August 31, 2026

This started as a footnote.

Last week I wrote about Frank LaRose sending nearly 8 million Ohioans’ personal data to the Trump Justice Department, and about his opponent this November — Annette Blackwell, the mayor of Maple Heights. I was going to add one line clarifying she’s no relation to Ken Blackwell, the Republican who held the Secretary of State’s office decades ago. “No relation,” I was going to write, and move on.

I checked anyway. That’s most of what I do in this writing — not assuming, checking. And what I found wasn’t a footnote at all.

Same office, a real pattern, twenty years earlier

In March 2006, while Ken Blackwell ran Ohio’s elections, his office accidentally posted the full Social Security numbers of 1.2 million Ohio residents on its own website — attached to Uniform Commercial Code filings, the public records created when someone finances a big purchase like a car or furniture on credit. A trucker named Darrell Estep, whose number had been sitting exposed for weeks, sued. Blackwell settled and agreed to remove the numbers.

He didn’t get much time to feel relief. A month later, in a separate incident, his office mailed out computer disks to roughly twenty recipients containing the full Social Security numbers of 5.7 million actual registered voters — recalled after the fact, though nobody could guarantee every copy had been destroyed.

That one prompted an investigation by Ohio’s own Republican Attorney General at the time, Jim Petro — who happened to be Blackwell’s opponent in that year’s governor’s race. After it, Blackwell promised Ohio would retain only the last four digits of anyone’s Social Security number going forward, not the whole thing. That promise is the reason Ohio’s voter file today holds SSN4 instead of a full number — which means the exact field Frank LaRose sent to the DOJ this year exists, in its current limited form, specifically because of Blackwell’s 2006 blunder. The safeguard born from one leak became the field exposed in the next one.

Two different kinds of records, one month apart, the same office. Still worth naming clearly: this isn’t “the same leak twice.” It’s two separate failures by the same office, in the same few weeks, to keep sensitive numbers where they belonged.

It gets more relevant from there. In 2017, that same Ken Blackwell was appointed as one of eleven members of Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — chaired on paper by Vice President Mike Pence, but run day-to-day by Vice Chair Kris Kobach, Kansas’s Secretary of State. Trump had claimed, without evidence, that millions of people voted illegally in 2016; the commission’s Democratic members later said it was built to find proof of that claim. It asked every state for sensitive voter data. States pushed back hard. Lawsuits piled up. The commission met exactly twice and was disbanded within eight months without ever issuing a report.

Here’s the part that matters most. Maine’s Secretary of State, Matthew Dunlap — a Democrat, and a sitting commission member himself — eventually sued to force the release of the commission’s own internal records. What he found, in his own words, was a section reserved for evidence of voter fraud that was “glaringly empty.” Kobach called that characterization laughable and pointed to roughly 8,400 cases of alleged double voting — but Dunlap said those figures were never actually brought before the commission for review. Nobody, including Kobach, ever produced the evidence in a form the commission itself examined.

Notice the pattern

An official asks for your data, citing fraud. The fraud never materializes. What’s left behind is the exposure.

An exposure in 2006. A commission in 2017 that spent eight months and came back empty-handed. A Department of Justice today that’s lost 23 straight federal court cases trying to run the same play nationwide — demanding sensitive voter data from every state, and never once having to show a single actual instance of the fraud it claims to be chasing. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what happens every time someone actually checks.

Here’s what makes this one worth remembering, though: it isn’t inevitable. In 2017, when Kobach’s commission sent its own request to all 50 states, Ohio’s Secretary of State at the time — Jon Husted, a Republican, now a sitting U.S. senator — said no. Flatly. He put it in writing: the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number or a driver’s license number “is not publicly available and will not be provided to the Commission.” A Republican Ohio Secretary of State refused a Republican administration exactly what a different Republican Ohio Secretary of State handed over in 2026. Same office, same party, same kind of request — a different answer.

