The primaries happening in May — and why they matter

It’s primary day in Ohio, and CNN spoke with a number of voters outside the Cincinnati Public Library polling location Tuesday. Many of whom were Democrats and listed the Supreme Court draft decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade published by Politico as top of mind.

Kiley Beale, a 28-year-old attorney who has lived in Cincinnati for 10 years and voted for former Dayton mayor Nan Whaley in the Democratic gubernatorial primary Tuesday, said that while she was already planning to vote, the news of the draft decision, “kind of lights a fire.” 

“I think [the draft decision] makes the gubernatorial races even more important, and I think it’s already hard for a Democrat to win that seat in Ohio, and I think it’s really important to get the right Democrat on the ballot against a Republican, and obviously that’s kind of going to control how Ohio handles abortion,” Beale added.

Asked why she had planned to vote for Whaley, Beale said, “I think it’s the most progressive campaign, and I always will support a woman if it aligns with my beliefs as well.”

For his part Wyatt Baker, who also voted for Whaley in the primary, said the news of the draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was one of the reasons he turned out to vote Tuesday.  

He described the news as “pretty surreal and dystopian.” 

Asked about the issues that matter to him most Tuesday, Baker cited a “better investment in public infrastructure,” “women’s issues” and “hoping to make the most of Biden’s infrastructure bill,” referring to the $1.2 trillion legislation signed into law last year.

Baker said he hopes his elected officials could “appeal whatever ruling the Supreme Court’s about to come down on and then get some protections in place to make sure something like this doesn’t happen.” He also went on to say his elected officials should, “maybe advocate for adding a justice to the Supreme Court.”

“I was planning on voting already, but it gave me more passion to vote,” Matthew Heldman, a 25-year-old from Cincinnati, said of the draft decision. 

Heldman also voted for Whaley and Democratic US Senate candidate Rep. Tim Ryan.

“They both have good track records in what they’ve done for Ohio,” he said, adding that while Roe v. Wade is not something that citizens can directly vote for, it’s important to “get the right people in elected office.”

Heldman called the potential decision “very disheartening,” and said “a lot of questions come to mind: what this means both for the decision itself and for millions of women… men and women around the country.”   

Ohio has changed since Tim Ryan first ran for Congress in 2002 — and so have the prospects of a Democrat running in the state.

“The perception of the party,” Ryan said bluntly in an interview, “is much different now than it was when I started.”

Ryan is the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Ohio, all but certain to win his party’s primary on Tuesday against Morgan Harper, an attorney and former senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. While the Republican race is far murkier – author J.D. Vance is seen as the front-runner after securing former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, but a range of candidates are vying for an upset – Ryan is preparing to accomplish a markedly more difficult task in November: Running as a Democrat in a red-trending state in a likely difficult election cycle for the party.

For years, Ohio Democrats have looked to assure national party officials that the state is not a lost cause, but elections after elections have complicated that pitch. No Democrat other than Sen. Sherrod Brown has won nonjudicial statewide office in Ohio since 2008, and President Barack Obama, in 2012, was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win Ohio. In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden became the first candidate in the last 60 years to win the White House without winning the state.

The trends have left many Democrats wondering if it is even worth vying for statewide office in the Buckeye State anymore, effectively writing off a state once seen as a key political bellwether.

The blame, said Ryan, lies with the same national Democrats now casting Ohio as a lost cause.

Ryan’s political story, in many ways, is the story of Ohio. The Democrat was first elected to Congress in 2002, representing a Northeast Ohio district that included his hometown of Niles, along with union-heavy Democratic bastions Youngstown and Warren. While Ryan initially dominated in his races – including in his home county of Trumbull – his margins began to fall as Republican strength in Ohio grew. In 2020, Ryan won with just 53% of the vote, his lowest showing in his district since his first election in 2002 (when his Democratic predecessor, James Traficant, ran as an independent and siphoned off 15% of the vote).

The shift was most stark in Trumbull County. Throughout much of Ryan’s term, Democratic presidential candidates won around 60% of the vote there — until Trump ran for president. In 2016, Trump surprised Ohio’s political world by winning Trumbull County by 6 points. He followed that up four years later by carrying the county by 10 points.

To Dan Polivka, chairman of the Trumbull County Democratic Party, Trump was a sign of how a slow political shift could speed up in just a few cycles.

“The national issues got trickled down on some of the local elections,” Polivka said of 2016 and 2020. “I still think there is a Democratic base here and a lot of support for a good Democrat. But the national issues now trickle down locally and that never happened before.”

Ryan has been eyeing a jump from the House for years. After winning another term in 2018, he explored a presidential run, eventually making it official in 2019. The bid was short-lived – Ryan only qualified for two Democratic primary debates due to low polling and his run ended less than a year after it began.

Read more here.

Ohio’s redistricting process was fraught with legal battles and concluded with a map that’s still under review by the courts.

The GOP-controlled Ohio legislature passed a congressional map that was signed into law by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in November.

Ohio now has 15 congressional districts after losing one due to slower population growth in the 2020 census. The map, which could have limited Democrats to just two congressional districts, was blocked by the Ohio Supreme Court in January for “undue partisan bias.”

