Saturday, February 8, 2025

Three Takeaways from Election Day 2016

There were shocking truths aplenty revealed on November Eighth. Setting aside the lurch to the alt-right at the national level, the local political landscape has also been realigned in significant ways. Here are three of the most obvious.

The good.

Many folks on the left of the political spectrum had grown complacent. Polls showed that Hillary Clinton would win by a comfortable Electoral College margin, effectively continuing the Obama legacy. The only thing to argue about was the idealism of voting third party. Or the relative value of writing in Bernie Sanders as a protest vote to the staid status quo. Or even refusing to vote because the choices presented were universally unpalatable.

These would all be safe choices in many places, because the protests would resonate, but progressive values–gay marriage, Black Lives Matter, women’s right to choose, global climate change, student loan forgiveness, immigrant rights, economic justice–wouldn’t be rocked off course. And then they were. The candidate endorsed by the KKK got elected, and has begun to appoint racist, anti-gay, anti-immigrant Old White Men to his new administration.

Why do we file this under “the good,” you might reasonably ask?

Because the complacency has been shattered. A new local focus on activism has surfaced in the short time since the election, with inquiries and commitments to keep the march of social progress on track. A new women-led organization, Toledo Area Progressives, recently sponsored a meeting of local activist groups in areas of women’s rights, civil rights, and the like, in order to connect those who feel the need to do something with the groups already engaged in the work.

Rather than tearfully lick the bitter wounds of defeat, these courageous women have decided to prepare for the coming storm of reaction by  banding together to fight. Good for them, and good for all of us!

The bad.

Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Gary Cook should have easily won a seat on the Sixth District Court of Appeals bench.  He has the experience in a court that sends decisions to the appellate court. Indeed, he has been a judge  for quite some time. His opponent, while seemingly a competent enough lawyer, has no judicial experience of any kind, yet sought a seat on the Court one step below the Ohio Supreme Court in her first run for office.

Yet Christine Mayle will soon be sworn in as the new appellate judge. Probably because Cook’s campaign was remarkably unremarkable. He worked on name recognition in the counties of the District other than Lucas for the bulk of the summer and fall. Voters in Lucas County may have been surprised when they saw his name on the ballot, because they had seen dozens and dozens of Mayle signs throughout the campaign season.

It is a basic tenet of electoral campaigns that you shore up your base first. For Cook, that would be Lucas County. But while Democrats like Pete Gerken, Bernie Quilter and Phil Copeland garnered over one hundred thousand votes countywide, Cook garnered less than seventy-nine thousand, and only beat Mayle by thirteen thousand in his home county. That wasn’t enough to make up for shortfalls elsewhere in the Sixth District.

Cook’s loss was just plain bad and should be a cautionary tale to other candidates for office.

The barely breathing.

We were pretty certain that Mikey P. Bellbottoms had little chance running against incumbent County Commissioner Pete Gerken. We wrote a column as his epitaph, noting how foolish it was to run as a Republican. We noted what a mistake it was to tie himself to the ill-fated union busting SB 5, and then to Donald Trump in Democrat-favorable Lucas County.

We opined that after he inevitably lost the election, he should just get on that ol’ Harley and ride, ride, ride. There was a part of us that assumed he knew all this, and was only keeping his name in the spotlight to prepare for his run at the Mayor’s seat next year.

All that is over. We had no idea Bellbottoms would run such a nonexistent campaign. We rarely saw him anywhere. He basically disappeared from public view. The few Bell yard signs we saw were all on the outskirts of the city. None were in his old home base, central city Toledo.

What’s even worse, Gerken trounced him in those central city wards. And in the city proper. Bell has little chance of ever being elected countywide, and exactly none being elected in a head to head race in the city itself.

As for Gerken, he says he has no desire to make a run at Mayor Hicks- Hudson. Given his strong electoral showing in the city, might he change his mind?