One honest caveat, because the comparison isn’t perfectly clean: the 2006 exposures were accidents, mistakes in handling data the office already had. The 2026 decision was a deliberate policy choice to send data the office didn’t have to send at all. Those are different failure modes, and lumping them into one seamless “pattern” oversimplifies it. What connects them isn’t that they’re the same kind of mistake — it’s that in each case, whether by accident or by choice, sensitive data that Ohio law was supposed to protect ended up somewhere it shouldn’t have, and the official in charge didn’t have a plan for getting it back.

This isn’t a story about one bad decision by one Secretary of State. It’s a story about an office — and an argument — that keeps getting reused, because “fraud” is a justification that’s very easy to invoke and very hard to be held accountable for when it doesn’t pan out. Nobody has to prove the fraud existed. They just have to ask for the data, and by the time anyone can confirm there was nothing there, the data’s already out of anyone’s control.

The question that actually matters

Here’s the honest version of what happened after 2006, because it’s more useful than a simple “nobody stopped him” story would be.

Someone did stop it, or at least made it cost something. Darrell Estep sued and won. Ohio’s own Republican Attorney General investigated the bigger leak — and he was Blackwell’s primary opponent that same year. Blackwell won that primary anyway, but he went on to lose the governor’s race by 24 points, and Democrats took the Secretary of State’s office next. In 2006, competition and an election did the job. The system had a check, and the check worked.

That’s not the world Ohio’s been in for a while now. Every statewide executive office — governor, attorney general, auditor, secretary of state, treasurer — has been held by the same party for sixteen years running. That’s not proof any specific decision was corrupt. But it does raise a real question, not a rhetorical one: in 2006, a competitive primary and a competitive general election were the mechanisms that turned a data blunder into consequences. Does that same mechanism still exist in 2026? Or has one-party dominance quietly removed the thing that made 2006’s accountability possible in the first place?

That’s the question worth carrying into November, when all four of those statewide offices are on the ballot — mostly in races most voters couldn’t tell you much about.

One more loose end, since this whole piece started with it: no, they really aren’t related. Annette Blackwell was born in Selma, Alabama, and moved to Ohio at two years old. Ken Blackwell was born in Cincinnati. Different families who happen to share a last name and, decades apart, possibly the same office. Sometimes a footnote really is just a footnote — you just don’t know that until you check.

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Have you checked your own state’s history with something like this — a data leak, an unfounded fraud investigation, an official who asked for more than they needed? I’d like to hear about it.

TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like — wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or the mysteries of life, it lands here. I’m a blueberry in a cherry pie (a Democrat in a red county) with the curiosity to ask questions and the time to write about what I find. If you find it interesting, please share with someone you know, especially in Ohio.

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Somewhere in a federal database right now sits a file with your name on it. Your address. Your date of birth. Your driver’s license number. The last four digits of your Social Security number.

You didn’t put it there. You didn’t sign anything. You didn’t get an email asking permission.

Frank LaRose did that for you.

What actually happened

In February, Ohio’s Secretary of State sent the personal data of nearly 8 million registered voters — that’s almost every adult in this state — to the U.S. Department of Justice. Names, addresses, birthdates, driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers. The whole file.

He didn’t have to. Thirty states and Washington, D.C. said no when the Trump administration came asking. They made the DOJ sue them for it instead of handing it over. Ohio was one of about a dozen states that complied without ever being sued at all — a number that’s grown since, as a handful of additional states decided compliance was simpler than a fight, even as the states that did fight kept winning.

LaRose’s reasoning at the time: federal law required it, the courts would back him up, and the DOJ could be trusted to keep the data safe. He told one interviewer he was confident the Supreme Court would eventually rule that states have to comply. He told another that the DOJ knows how to handle sensitive information — a claim that landed awkwardly close to a real DOJ failure: on January 30, just two weeks before LaRose’s letter, a review of the department’s own Epstein-files release found that 43 of 47 victims’ full names had been left unredacted, and DOJ had to scramble to pull thousands of documents within days. That’s not a tangential controversy. That’s the same department failing, in real time, to protect the one category of information it was legally required to protect.