After the legislature failed to come up with a new map, the task was passed to Ohio’s Redistricting Commission – also controlled by Republicans. In March, the commission passed the new congressional map which makes a few districts more competitive for Democrats, but still gives Republicans the chance to win as many as 13 seats.

Legal challenges are still pending on the map, but the Ohio Supreme Court won’t hear arguments until after the primary elections.

Learn more about redistricting in Ohio:

Former President Donald Trump’s ability to pick winning candidates will be put to the test as the primary calendar kicks into high gear this month with a series of contentious contests starting Tuesday in Ohio.

Most of this month’s GOP candidates have tried to appeal to Trump during their campaigns, which is already a victory for the former President. But clearing the field and sailing toward a potential 2024 White House bid will hinge in part on his capacity to prove that he remains the unrivaled kingmaker of the GOP.

The Ohio GOP Senate contest is a prime example of how genuflection to the former President is driving the debate in many Republican primaries throughout the country. Trump upended what was already a topsy-turvy race by backing J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author and onetime Trump critic, who has since recanted. But even after Trump threw his weight behind Vance — describing him as “a warrior” against what the former President falsely calls the “rigged and stolen presidential election” — several of Vance’s Republican rivals have clamored to prove they are more aligned with Trump’s values.

That’s been a common dynamic throughout many of the contests holding primaries this month. Fealty to Trump will play a major role in a US House race in West Virginia the following week when the Trump-backed candidate, Rep. Alex Mooney, will face GOP Rep. David McKinley in the first incumbent-versus-incumbent primary of the cycle.

Mooney endeared himself to Trump by objecting to the Pennsylvania electoral count as Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s general election victory. McKinley voted to certify Biden’s win and backed the formation of an independent commission to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol — an effort killed in the Senate.

One of this year’s most expensive Senate showdowns will unfold in Pennsylvania on May 17. Trump’s candidate, celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz, is in a heated race against, among others, David McCormick, a former hedge fund chief executive who has pounded Oz for the ideological inconsistencies he displayed throughout his television career.

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In recent months, state Supreme Courts have played pivotal roles in redistricting fights. On April 15, the conservative majority on Wisconsin’s high court adopted Republican-drawn state legislative boundaries.

A day earlier, Ohio’s Supreme Court struck down proposed state House and Senate maps for a fourth time.

Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who has served on the bench for two decades, has joined Democrats on Ohio’s high court in 4-3 rulings to reject maps.

The Ohio Constitution now requires the partisan makeup of the state’s legislative districts to roughly mirror Ohioans’ voting preferences in statewide elections over the last decade. That split roughly 54% – 46% in favor of Republicans. But early maps drawn by the GOP majority on the Ohio Redistricting Commission gave Republicans the opportunity to secure lopsided majorities in the state legislature.

O’Connor’s votes have drawn anger from Republicans, with some GOP politicians calling for her impeachment.

O’Connor is retiring at the end of this year to comply with the state’s age limits for justices, and a race is underway between Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner and Republican Justice Sharon Kennedy to succeed her.

Two other Republicans on the Ohio Supreme Court also are running for reelection this year.

The Ohio Chamber of Commerce already has set a goal of raising $4 million to shape Ohio’s high court contests, doubling what it has spent on these races in recent election cycles.

Chamber CEO Steve Stivers said business-related concerns, such as potential changes to the state’s liability laws, rather than redistricting is driving the group’s interests in the high court races.

The justices are currently weighing whether to overturn an Ohio law that caps the damages plaintiffs in civil cases can be awarded for pain and suffering.

“We want a lot of companies to come here, and we want the existing small businesses to invest in their business and grow, and you can only do that when you have a legal structure you can depend on,” said Stivers, a former GOP congressman.

“We have a pro-business majority … in the state House and the state Senate. We have a pro-business governor,” he added. “But if we have the wrong four people on the Supreme Court, we could go backward every day.”

The Ohio GOP may have another advantage in November: Under a new state law, the party affiliation of Supreme Court candidates will appear on the ballot in a state that has been trending Republican.

Several Republicans are vying in the May 3 primary for the open seat of retiring GOP Sen. Rob Portman. Rep. Tim Ryan is the heavy favorite on the Democratic side.

Top GOP candidates include state Sen. Matt Dolan, businessman Mike Gibbons, former state treasurer Josh Mandel, former state party chair Jane Timken and author J.D. Vance.

A Fox poll out last week showed Vance, buoyed by an endorsement from Trump, catapulting from 11% in Fox’s previous survey to leading the GOP field with 23%, to Mandel’s 18%, Gibbons’ 13%, Dolan’s 11% and Timken’s 6%.

To be clear, this is a race that is too close to call. The true margin of error (i.e., the 95% confidence interval) for the margin between the top two polling candidates in the final three weeks of the campaign has been about plus or minus 22 points since 2000. It wouldn’t be surprising if either Mandel or Vance end up winning by a massive margin, or if someone else won. After all, a quarter of the electorate remains undecided, per the Fox poll.

