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…
There's a pattern worth naming in American politics right now, and it isn't a one-party story. It's about what happens when the institutions built to check power get cleared out or bent right when checking power matters most. Start with the Electio…
This month CNBC named Ohio the number one state for business in America, the first time the state has finished first since the rankings began in 2007. Ohio climbed from thirtieth in 2007 to fifth last year to first today. As an Ohioan, I think that …
Most political commentary is reactive. A ruling drops, a bill passes, a scandal breaks, and everyone scrambles to have the correct opinion about it within the hour. What almost nobody does is the opposite exercise: sit down, with no news peg, and wr…
Two rulings came down from the Supreme Court on the same day this term, both answering the same question: can a president fire the head of an independent agency? One went for the administration. One didn't. Most coverage ran it as a split decision, …
Ohio's 9th and 10th Congressional Districts are drawing national attention this cycle, and for good reason. Both feature incumbents facing real headwinds, and both illustrate something bigger about where Ohio politics stands heading into November. …
"Court packing" is a phrase that ends conversations. One side hears a partisan power grab, the other hears overdue payback, and everyone retreats to their corner. This week I tried to have the conversation anyway, start to finish, and the honest ver…
Every election season we are trained to focus on the names at the top of the ballot. This year in Ohio, the more important story may be the rules of the game itself, and who is paying to set them. Start with the money. The latest campaign finance r…
Every cycle we hear that Americans are exhausted by the two party system. Most of the time it stays an abstraction. Then occasionally a race comes along that turns the abstraction into a real test. Idaho's 2026 U.S. Senate race is shaping up to be o…
Every so often a single week in state politics tells you everything you need to know about who has power and who does not. The past week in Ohio was one of those weeks, and most of it never reached the average voter. So let me lay it out plainly. A…
I host a nonpartisan political podcast, which means I spend a lot of time watching politicians talk and asking one question: is this an answer or a performance? This week I tried a new format. I took the full Michigan U.S. Senate Democratic primary…
This week's Purple Political Breakdown opened with a single clip: the President, asked on national television why he broke his no-new-wars promise, replying that he never guaranteed no new wars. Set the politics aside for a moment and notice what th…