Here’s why that’s supposed to matter to you, not just to political junkies

Set aside the politics for a second. Think about what’s actually in that file.

Here’s what’s actually new about this, and it matters to get it exactly right: your name, address, and birthdate are already part of Ohio’s public voter file — they always have been, available to anyone who requests it, campaigns included. That’s not what LaRose sent away. What Ohio law has always kept private are two specific fields: your driver’s license number and the last four digits of your Social Security number. Those are the fields LaRose added to the public record and sent to the DOJ — and that combination, layered on top of information that’s already out there, is close to a starter kit for identity theft. Not the whole SSN — but a driver’s license number and partial SSN, paired with a birthdate and address someone could already get anywhere, is more than enough for a targeted scam to sound convincing.

And once your information left Ohio’s hands, it left your control. LaRose’s own letter to the DOJ didn’t contain a binding legal guarantee about how the data would be used or protected — just his stated “understanding” that the department would use it appropriately. There’s no retention limit you can point to. No independent audit of what happens to it next. If it’s mishandled, lost, or repurposed, there is no undo button, and there’s no one in Columbus you can call to get it back.

This isn’t hypothetical paranoia. Privacy and voting-rights groups tracking this effort — across party lines — have flagged it as the building block for something new: a national database of voters that no version of Congress ever authorized, that no court has ever approved, and that no state fully controls once its data is inside it.

There’s also a harder question underneath this, and you don’t have to guess at anyone’s motives to ask it: does knowing your data can end up here make you less likely to register at all? A federal judge already answered that question — not as speculation, but as part of the legal basis for the very first ruling against the DOJ. Dismissing the department’s case in California, Judge David Carter — a Clinton appointee — wrote: “The centralization of this information by the federal government would have a chilling effect on voter registration, which would inevitably lead to decreasing voter turnout as voters fear that their information is being used for some inappropriate or unlawful purpose.” That’s not a partisan talking point. That’s a federal court’s written legal reasoning, in the first decision issued anywhere in this fight. Nobody has proven Ohio’s registration numbers have actually dropped because of this — that data isn’t available yet — but a sitting judge found the risk real enough to help kill the DOJ’s case outright, before any other court had even ruled.

The part that should really bother you: he was wrong, and kept saying he wasn’t

This is where it stops being a story about privacy risk and becomes a story about judgment.

LaRose wasn’t betting on an open question. By the time he sent Ohio’s file to the DOJ, three courts had already ruled against this exact legal theory — the same laws, the same demand, the same argument the DOJ was making to every state. California’s case was dismissed Jan. 15. Oregon’s was finalized Jan. 26. And just three days before LaRose signed his letter, a federal judge in Michigan — appointed by Donald Trump — dismissed the DOJ’s case there too. LaRose complied anyway, apparently betting that three separate courts, including one presided over by a judge from his own party’s president, were all wrong.

They weren’t. The DOJ filed the same lawsuit against 30 states and Washington, D.C. Of the cases resolved so far, the department has lost 23 in a row — the only other resolution was Oklahoma, which folded and agreed to comply before a ruling came down, so even that one isn’t a case DOJ actually won on the merits. Zero real victories. Judges appointed by Presidents of both parties — including several appointed by Trump himself — have thrown the DOJ’s demands out, one after another, for months. In June, the Sixth Circuit — Ohio’s own federal appeals court — became the first appellate court to weigh in, affirming a lower court’s dismissal in Michigan and later refusing to reconsider. The remaining cases are still pending, but no court, anywhere, has yet found the DOJ’s legal theory holds up.

At least one other judge, reviewing a different state’s case, went further and questioned the DOJ’s real motives for the whole effort.

LaRose hasn’t publicly walked back his prediction. As of late April — with several court losses already on the board — he was still telling reporters he expected the Supreme Court to eventually side with the DOJ. The losses kept coming after that, climbing through the teens and past 20, and there’s no public sign he’s revisited the prediction since. On August 21, he published an opinion piece about Ohio’s election system built almost entirely around one idea: that trust cannot be built on assurances alone — it must be verified by evidence.

