Why Ohio liberal groups and media are making 2024 about Project 2025 — and fear — and putting Ohio families in the crossfire
ANALYSIS—Why are Ohio liberal groups and media making the election about Project 2025 — and fear? And what does an issue like school choice in Ohio have to do with Democrats’ disastrous handling of the country on the national stage?
The Story
The answer is that Democrats have nothing left to run on, and they’re making Ohio families and the nation pay for their failures.
The 2024 election has taken shape around three key issues: the Biden-Harris administration’s volatile, inflationary economy; securing the U.S. border; and America’s future as a nation on the world stage.
Inflation, coupled with rampant illegal immigration suppressing wages, has for its part robbed Ohioans of the American dream. The wide-open U.S. border has effectively turned every state into a border state, with crime, drugs, and skyrocketing social welfare benefits for illegal immigrants — all of which citizens will pay for with their taxes.
And, decades of foreign wars and outsized military spending have left Americans poorer, military recruitment in the gutter, and thousands of U.S. troops dead in exchange for international instability and loss of credibility internationally.
In this way, 2024 is a referendum on whether the United States is simply an economic zone from which anyone from around the world can glean and from which taxes and inflation harvest their due.
Or, alternatively, is America a nation worth loving and fighting for?
Propping Up Democrats’ Straw Man in Ohio
Instead of taking this question head on, Ohio liberal groups and media, like their national counterparts, are making a concerted push to keep Democratic and moderate voters on edge over Project 2025. Project 2025 is one conservative think tank’s idea for how to run America, which former President Trump denounced.
Trump’s actual platform prioritizes the tried and true MAGA agenda that carried him to victory in 2016. Still, liberals have found in Project 2025 an easy straw man to turn into a dead horse.
So why are Ohio media and liberal interest groups making the election about anything other than America’s gravest concerns, especially fear-mongering over social issues, and attempting to tie Ohio lawmakers to Project 2025 through school choice legislation?
The sad answer is they’re to blame for America’s broader failures, and have no other recourse if they want to remain in power.
Papering Over Harris’ ‘Non-campaign’
Kamala Harris only conducted her first media interview today — a pre-recorded and edited interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, and her running mate Tim Walz along for the ride — 39 days after her campaign launched when Joe Biden was pushed off the ballot.
Amidst radio silence from the candidate on her platform, Harris’ “non-campaign” has so far only floated a handful of policy proposals. She debuted disastrous price controls and a capital gains proposal that would chase money out of the United States.
Now, Harris has cribbed two ideas directly from Donald Trump: not taxing service workers’ tips and, stunningly, completing the border wall, a policy her administration almost certainly has no intention of enacting.
Nevertheless, in the wake of the DNC, which lacked both form and content, Columbus’ Capital Journal ran glowing platitudes. Why wouldn't they? The Capital Journal's parent, States Newsroom, was a project of the Hopewell Fund, linked with major left money groups The 1630 Fund and Arabella Advisors, architects of state policy takeovers and far-left campaigns.
The play from the Democratic and left media apparatus appears to be fiddling as Rome burns while assuring Ohioans all is well — and shaming them for their school choice preferences.
The guilt by association of Project 2025 with Ohio legislators’ moves on school choice shows a down-ballot focus on once again attacking policies popular with Ohioans.
But it turns out a majority of Ohio parents of school age children support school choice, with 71% favoring the measures, according to Morning Consult. Linking him with Project 2025, The Capital Journal attacked Ohio Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery) over an educational savings account plan that gives Ohio parents control over their childrens’ educational options. More than 75% of Ohioans with school-age children favor ESAs.
Barely more than a third think their local school district is “heading in the right direction,” per Morning Consult. Not even a quarter think the state itself is up to par. More than half prefer options other than public schools.
Never mind all that. Democrats’ disastrous handling of the economy, immigration, and the Afghanistan exit means Ohioans must pay.
A New Coalition
Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign has taken a dramatic turn, with former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Trump. Liberal groups and media organs have little recourse but deception and fear-mongering in the face of the formidable alliance. In the wake of the announcements and the bland DNC, Trump is now favored to take the White House, per analyst FiveThirtyEight.
Kennedy called out the Democratic Party’s losing its way, saying it had become the party of “war, censorship, and corruption.” Gabbard endorsed Trump at Arlington National Cemetery on the anniversary of the tragic Abbey Gate terrorist attack in Afghanistan.
A unifying and substantive coalition appears to be forming around Trump’s call to end disastrous decades of foreign intervention that has seen American troops’ lives shredded for little gain. The Trump-Kennedy-Gabbard coalition has touched on Americans’ desire to secure the border, reshore manufacturing, and end costly foreign military adventures.
With the Harris-Walz outfit inextricably linked to the Biden-Harris’ administration’s failed border policy, its catastrophic exit from Afghanistan, and a crippled economy, democrats and their media apparatus must rely on issues like abortion and school choice. They must distract from the issues they bear ultimate responsibility for, and those down the ticket they can still lever to try to retain control of the narrative.
Their remaining in power depends on all the misdirection they can muster, even if it means shaming lawmakers with Ohio families’ interests in mind. And making parents pay. Fortunately for Ohioans, the lies mean the liberal media and Democratic Party apparatus is afraid.
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