Local politics is sort of like the Powerball lottery.
You can’t win if you don’t play.
In recent years, Democrats have barely been players in Ohio politics. It is a dismal record of losses:
- For the first time in decades, there are no Democrats serving in any of the state’s executive offices, from governor on down the line.
- Beginning in January, both U.S. Senators from Ohio will be Republicans — Bernie Moreno and whoever the governor chooses to fill J.D. Vance’s seat. It’s been 30 years since Democrats held both Senate seats in Ohio, when John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum served together.
- In the November election, Republicans maintained their veto-proof supermajorities in both the Ohio House and Ohio Senate, although Democrats made modest gains.
- Also next month, Ohio Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Brunner will lose her two Democratic colleagues on the court, which will have a 6-1 Republican majority.
The Democratic Party has only a faint heartbeat in Ohio politics now; its influence has ebbed to a point not seen since the 1950s and 1960s.
Trying to win over Ohio voters with candidates at the top of the ticket is clearly going nowhere, at least for the time being. Politics in Ohio has a history of swinging back and forth.
ANALYSIS: A 'red wave' finally overtakes Sherrod Brown
Ohio voters have a habit of changing dance partners every few decades or so. And, at some point, it will happen again.
So, what does the Ohio Democratic Party do in the meantime?
They try building the party from the bottom up instead of from the top down.
That’s why the Ohio Democratic Party in recent years has been partnering with a national political consulting firm called Movement Labs on its Contest Every Race program.
Contest Every Race is a national program that focuses on the thousands of elected offices in Ohio that are routinely won in odd-numbered years by Republicans who face no opposition.
The focus is not on the major urban areas of the state. The cities are solidly Democratic blue. Look at Cincinnati — nine City Council members and all nine are Democrats. In the last mayoral election, there was no Republican candidate. Two Democrats — Aftab Pureval and David Mann — ran against each other.
The major cities are locked up for Democrats. Instead, Contest Every Race is focusing on hundreds of small towns and rural townships where it has been hard to find Democrats to run and challenge the local GOP machine.
“You’ve got to build a deep bench to grow statewide candidates,” said Katie Seewer, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Democratic Party. “That happens by running candidates for city and village councils, for township trustees.”
There are about 6,000 local elected offices in Ohio that have been targeted by Contest Every Race.
“You have to find people who love their communities, who want to serve, and teach them how to win,’’ Seewer said. “And we have found that about 40 percent of the time, they do win.”
ANALYSIS: Analysis: Will Andy Beshear run for president in 2028?
So how do you find Democrats willing to run in the heavily Republican rural counties of Ohio?
You ask for help from their county party chairs.
Austin Smith, the chairman of the Clark County Democratic Party, has been working with Contest Every Race since 2018, recruiting candidates to run in small town and rural races all over Ohio and, once they are recruited, training them as candidates.
“The people we recruit are very passionate about the issues in their communities; they want to make things better,’’ Smith said. “They want to do it for all the right reasons, but the majority of them are first-time candidates and need help organizing campaigns.”
Right now, the candidate recruitment efforts are focused on Feb. 5 — the filing deadline for partisan races in the May 6 Ohio primary election.
Smith said Contest Every Race is trying to fill as many of those partisan races as they can now. Many more counties, villages, cities and townships in Ohio have non-partisan races; and their filing deadlines are not until Aug. 6.
Every county party chair in Ohio is getting a call from Contest Every Race, Seewer said.
“We ask them to identify people in their communities who are activists and might be willing to run,” Seewer said. “The county chairs are the people who know what is happening on the ground. We depend on them.”
The Clark County chairman will end up training many of the recruits on how to run a campaign.
“We help them develop a campaign strategy; we help them with fundraising and knowing the legal requirements of filing campaign finance reports,” Smith said. “All of this is new to them. It’s not just a matter of getting signatures on a petition.
ANALYSIS: How MAGA are Ohio's Republican voters?
“We also offer them education on what the offices they are running for really do, and make sure they understand the rules of governing,” Smith said.
Picking up political influence in the most reliably red areas of Ohio is not an easy task. There is no overnight fix that is going to bring the Ohio Democratic Party back.
“It’s a long, hard climb,” Smith said. “This is not going to be a four-year cycle; it’s more like a 10-year cycle. But in the long run, it’s going to pay off. I truly believe that.”