He never mentioned the file. He never mentioned the 23 losses. To be fair, he doesn’t mention several other things either — ERIC, Ohio’s 2023 withdrawal from it, the SAVE system he’s said he’ll deploy. This isn’t a piece that catalogs everything he left out. But in a piece built entirely around the idea that trust requires evidence, not assurance, the one decision in his record that courts have actually tested — repeatedly, and against him — is nowhere in it. Later in that same op-ed, describing Ohio’s audit process, he writes: “Those audits don’t simply tell voters the system worked. They prove it.” Assurance versus proof was his own distinction to draw. He just didn’t apply it to himself.

One thing this file doesn’t contain

If part of you is now wondering whether this exposes who you actually voted for — it doesn’t, and that’s worth saying plainly. Your ballot itself is secret. No file, no database, no request from any federal agency changes that.

The one partisan signal that does exist in Ohio’s voter file is which party’s primary ballot you requested, if you’ve voted in a primary — Democratic, Republican, or none. Ohio law already makes that a public record, and it has been for years, available to campaigns, political parties, and anyone who files a records request. That’s not new, and it’s not something this DOJ transfer created. It’s also not the same as knowing who you voted for. It only tells someone you pulled a Republican or Democratic ballot in a primary — not which candidate you chose once you had it.

Small, honest aside: the fact that requesting a primary ballot is a public act at all is one more argument, in my view, for open primaries — a system where showing up to vote doesn’t require declaring a partisan lane in a government record in the first place. That’s a separate fight. But it’s related.

Why this isn’t just a data story — it’s an audit story

Frank LaRose is now running for a new job: State Auditor of Ohio. It’s the office whose entire purpose is evaluating whether public officials handled records, money, and risk responsibly — and catching it when they didn’t.

You just watched him make exactly that kind of call, in real time, with your data. He assessed a legal risk, complied anyway even as early court rulings were already going the other way, told the public it was the right call, and has now been wrong — by an actual, countable, 23-0 margin — every single time the question has been tested.

That’s not a gotcha. That’s a work sample. If you’re deciding whether to trust someone with the job of catching bad judgment calls involving public records, this is what his judgment looks like when it’s tested against real stakes.

The Department of Justice, for its part, isn’t backing down either — the new Attorney General has floated taking the fight to the Supreme Court despite the losing streak. So this isn’t finished. And here’s the part that should sit with you: nobody outside the DOJ actually knows where your file has gone since February, who’s touched it, or what it’s been used for. That’s not a reassurance. That’s the problem — especially from a department that just failed, weeks earlier, to protect the one category of sensitive information it was legally required to protect in an entirely different case.

It’s not for lack of anyone asking, either: a state representative filed a public records request back in April specifically seeking these answers, and as of this summer, LaRose’s own office still hadn’t responded. One thing his office will likely say if pressed: Ohio routinely compares its voter rolls against other government databases to catch people who’ve died or moved — that’s normal, ongoing list maintenance. That’s true, and it’s not what happened here. Comparing records against a database is not the same as handing the federal government your driver’s license number and partial Social Security number in a single unredacted file. That distinction is worth holding onto before anyone tries to blur it. The question of whether Ohio should have handed it over in the first place is still very much alive — right up until you vote this November.

This isn’t the first time an Ohio Secretary of State’s office has mishandled voters’ most sensitive data, or promised to find fraud that was never there. That’s a longer story — I’ll have it for you next week.

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Have you checked what’s in your own voter file, or asked your county board of elections what they know about how this data has been used since February? I’d like to hear from you.

Who’s running against him: Democrat Annette Blackwell, mayor of Maple Heights, a Cuyahoga County city of about 23,000. I haven’t dug into her record yet, but she took office right after the city was placed in state fiscal emergency, wrote its five-year recovery plan, and led it to three straight years of the State Auditor’s own Clean Audit Award (2021–2023). Before politics, she worked over a decade in the private sector at KeyBank, University Hospitals, and Deloitte.

