The Progressive Midwesterner

Tomorrow, voters in Ohio's 12th Congressional District will vote in a special election to fill the district's vacant U.S. House seat. Recent pre-election opinion polling has shown that the election is expected to be extremely close, although support for Democratic nominee Danny O'Connor appears to be surging in the lead-up to the special election. One recent pre-election opinion poll had O'Connor only one percentage point behind Republican nominee Troy Balderson, well within the poll's margin of error, and a different pre-election opinion poll had O'Connor ahead of Balderson by only one percentage point, also within that poll's margin of error. The 12th District of Ohio was gerrymandered by Republicans to be what would be considered in 2012 to be a Republican stronghold. After cracking the Columbus area into three Republican-leaning districts after the 2000 Census, Republicans in Ohio, after the 2010 Census and despite Ohio losing two congressional distr...

Even though the 2018 general election for all 435 U.S. House seats aren't until November 6, U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who, when he was an assistant wrestling coach at The Ohio State University, turned a blind eye to sexual assault committed by now-deceased team doctor Richard Strauss, launched his bid for U.S. House Speaker. There are precisely two reasons why Jordan would launch a bid to become speaker: either Jordan believes that current House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who has already announced that he will not run for re-election to his House seat, is going to give up the speakership before the midterm elections, or Jordan is deluded enough to believe that Republicans are all but certain to retain a majority of seats in the House (according to a FiveThirtyEight weighted aggregation of polls, Democrats have, as of this writing, a 7.7% generic congressional ballot lead, which, given the Republicans' net gerrymandering advantage, that would mean that Democrats have at leas...