Biden heads to Ohio – a state that embodies the challenges facing his party

Biden heads to Ohio – a state that embodies the challenges facing his party

President Biden is heading to Ohio this afternoon, making his sixth trip to the state since taking office. No other state that’s not on the East Coast has received as many presidential visits.

The event is vintage Biden: He’ll appear with union workers at a Cleveland high school, where he’ll announce a milestone in his administration’s efforts to shore up struggling multiemployer pension plans and keep retirees from seeing their benefits cut. He’s expected to contrast his efforts with the legislative agenda advanced by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.).

But Biden’s decision to travel to Ohio casts a spotlight on a state that has become increasingly unfriendly toward the party in recent elections and that embodies many of Democrats’ challenges heading in the midterms.

Intel has put its plans to build a $20 billion semiconductor factory in Ohio on hold while Congress feuds over legislation meant to spur domestic manufacturing — a blow for Biden, who called the field where the factory would be erected “the ground on which America’s future will be built” in his State of the Union.

The killing of Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man, by police in Akron, Ohio, last week touched off days of protests and calls for Biden to do more to fulfill his promises to reform police departments.

Ohioans are pessimistic about the economy amid rising inflation even as its unemployment rate has steadily dropped.

And the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade last month let a six-week abortion ban to take effect in Ohio — one of the most restrictive measures of any swing state. Democrats have denounced the ban and have argued the backlash against it will help them overcome Biden’s unenviable November’s elections despite Biden’s unenviable approval rating.

“I think it makes every race in Ohio more competitive,” said Justin Barasky, a longtime Ohio Democratic operative in Ohio who was campaign manager for Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) when he won reelection in 2018.

Dems bank on abortion anger

Democrats need all the help they can get in a state that Donald Trump carried twice, winning by roughly the same margin in 2020 than he did in 2016 even as Biden prevailed in three other Rust Belt states Trump carried. 

Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan is mounting an underdog campaign against Republican J.D. Vance for the open Senate seat that Sen. Rob Portman (R) is vacating. And Nan Whaley, Dayton’s Democratic mayor, is betting that anger with Ohio’s new abortion restrictions will help her defeat Mike DeWine, the state’s popular Republican governor. 

In an interview, Whaley said she’s been surprised by the intensity of voters’ response.

“I was in Youngstown this past week with building trades members, so you can expect — they were all male,” she said. “And I’m talking about my position on collective bargaining and the prevailing wage — and they brought up abortion. I mean, I was surprised.”

Whaley has said she’ll lead an effort amend Ohio’s constitution to protect abortion rights if she wins. But she’s facing an uphill battle. A Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted in May before the court struck down Roe found DeWine leading Whaley, 46 percent to 30 percent. Just 37 percent of likely Ohio voters approved of Biden’s job performance; 57 percent disapproved.

But a slim majority of likely voters also said the Ohio legislature should protect abortion rights if Roe was struck down.

Whaley is gambling that Ohio voters will be angrier with DeWine than they are with Biden.

“Ohio is a frustrated state, and I think that’s what people miss about it,” she said. “When Ohio voted for Barack Obama, they wanted to set the place on fire, and when they voted for Donald Trump, they wanted to set the place on fire.”

Key candidates won’t appear with Biden

Biden’s trip comes at a time when many Democrats want the president to show more fight on issues like abortion as other leaders in the party are trying to tap into that anger, our colleagues Ashley Parker and Matt Viser report.

• “In the view of many distraught Democrats, the country is facing a full-blown crisis on a range of fronts, and Biden seems unable or unwilling to respond with appropriate force,” they write. “Democracy is under direct attack, they say, as Republicans change election rules and the Supreme Court rapidly rewrites American law. Shooting sprees are routine, abortion rights have ended and Democrats could suffer big losses in the next election.”

It’s not clear whether Biden will talk about abortion in Ohio, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to say on Tuesday whether Biden will address Walker’s killing in his remarks. His speech is meant to tout his economic accomplishments.

Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, White House senior adviser Gene Sperling, and Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) and Sherrod Brown will be there, according to a White House official. So will Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who’s facing a tough race after her Toledo-area seat was made more Republican during redistricting.

But Whaley and Ryan are keeping their distance, citing scheduling conflicts, along with state Rep. Emilia Sykes, who’s running for an open swing district centered in Akron, a short drive south of Cleveland. A Sykes spokeswoman, Samantha Herd, said she couldn’t attend “due to previous commitments which include continuing to monitor the situation in Akron with other community leaders.”

Iris Harvey, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, said she’d like to see Biden use the speech to reassure Americans that they’re allowed to cross state lines to get abortions without fear of breaking the law and to encourage employers to make provisions for employees who take time off to travel out of state to seek abortions.

“We need our commander in chief to explain that abortion is health care, and to help reduce the stigma that many of the anti-abortion groups are imposing on people seeking abortions and their providers,” she said.

Highland Park shooting renews debate on gun-control restrictions as community mourns

The latest from Highland Park: “Vice President Harris called for tighter gun restrictions, including a nationwide ban on assault weapons, ‘to end this horror’ during a Chicago appearance Tuesday evening, a day after a gunman killed seven and wounded dozens more at a July Fourth parade in Highland Park,” the Chicago Sun-Times’s Mitchell Armentrout reports.

• Authorities have charged Robert E. Crimo III, 21, “with seven counts of first-degree murder but said there was no definitive motive for the rampage,” per our colleagues Kim Bellware, Mark Berman, Bryan Pietsch and Gerrit De Vynck.
• Crimo had two prior run-ins with law enforcement, per our colleagues Kim Bellware, Mark Berman, Bryan Pietsch and Gerrit De Vynck. He “had so alarmed his family with violent threats in 2019 that they summoned police, who confiscated more than a dozen knives and other sharp weapons from his home.”

MORE: ‘Nothing feels safe:’ Americans are divided, anxious and quick to panic. By The Post’s Marc Fisher.

Georgia grand jury subpoenas Sen. Graham, Giuliani and Trump legal team

Save the date: “Sarah Matthews, who served as deputy press secretary in the Trump White House until resigning shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has been subpoenaed by the House select committee investigating the insurrection and has agreed to testify at an upcoming hearing,” CNN’s Katelyn Polantz and Ryan Nobles first reported. Matthews could appear before the committee as early as July 12.

More bad news for Trumpworld: Several of former president Donald Trump’s closest advisers — including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — are being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in Georgia’s Fulton County, “as part of an ongoing investigation into Trump’s potential criminal interference in the 2020 presidential election,” our colleague Matthew Brown reports.

• Others include Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Cleta Mitchell, “all of whom are believed to have knowledge of Trump’s attempts to tamper with the election process in battleground states such as Georgia.”

Gov. Andy Beshear releases emails showing Biden plan to nominate antiabortion Republican as judge

More from the Biden-McConnell deal: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s office “turned over a June 23 White House email that confirms Biden intended to nominate anti-abortion Republican [Chad Meredith] to a lifetime appointment as a federal district judge in Kentucky,” the Louisville Courier Journal’s Joe Sonka, Michael Collins and Joey Garrison report.

• Email from White House aide Kathleen M. Marshall: “To be nominated tomorrow: … Stephen Chad Meredith: candidate for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.”
• Email from Coulter Minix, a Beshear staffer in the governor’s D.C. office: “Thanks, Kate. I’ll share the info and appreciate the heads up.”

Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) and other officials told The Courier Journal they “believe Biden agreed to appoint Meredith, a Federalist Society attorney who has fought against abortion rights, so that [Sen. Mitch] McConnell would not hold up future White House nominations.”

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