Worth a look: Campaign Website and this Ohio Capital Journal Profile. I’ll have more on her soon.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or the mysteries of the universe, they land here. I’m a blueberry in a cherry pie (a Democrat in a red county), precinct captain, and I write so people can make better informed decisions at the voting booth. Your vote is valuable, don’t throw it away … a lot of billionaires are spending a lot of money trying to influence it.

August 24, 2026

Somewhere on a spreadsheet in Washington, Greene Memorial Hospital already has a flag next to it.

Not a diagnosis. Not a score — a binary flag, two conditions met. In March, a nonprofit called Public Citizen ran the math on 4,241 hospitals nationwide against the Medicaid cuts working their way into law, and put Xenia’s hospital on the list — one of ten in Ohio identified as financially vulnerable enough that a closed unit, a cut service, or worse isn’t hypothetical anymore.

Let me be clear about what this means. Public Citizen didn’t say Greene Memorial will close. They said it meets two conditions — a fifth or more of its revenue comes from Medicaid and other low-income coverage, and it’s averaged a loss across 2022 through 2024 — that make it the kind of hospital that goes under when the money keeping it open gets cut. That’s a risk, not a prophecy. It’s also not nothing, if it’s your hospital — and it already happened once here: Kettering Health, which owns Greene Memorial, announced in 2024 that it planned to close this exact site. After Xenia’s city leaders pushed back, Kettering reversed course last year and is now putting $10-15 million into renovating it instead. System backing changes the math. It doesn’t eliminate the flag.

Here’s the part that’s more disturbing than the hospital flag itself: this isn’t a countdown with one clean deadline. It’s two.

The federal law behind it — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed last July — cuts $911 billion out of Medicaid and CHIP over the next decade. Its work-reporting requirement has a fixed date: January 1, 2027. Ohio’s own budget, House Bill 96, carries a companion trigger, and this one has no date at all, because it doesn’t need one — it’s already law. If the federal government’s share of Medicaid expansion funding drops even one point below 90%, coverage for 770,000 Ohioans ends automatically, the same day, no second vote, no debate. That provision has been sitting in Ohio law since June 30, 2025. It just hasn’t fired yet, because Congress hasn’t cut the match rate. Yet.

So there are two fuses, not one. One burns on a schedule — 2027, after the election. The other has no schedule at all; it’s a tripwire, already strung, that could go off before November or not for years, depending entirely on what Washington does next.

I’m not going to tell you the timing on the OBBBA piece is deliberate. I don’t have a document proving anyone sat down and said let’s make sure this lands on someone else’s watch so they get the blame, not us. What I can tell you is the sequence, and you can decide what to make of it yourself: the vote that built both of these happened already, in 2025, while the consequences were still abstract enough not to cost anyone an election.

Which brings me to a name that’ll be on your ballot this November: state Rep. Brian Lampton, R-Beavercreek, running for reelection in House District 70, which covers the western half of Greene County. Greene Memorial’s home turf.

Lampton sits on the Ohio House Medicaid Committee. He’s also chairing the House Insurance Committee for his second consecutive term — a thirty-year insurance agency owner overseeing the industry he came from, which is its own story for another day. For now, we’ll stick with Medicaid.

Since 2020, Lampton’s campaign has taken $6,000 from Anthem’s PAC, $5,500 from Molina Healthcare, $2,000 from CareSource’s PAC, and $10,500 combined from the Ohio Dental Association — all entities with a direct financial stake in how Ohio runs its Medicaid program. None of that is illegal. Managed-care companies fund the legislators who sit on the committees that oversee them, the same way insurance companies fund the committee chair whose business was selling their product. It’s how the system works. It’s also worth knowing, especially now.

What I couldn’t find, after actually looking, is a single substantive public statement from Lampton about the Medicaid cuts themselves — not the HB96 trigger, not the work-reporting mandate, not Greene Memorial’s spot on a national at-risk list. A keyword search of his own official Ohio House news page for “Medicaid” returns exactly one result out of 54 press releases on file — the January 2025 announcement of his Insurance Committee chairmanship, which mentions the word only in passing. No floor speech. No policy statement. No local news quote. That’s not an accusation. It’s a documented gap, and it’s one you’re entitled to fill in yourself, before November — not after a hospital in your own county starts cutting services and it’s too late to ask why nobody said anything.