Stay tuned.  The mayoral race is just starting to heat up.

There were shocking truths aplenty revealed on November Eighth. Setting aside the lurch to the alt-right at the national level, the local political landscape has also been realigned in significant ways. Here are three of the most obvious.

The good.

Many folks on the left of the political spectrum had grown complacent. Polls showed that Hillary Clinton would win by a comfortable Electoral College margin, effectively continuing the Obama legacy. The only thing to argue about was the idealism of voting third party. Or the relative value of writing in Bernie Sanders as a protest vote to the staid status quo. Or even refusing to vote because the choices presented were universally unpalatable.

These would all be safe choices in many places, because the protests would resonate, but progressive values–gay marriage, Black Lives Matter, women’s right to choose, global climate change, student loan forgiveness, immigrant rights, economic justice–wouldn’t be rocked off course. And then they were. The candidate endorsed by the KKK got elected, and has begun to appoint racist, anti-gay, anti-immigrant Old White Men to his new administration.

Why do we file this under “the good,” you might reasonably ask?

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Because the complacency has been shattered. A new local focus on activism has surfaced in the short time since the election, with inquiries and commitments to keep the march of social progress on track. A new women-led organization, Toledo Area Progressives, recently sponsored a meeting of local activist groups in areas of women’s rights, civil rights, and the like, in order to connect those who feel the need to do something with the groups already engaged in the work.

Rather than tearfully lick the bitter wounds of defeat, these courageous women have decided to prepare for the coming storm of reaction by  banding together to fight. Good for them, and good for all of us!

The bad.

Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Gary Cook should have easily won a seat on the Sixth District Court of Appeals bench.  He has the experience in a court that sends decisions to the appellate court. Indeed, he has been a judge  for quite some time. His opponent, while seemingly a competent enough lawyer, has no judicial experience of any kind, yet sought a seat on the Court one step below the Ohio Supreme Court in her first run for office.

Yet Christine Mayle will soon be sworn in as the new appellate judge. Probably because Cook’s campaign was remarkably unremarkable. He worked on name recognition in the counties of the District other than Lucas for the bulk of the summer and fall. Voters in Lucas County may have been surprised when they saw his name on the ballot, because they had seen dozens and dozens of Mayle signs throughout the campaign season.

It is a basic tenet of electoral campaigns that you shore up your base first. For Cook, that would be Lucas County. But while Democrats like Pete Gerken, Bernie Quilter and Phil Copeland garnered over one hundred thousand votes countywide, Cook garnered less than seventy-nine thousand, and only beat Mayle by thirteen thousand in his home county. That wasn’t enough to make up for shortfalls elsewhere in the Sixth District.

Cook’s loss was just plain bad and should be a cautionary tale to other candidates for office.

The barely breathing.

We were pretty certain that Mikey P. Bellbottoms had little chance running against incumbent County Commissioner Pete Gerken. We wrote a column as his epitaph, noting how foolish it was to run as a Republican. We noted what a mistake it was to tie himself to the ill-fated union busting SB 5, and then to Donald Trump in Democrat-favorable Lucas County.

We opined that after he inevitably lost the election, he should just get on that ol’ Harley and ride, ride, ride. There was a part of us that assumed he knew all this, and was only keeping his name in the spotlight to prepare for his run at the Mayor’s seat next year.

All that is over. We had no idea Bellbottoms would run such a nonexistent campaign. We rarely saw him anywhere. He basically disappeared from public view. The few Bell yard signs we saw were all on the outskirts of the city. None were in his old home base, central city Toledo.

What’s even worse, Gerken trounced him in those central city wards. And in the city proper. Bell has little chance of ever being elected countywide, and exactly none being elected in a head to head race in the city itself.

As for Gerken, he says he has no desire to make a run at Mayor Hicks- Hudson. Given his strong electoral showing in the city, might he change his mind?

Stay tuned.  The mayoral race is just starting to heat up.

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