OH-12 special election: Danny O'Connor may be turning red voters blue.
Danny O’Connor is trying to do what hasn’t been done in nearly 40 years: persuade voters in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District to send a Democrat to Washington.
The district has been deep red since Gov. John Kasich was elected in 1982. Ironically, O’Connor is hoping voters’ current favor for Kasich, still a popular Republican, can carry him to victory in what has become an increasingly important special election, the last of several before the November midterms.
The young Franklin County recorder — the only elected office he has held — is banking on flipping moderate Republicans who support Kasich, but might have voted for President Donald Trump in 2016. He says voters want leadership in Congress that will hold the administration accountable and check the president’s power.
The district voted Trump into office by a margin of more than 11 points, but O’Connor says his message of expanding health coverage and educational opportunities to promote job growth can connect with Trump voters. He seldom fails to mention that his fiancee is a Republican.
With less national money pouring in than his counterpart, Republican state Sen. Troy Balderson, O’Connor is walking the streets and knocking on doors promoting his message himself.
O’Connor frequently has used Kasich’s “common sense” gun initiatives as talking points, such as limiting assault weapons and bump stocks and promoting “red flag” legislation that could temporarily take guns from the mentally ill or domestic abusers.
Tami Halliday, a mother of two teenage daughters who lives in suburban New Albany, voted for Trump in 2016 and considers herself a Republican along with her husband. But she said she is concerned about her daughters’ safety in school.
“I am a Republican, but I really feel like I need to find a candidate who is strongly against assault rifles,” she said to O’Connor as he stood on her porch, asking for her vote. “I am OK with having a gun for hunting, but it’s this other stuff that has got to stop. I don’t know much about the other candidates, but that (gun legislation) is going to be my deciding factor.”
O’Connor happily touted his ‘F’ rating from the NRA and told her he does not take campaign money from the group. That was enough to persuade Halliday to vote for him. Halliday represents what O’Connor’s campaign hopes is a growing electorate discontent with the Republican Party since Trump took office.
To win, O’Connor will need voters such as Halliday to show up in the middle of the summer for a special election that isn’t yet garnering the same national attention as did others in Georgia and Pennsylvania earlier in the year — although both the New York Times and Washington Post did stories on the race in the past week.
The Democrat has focused a lot of his time and energy on Delaware County, a GOP area in the heart of the district that he must do well in to have a chance of winning.
In an ad earlier this month, O’Connor had a female voter from Delaware County who supported Kasich and Trump but said she would be voting for O’Connor.
Dan Morrison, a retired public school teacher who lives near downtown Delaware, thinks people in his area — himself included — are frustrated enough with the current direction of the country that they are willing to vote a moderate Democrat like O’Connor into Congress regardless of their voting history.
“If Balderson were going around and saying I have a deep respect for John McCain and what he believes, that would be different ... but we know he supports the Trump agenda and is riding his coattails,” said Morrison, who will be voting for O’Connor in the special election but does not consider himself a down-ticket Democrat. “If Kasich were running for the representative of this district, I would take a serious look at him.”
http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180722/ohios-12th-district-special-election-democrat-danny-oconnor-hoping-he-can-break-republican-hold-on-district
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