I reached out to Rep. Lampton’s office on July 28, 2026, with these exact questions, sent during the legislature’s summer recess. As of publication, his office had not responded.

So here’s a plain ask, addressed to nobody in particular and everybody in HD70 at once: ask him. Ask where he stands on the trigger — the one that could fire tomorrow, not just the one scheduled for 2027. Ask whether he thinks a hospital in his own district belongs on a national risk list, and whether he’s raised it with anyone in Columbus. Ask him now, while the answer still has time to matter — not after the answer is a hospital that isn’t there anymore, and an election that’s already over.

Both fuses are already lit. Whoever’s standing there when either one goes off didn’t necessarily strike the match. But somebody did, and it happened in 2025. This year, for once, we get to ask before it happens instead of after.

TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sound likes - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or the circus we call life, it lands here. I’m a precinct. captain in Beavercreek Ohio who spends way too much time with campaign finance reports but that’s where you find the stories. All of this is designed to help you make better informed voting decisions.

Sources: Public Citizen, “The Big Ugly Threat” (March 2026); Ohio Capital Journal, “10 Ohio hospitals face risk of closure” (April 7, 2026); WYSO/Dayton Daily News reporting on Kettering Health’s 2024 closure announcement and 2025 reversal for Greene Memorial; Ohio House Bill 96 (136th General Assembly), ORC 126.70; Ohio Secretary of State campaign finance filings, Citizens for Lampton (Filer ID 12127); keyword search, ohiohouse.gov/members/brian-lampton/news, conducted July 28, 2026.

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August 20, 2026

This spring, Ohio Republicans spent weeks fighting each other about fraud.

It started with a series of stories from the conservative outlet The Daily Wire, whose reporter Luke Rosiak found that Ohio spent roughly $1 billion in Medicaid dollars on home health care in 2024 — data he said showed few safeguards against fraudulent billing. Within days, Vivek Ramaswamy — the GOP nominee for governor — was joined by House Speaker Matt Huffman and Senate President Rob McColley in going after Governor Mike DeWine, accusing him of not doing enough to stop it.

DeWine pushed back hard. His critics said he’d vetoed budget provisions that would have curbed fraud. DeWine’s account is different: the one provision he vetoed, he said, would have barred the state from using GPS to confirm home-health aides were actually in the patient’s house.

“The one bill I vetoed would have prohibited us from using GPS coordinates to check on fraud, to make sure that the person who is delivering the service is actually in that woman or man’s house,” DeWine told reporters on May 20 at the Columbus Metropolitan Club. GPS verification had been optional — about half of providers used it — and DeWine said the state would now make it mandatory. He also put a moratorium on new home health companies enrolling in Medicaid and started holding some providers’ payments while the state investigated. The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ own administrator, Dr. Mehmet Oz, came to Columbus and said Ohio needed more safeguards — while also defending DeWine.

For a few weeks, fraud was the loudest word in Ohio Republican politics. Republicans were furious at a Republican governor over fraud that happened, by any honest accounting, entirely on Republican watch — the governorship, both legislative chambers, and every other statewide executive office have been controlled by one party continuously since 2011. It’s also worth noting that DeWine’s own administration restarted Centene’s Medicaid contract in 2021 after the company hired a longtime friend of the governor to lobby on its behalf, following a brief suspension over the fraud allegations described below.

So if fraud is suddenly the thing nobody in Ohio Republican politics can stop talking about, it’s worth asking a simple question: how are the people doing the talking actually behaving?

Husted

Start with the numbers Ohio Capital Journal published on January 16, 2026: U.S. Sen. Jon Husted has taken at least $75,000 in campaign contributions from Centene, the largest Medicaid managed-care company in the country. More than $29,000 of it came after Centene paid Ohio $88.3 million to settle allegations that it had fraudulently overbilled the state’s Medicaid program. Centene executives gave nothing to Husted’s Democratic opponent, Sherrod Brown, over the same period.