Trump’s support of Vance was a blow to Mandel, who was a huge booster of the former President. It has also set the primary up as a proxy battle for 2024.

Mandel has been endorsed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who, like Trump, has his eyes on a 2024 bid.

Cruz trails Trump by wide margins in 2024 polling, and a Mandel loss Tuesday would only reinforce that Cruz’s name is not worth much to Republicans nationwide.

On the other hand, a Vance victory in the primary would do the opposite for Trump. It can’t be emphasized enough that Vance looked pretty much finished until the former President endorsed him. While Trump may not be as beloved by Republicans as he was a few years ago, a Vance win would show that, all else equal, Trump is still a force to be reckoned with in a Republican primary.

If Mandel or another Republican wins, then we’ll have a lot to talk about in the aftermath.

Read more here.

J.D. Vance’s bid for the Ohio Republican Senate nomination has turned into the clearest early test in this year’s midterm elections of former President Donald Trump’s influence over the candidates whom GOP primary voters back and the policies that animate the party.

Trump plucked Vance from a pack of better-polling rivals, hoping that his endorsement of the venture capitalist, whose memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” became a Netflix movie, would be enough to carry the candidate through the wide-open May 3 primary to replace retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman.

Vance possesses a ready-for-television personality and an ease at the microphone that shines through in debates and stump speeches. He has never run for office before, so he holds none of the baggage that leading rival Josh Mandel, the former Ohio treasurer with an appetite for divisive cultural debates, carries from previous losses. Mirroring Trump, Vance frequently breaks from the business-aligned interests that have long dominated conservative politics and is eager to engage in fights over Big Tech, border security and more.

Vance’s liabilities — largely that he can be found on video lambasting many of the same politicians and policies he now embraces — mirror those that Trump once faced.

Rivals are attempting to exploit those old remarks, including Vance’s 2016 suggestion that he might vote for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over Trump. Some Republican officials who worked to help the former President win Ohio then say they see Trump’s endorsement of Vance as a betrayal, while Democratic strategists say that if Vance advances to the general election, where he will likely face Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, they will seek to portray him as inauthentic.

GOP Senate hopeful Mike Gibbons, the businessman who has largely self-funded his campaign, said Trump’s decision to endorse Vance left other candidates an opening that would not have existed had the former President backed someone who had been more loyal to his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

Read the full report:

In a Cincinnati parking lot between a Costco and Target Monday evening, a number of Ohio voters told CNN that they are either undecided or will not vote on Tuesday.

Among the Ohioans across the political spectrum, there was an overwhelming consensus that the economy, gas prices, inflation and the war in Ukraine are the issues matter most this election cycle. Many of the Ohioans CNN spoke to said they either haven’t been paying attention to or have not heard about the primary races.

“I don’t even know who are the people,” said Lynn Ziegler, an undecided voter who plans to vote Tuesday. “I think I got a couple… things in the mail with names… I haven’t seen any ads on TV for any of them,” she said. Ziegler said she does not plan to vote for the candidates who she has seen in television ads.

Cole Peterson, a 21-year-old from Mason, Ohio, said he is not planning to vote in Tuesday’s primary and when asked if she was aware of the primary election, Natalie Lannes, also 21-years-old and from Mason, said, “Aware of what?”

Likewise, when asked if she planned to vote Tuesday, Megan Sullivan, who said she lives toward Loveland, Ohio, said she just “vote[s] in the bigger ones.”

“[I] have never really thought the smaller ones matter,” Sullivan said, adding that she hadn’t seen television ads ahead of Tuesday’s primary.

When asked what issues matter to him most this election cycle, Jim Stapleton, a Democrat who lives in Loveland, told CNN the economy and war in Ukraine are top of mind. Stapleton, who is originally from New York, said he saw television ads for the primary candidates during the NFL draft.

Howard Tropepe, a 66-year-old Democrat from Mason, Ohio, voted early in-person last week. Tropepe said he voted for former Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and US Rep. Tim Ryan for the Democratic Senate nomination.

Asked what he believes are the key issues this election cycle, Tropepe said, “getting rid of about 98% of the Republicans in Congress and 99% in the Senate.”

Tropepe, who said he has been a registered voter since he was 18-years-old, has “never missed an election.” 

For his part, Brennan Berter, who voted for Trump in 2020, said he has been busy working as a firefighter paramedic and will not be voting on Tuesday. Berter, who said he had worked 108 hours in seven days, cited inflation and gas prices as the issues that matter most right now. Berter said he plans to vote in November.

Sarita Mishra of Mason, Ohio, said that while she’s seen a lot of posters, “she’s not interested in this one,” and does not plan to vote on Tuesday. Mishra, who voted for Biden in 2020, explained that she is not loyal to one specific party and instead “chose my vote with how I like the candidate.” She cited gas prices increasing and the economy as key issues.

Tuesday is the first multi-state primary night of 2022. Ohio and Indiana will both be holding primaries but the focus will be on Ohio, especially on a Republican Senate primary that will test the power of Donald Trump’s endorsement. 

Here’s what to know about the state’s key races:

Race: Senate (GOP)

Race: Governor (GOP)

Race: Governor (Democrat)