For a long time, I could tell you what I thought about almost any political issue. What I couldn't always tell you was why, at least not in a way that held together from one issue to the next. That bothered me. I host a show called Purple Political…
Ohio's 12th Congressional District is rated safe Republican, and by every conventional measure it is. Troy Balderson won it by 37 points in 2024. The Cook Political Report describes the Republican primary as effectively the general election. If you …
This week, a president promised you five thousand dollars, but only after the election. He promised a war ends, but only after the election. And the Supreme Court decided the rules of that election before a single vote was counted. At the first eve…
The Democratic nominee in Ohio's 4th Congressional District got into the race by accident. Joshua Kolasinski runs a small business. He has three kids. He grew up in Toledo, spent twelve years working at ski resorts and national parks out west, and …
Digital Ground Game did not start as an organization. According to organizing director Sam Cebula, who joined me on Purple Political Breakdown this week, it started as one impromptu canvassing event that Destiny organized for his online community du…
On Sunday afternoon, an armed man forced his way through a crowd at the Canfield Fair while Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor, was speaking at the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent. Multiple people were knocked to the groun…
Ohio has two candidates for governor. Neither has ever held elected office. One of them has accepted two debate invitations. The other has declined. And unless something changes in the next eight weeks, roughly eleven million people are going to cho…
Four unrelated stories converged last week on the same structural problem, and the connection between them is more interesting than any one of them. The ballroom. On August 31 the Supreme Court allowed construction of a 400 million dollar, 90,000 s…
There is a number in the Ohio governor's race that should be getting more attention than it is. Jeffrey Yass, a Pennsylvania financier, has now given at least $30 million to V-PAC: Victors not Victims, the federal super PAC supporting Vivek Ramaswa…
Something structural happened last week and it got covered as five unrelated stories. On August 19, the President posted that the United States would launch the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country. He called it an econom…
Iowa's 1st Congressional District was decided by fewer than 800 votes in 2024. In 2020, it came down to six. This year it's the same two major party candidates for a third consecutive cycle, and Michael Bridgford is betting that voter fatigue with t…
In 2025, Ohio's Department of Taxation estimated that the state's sales and use tax exemption for data center equipment would cost about $136 million. The actual figure came in at roughly $1.6 billion. Eleven times the estimate. Local governments a…
Public opinion on data centers is not settled. It is forming, and it is moving in one direction. Pew surveyed 8,512 American adults in January, the first time it has ever polled this question. Three quarters have heard about data centers. On the en…
THE ANALYSIS There is a structural problem in how American institutions handle presidential conduct, and it has almost nothing to do with any individual president. I spent two hours this week working through every documented corruption and abuse o…
Ohio has an open race for Secretary of State for the first time since 2018, and it is being conducted in near silence. Frank LaRose is term limited and running for auditor. Republican Treasurer Robert Sprague faces Democratic state Rep. Allison Rus…
In Michigan's Democratic Senate primary on August 4, AIPAC and its affiliated groups put close to $30 million behind Haley Stevens. It was the largest investment in a single race in the organization's history. Total outside spending in that primary …
Every structural reform Americans argue about has the same problem: it requires a constitutional amendment. Ending the Electoral College. Congressional term limits. Restructuring the Supreme Court. Each needs two thirds of both chambers of Congress …
Ohio voters will fill six statewide executive offices, a U.S. Senate seat, and two Supreme Court seats on November 3. If you work in policy, government affairs, compliance, or advocacy in this state, several of those offices matter more to your oper…
On August 1, Trump Media and Technology Group launched a product called Truth API. It sells financial firms a licensed, real-time feed of posts from the ten highest-profile accounts on Truth Social, including the President's, delivered to institutio…
Most conversations about money in politics start with Citizens United. In a recent episode of Purple Political Breakdown, my guest Dan McMillan, a historian and former prosecutor who founded Make Voters the Donors, made the case that the real turnin…
There is a version of Ohio politics that gets covered nationally, and it is almost entirely the governor's race. Then there is the version that decides how much you pay in property taxes, whether your utility rates go up, and who redraws your distri…
Three separate stories dominated the past week, and each was covered as its own event. Read together, they describe a single pattern worth naming. The tariff sequence The Supreme Court struck down the administration's blanket tariffs earlier this …
There is a debate happening on the American left that I think is being conducted badly, not because the people in it are unserious, but because the central question contains two different claims that require different evidence. I spent an hour and f…
Two things happened in Ohio politics this month that, taken together, tell you something uncomfortable about how modern campaigns work. The first: on July 16, the Cook Political Report moved Ohio's governor race from Lean Republican to Toss Up. Viv…