The itemized filings show what that money actually looked like on the ground. Between June 11 and July 1, 2025, twenty-one Centene employees — government affairs staff, an HR director, a controller, several vice presidents, the company’s Ohio market CEO — gave a combined $28,198.36 to Team Husted, Husted’s joint fundraising committee, through WinRed. One of the checks, for $2,500, came from Centene’s own chief executive, Sarah London.

Husted’s office didn’t respond to OCJ’s questions for that story — including whether he thinks fighting fraud is important. Common Cause Ohio’s executive director, Catherine Turcer, said what you’d expect a watchdog to say: “We expect our elected officials to turn their backs on donors who have committed fraud. We expect them to step away and repudiate that. One way they can do that is by refusing campaign contributions.”

Here’s what actually happened instead. Ten days after that story ran, on January 26, 2026, the Senate HELP Committee announced a Republican task force on rooting out fraud in federal spending — with Husted co-chairing the Education subcommittee alongside Sen. Tommy Tuberville.

“Fraud of any kind decreases confidence in our systems,” Husted said in the committee’s announcement, “and it’s our job to find bad actors and hold them accountable.”

He did not mention Centene.

He also never gave any of the money back. Husted for Senate and Team Husted have processed a combined $456,000 in refunds since last year — to Rick Scott’s Florida campaign, to Jim Jordan’s, to a Buckeye Liberty PAC transaction, to a long tail of small state Realtor-association checks. None of it went to Centene, its PAC, or Sarah London. Zero dollars, checked directly against the disbursement filings.

Healthcare isn’t the only industry writing Husted personal checks. On November 5, 2025, three Andreessen Horowitz general partners — Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Ben Horowitz — each gave Husted for Senate $3,500, the per-election maximum, the same day as matching checks from Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and the Horowitz Foundation. Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, gave $3,500 in December. Two Coinbase executives followed at the same amount: VP of Engineering Jesse Pollak in March 2026, and company president Emilie Choi in June 2026. Separately, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and CTO Shyam Sankar each gave $7,000 — the combined primary-and-general max — Karp in August 2025, Sankar in September.

Husted also has his own leadership PAC: Jobs Opportunity Now, or JON PAC, registered in Columbus. Team Husted has funneled $824,033 into it since March 2025, with another $57,000 arriving from a second Husted-aligned committee, One Team Senate Majority. On top of that internal money, JON PAC has pulled in roughly $354,000 in outside contributions — $10,000 each from Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and his wife Christine, $10,000 combined from Jane Street Capital’s Robert Granieri and Daniel Setzman, $5,000 from Duke Energy’s corporate PAC, and a standard roster of defense and healthcare-industry PAC checks. JON PAC has, in turn, written $10,000 checks to roughly twenty sitting and incoming Republican senators, plus $15,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It’s the same shape as Bernie Moreno’s own leadership PAC, BERNIE — a senator’s personal money network, built from contributions to his own campaign, redeployed to build chits with colleagues.

Moreno

On July 15, 2026, Sen. Bernie Moreno sat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for a hearing on rooting out federal fraud. When it came time for the minority to question witnesses, Democrats weren’t in the room — only one had shown up for opening statements, and he’d already left.

“So, there’s no Democrats present at a hearing about fraud,” Moreno said. Fox News first reported the moment; RNC Research amplified it, and it went on to run in the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, and PJ Media as evidence that Democrats don’t take fraud seriously.

Six and a half months earlier, on December 29, 2025, committees raising money for Moreno collected $764,000 from one couple: Brian and Gretchen Colleran of Chagrin Falls, his single largest donors by a wide margin. $382,000 each — most of it, $375,000 apiece, landing in Team Moreno, his joint fundraising committee, on the same day. Joint fundraising proceeds get split across participating committees, so that figure reflects what the Collerans gave in total, not necessarily what Moreno’s own campaign committee kept.

