you,” where personal constraints are never managed, embracing laziness. We can talk all day about the foreign invasion into our country by the Desecrators of Davos and their schemes in finance. We can talk about the spying that goes on with China into stealing our intellectual property. We can speak of Russian cyberattacks and other acts of terrorism worldwide. But the worst of all has been the destruction of the American workforce and productivity during and after Covid, such as this closing of the BMV in Middletown, Ohio.

The government isn’t even trying to get better; they just close down a branch of service because they can’t staff it and make doing business with the government even worse and think that’s acceptable. It makes it evident that Covid was never about health and concern for the human race; it was the exploitation of fear to make the lazy feel more equitable in the world. It was just another form of desecration, just as the transgender issue has been introduced to us by the same lunatics, the concept that we no longer have men and women. Still, we can make up anything we want along the way, depending on how we feel. Well, I feel like not paying taxes anymore. Or I feel like I don’t want this government representing me. Or I feel like the government owes me millions of dollars in lost opportunity cost. If we are going to base everything on liberal feelings, well, that’s a door they can’t afford to open. And as bad as everything truly is, the true measure of that disgusting inefficiency that we see so often in government is when they close a BMV because they just can’t manage the location because their management methods are so terrible. In the end, we are the ones who suffer as they just collect their paychecks, play on their phones, and bring detriment and destruction to the American workforce with vengeful smiles on their lazy faces. 

Rich Hoffman

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Jim Renacci is Winning Big over Governor DeWine, 46% to 30%: Greatness in Ohio is poised to make a comeback

It’s pretty late in the game for such a poll to come out in The Ohio Star that showed Jim Renacci is up 49% to DeWine’s 30. That is good news. The other candidates’ Joe Blystone, came in at 20%, with Ron Hood at 4%, with the May primary coming up fast. There is a chance that the date for the primary might move to August due to district mapping Supreme Court decisions, but for a snapshot of where things are in the spring of 2022, things are looking very good for Jim Renacci. And Renacci’s own people confirm that this sampling of 1,342 likely primary voters is consistent with their internal polling. I would caution that such sampling could still run hot or cold depending on what part of the State the polling is done. For instance, in Cuyahoga County, Renacci is from that region and will naturally perform well, whereas DeWine is better known in the south of the State by default. But that is a pretty good lead and is consistent with the temperature of Ohio after a disastrous four years of Mike DeWine. Even at his recent State of the State speech, where all the focus was on him, with no Renacci to compete for attention, DeWine could not escape the cascade of blunders born out of his reaction to Covid-19. DeWine will always be known as the first governor in all the country that started the lockdowns, and for that, we can never forgive him. 

But I would caution everyone not to get too cocky just yet. While this poll shows a big lead, you can bet everything that DeWine’s 30% will show up to vote for him on a primary day. They might hold their nose to doing it, but they will because they are probably tied to him somehow. So his 30% is real, and it is active. Really at no point in this whole process has Mike DeWine cracked the 40% threshold, so his support has always been a fringe portion of the old establishment type of Republican voter.   It says quite a lot about the strength of the Renacci campaign that he can poll as high as he can against an established Republican, even with competition from two other challengers. But voter turnout will be vital to sustaining this polling lead. There is a reason that establishment candidates tend always to win, and that’s because their base participates in elections on primary day while most everyone else talks about who they’ll vote for but forget about the importance of primaries. That makes it very hard for Central Committees to pick against an incumbent no matter how much they’d like to see different results. This election is different for many reasons, so we are dealing with lots of uncharted new conditions. But once the votes are counted for this primary, the winner will be the candidate with the most active base. 

Yes, it was very embarrassing for Governor DeWine, granted it was on Renacci’s home turf in Cuyahoga County. The Republican Party recently voted to endorse Mike DeWine with a 123-75 margin. It wasn’t even close, and they aren’t delusional. That kind of comprehensive win for an establishment party is great no matter where it comes from. Other parts of the State have supported Mike DeWine, but they risk looking like fools in picking a loser, which is tricky because so many people are just holding their nose for DeWine just to get along in their local parties. But the truth is, Renacci has done an excellent job in creating an option for DeWine, and people have not forgotten what DeWine did to them with Covid-19. Mike DeWine is Ohio’s, Dr. Fauci. When everyone thought they would die over Covid, DeWine’s strategy of exploiting authoritarian rule over all of Ohio, shutting down businesses, church services, and putting an abortion activist in charge of health, DeWine was polling well among Democrats. But not with Republicans. And even though DeWine had tried to be more Republican since the summer of 2021, when the lockdowns and mask mandates finally were removed, the public has not forgiven him. We know a lot more about Covid-19 than we did in 2020, and it’s quite clear that Governor DeWine overreacted and led the nation into a destructive course of action that was reprehensible. He cost the lives of many Ohioans, destroyed businesses, violated the Constitution multiple times with grave consequences, and it will take decades for many of those memories to alleviate. A few months isn’t enough to help DeWine in an election where there is stiff competition like there is in this 2022 primary.

The good news isn’t just one stand-off poll; there is evidence everywhere that Jim Renacci is poised to beat Mike DeWine in the 2022 primary comfortably. Renacci is the Trump candidate in the race, so given where Ohio is in relation to the President, that enthusiasm shows up in support of the Ohio governor race. Renacci has promised to be the Ron DeSantis of Ohio, and the world is watching great government coming out of Florida as an example for everyone to see. It’s a real opportunity for Ohio to really do some great things if they had a governor like Renacci, who I think could be better than Ron DeSantis. It was President Trump who opened up this new kind of political playbook. DeSantis didn’t start on such sure footing. By adopting the Trump management style, he has been able to really put Florida on the map of leadership. His success has given him the political clout to take on the wokeness of Disney when any other governor would be crawling through broken glass to kiss up to the biggest employers of Florida with appeasement. What’s good for Disney obviously isn’t good for the rest of the State, and DeSantis has done well to stick up to the big bully for the benefit of Florida, and people see that.

Renacci is the same type of person; he could be a great governor in Ohio. Better than DeSantis. And with a month to go before the primary, obviously, people are feeling it. Just remember, while all this is wonderful to see and hear, it still takes showing up to vote for Renacci on election day. It would be good if Blystone and Hood would rally behind Renacci to ensure a victory against DeWine. They aren’t going to gain any more of the vote at this point, and if they really wanted to help Ohio, they would find a home under the Renacci umbrella. There’s plenty of room. It would also be an excellent time to get a Trump endorsement, officially. For President Trump, that would be a low-risk endorsement that could really engage voters and ensure that they do show up for the primary. But with just a little bit to go, Jim Renacci is looking good. There is a lot of hope that we may just get to see how great Ohio can be and that we can put these dark days of DeWine behind us. As bad as the last several years have been, the years before us could be many times better. Perhaps, just perhaps, we will see it. We certainly deserve it. Ohio is a great state, and it deserves a great Governor to represent the people who make it so great. DeWine is undoubtedly not that guy. Jim Renacci is, and everything is pointing in the right direction for greatness to make a comeback.    

Rich Hoffman

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