Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter and writes from Ohio University.
If DemocratAmy Acton, the Youngstown-area native and doctor, wins the governorship, she will have her hands full with an almost certainly Republican-run legislature and an Ohio Supreme Court that thinks “change” is a six-letter word “coins.”
But a governor can only command an agenda if the army of patronage employees – directors of cabinet departments, their aides and such – are good managers.
And on that front, Democrats have a problem.
It's not because they lack capable people to run, say, the Bureau of Widgets, but because the people with experience on the subject were selected mostly by Republicans from 1991-2006 (Govs. George Voinovich, Nancy Hollister, Bob Taft),
then again from 2011 to 2026 (Govs. John R. Kasich and Mike DeWine).
The last Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, served from 2007 through 2010.
And it’s the mid-level appointees, almost always members of the same party as the incumbent governor, who are supposed to make the trains run on time – and the appointing governor look good. But Republican dominance of the governorship means the GOP has a ready-made pool of talented managers, while Democrats don’t have nearly the depth of deputy directors of cabinet departments, members of regulatory commissions.
The politically volatile Public Utilities Commission of Ohio included.
Furthermore, most appointees require confirmation by the Republican-run Senate, unlikely to pass up any opportunity to embarrass the appointees of a Democratic governor. And make no mistake, for every regulatory board or commission there is a clique of lobbyists whose jobs depend on how their client-industries get along with gubernatorial underlings.
Then there are of course the unofficial lobbyists who used to line up, like pilgrims at a shrine, to have a word with the late Vernal G. Riffe Jr., Ohio’s 20-year House speaker, perched on his customary bar stool. at the former Galleria Tavern, just east of the Statehouse.
The only time “Mr. Speaker” was spotted in a Galleria booth, rather than at its bar, was when the late central Ohio mogul John Walton Wolfe came by to talk. Wolfe led a banking and broadcasting empire that later included vast real-estate holdings that boomed as Columbus has.
It’s such networks of influence a governor must know how to get her or his program enacted. And that takes appointees who know ”the history,” so to speak. But most are Republican, and Acton needs to keep that in mind.
What will Youngstown do?
On Oct. 9, 1960 – 66 years ago Friday – amid likely the biggest crowd ever gathered in Youngstown, on one of those tawny fall days that are among Northeast Ohio’s glories, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy spoke to tens of thousands of voters – young, old; Black, white; Christian, Jewish – of the better world that might draw near if Ohioans and other Americans chose leaders dedicated to the public interest, rather than cater to the grasping and greed of today’s Washington:
“I ask you to help build America. I ask you to join in building a stronger country. I ask you to join us in caring for the sick, in educating our children, in providing full employment for those who want to work, in building America where there is no discrimination, where there is a chance for all who have talent and for all who want to work. That is the ancient Democratic position in this century, and I am proud to be associated with it.”
A month later, Republican presidential nominee Richard M. Nixon carried Ohio. But Mahoning County, whose seat is Youngstown, cast 63% of its vote for Kennedy – percentagewise, the highest of any Ohio county.
But in 2024, Mahoning cast 54 percent of its vote for the Republican freebooter-with-a-Wharton degree Donald Trump.
The president will be in Youngstown tomorrow, Oct. 12 to (a) prattle his customary irrelevancies and to (b) boost the flagging election campaign of appointed Republican Sen. Jon Husted.
Husted’s challenger, former Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Bexley Democrat, failed to carry Mahoning by just 234 votes in 2024 when Brown lost to Republican Bernie Moreno.
Evidently, that’s scripting the Trump-Husted duet, because one of the last things Trump needs would be to have Sherrod Brown baiting him in the Senate. But it might happen.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter and writes from Ohio University.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Can Acton's team really run Ohio? If so, winning this town may put her over top | Opinion