Brian Colleran runs Foundations Health Solutions, one of Ohio’s largest nursing home operators. On July 17, 2017, Colleran personally — along with his companies and fellow executive Daniel Parker — agreed to pay the federal government $19.5 million to settle allegations that they’d billed Medicare for medically unnecessary rehabilitation therapy and hospice care, plus kickbacks for steering nursing home patients to a preferred referral partner. It was a settlement, not a conviction — nobody admitted wrongdoing, and the Department of Justice’s own release says explicitly there was no determination of liability. Colleran personally signed a five-year corporate integrity agreement with the federal government, which closed on schedule in February 2023 — about two and a half years before he became Bernie Moreno’s biggest donor.

No reporter has put that question to him directly.

Ramaswamy

Which brings us back to where this started.

Ramaswamy is the loudest voice attacking DeWine over fraud vigilance. He’s also raised roughly $50 million for his governor’s race, about half of it his own money — a $25 million personal loan to his own campaign. A super PAC backing him, V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, has taken in more than $41 million total — $37 million of it from just five donors: Jeff Yass, his single largest backer at $20 million, followed by Ross Stevens at $6 million, and $5 million apiece from Elon Musk and Ratmir Timashev, and $1 million from Bill Ackman personally. Between his campaign and the PAC, Ramaswamy and his allies outspent his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, roughly ninety to one on ads over a six-week stretch in July — $9 million to Acton’s $100,000.

And Centene — the same company whose fraud settlement and whose donations to Husted have gone unrefunded — gave $5,000 directly to Vivek Ramaswamy for Ohio on May 29, 2026, through its corporate PAC.

Acton has no billionaire-funded super PAC of her own behind her — a candidate legally can’t take super PAC money directly, though 314 Action, a PAC aligned with her, has spent modestly on her behalf. She started the governor’s race with no war chest of her own and has since built one from small donations; her campaign says more than 96% of contributions have been $100 or less. She put the contrast plainly when Musk’s donation to Ramaswamy’s PAC became public: “Ohio isn’t for sale. Not now. Not ever.”

What we actually know

Three Republicans. One spring of very loud fraud rhetoric. And so far, not one instance of any of them declining money connected to the thing they’re campaigning against.

Husted co-chairs a federal task force on fraud and hasn’t returned a dollar of Centene’s. Moreno used a Senate hearing to score points about Democratic indifference to fraud while sitting on three-quarters of a million dollars raised in part from a man who personally settled Medicare fraud allegations for $19.5 million. Ramaswamy is attacking a fellow Republican governor over fraud oversight while running the most expensive, most billionaire-funded campaign in Ohio gubernatorial history.

You can draw your own conclusions. The FEC filings are public record, and so is the DOJ’s.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or the mysteries of life, this is where it lands. I’m a recovering candidate, precinct captain, and regular occupant of rabbit holes typically filled with campaign finance reports. Friends tell me to get a life, instead I tell stories. If you find them interesting, please tell a friend - midterms are coming up in 75 days.

Sourcing: Husted-Centene figures and quotes from Ohio Capital Journal, January 16, 2026, and the Senate HELP Committee’s January 26, 2026 press release. Centene employee contributions and CEO Sarah London’s donation from FEC Schedule A filings, Team Husted (C00896928). Refund figures from FEC Schedule B filings, Team Husted and Husted for Senate. Crypto and Palantir-linked donations from FEC Schedule A, Husted for Senate (C00896019), pulled 8/17/26. JON PAC figures from FEC Schedule A/B, Jobs Opportunity Now PAC (C00896688), pulled 8/17/26. Moreno hearing quote first reported by Fox News, July 15, 2026, and subsequently by RNC Research, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, and PJ Media. Colleran donation from FEC Schedule A, Bernie Moreno for Senate and Team Moreno, December 29, 2025. Colleran/Foundations Health Solutions settlement and corporate integrity agreement from U.S. Department of Justice press release and CIA filing, July 2017 (Medicare only; settlement, not a finding of guilt). V-PAC donor figures from FEC Schedule A, V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims (C00892919), pulled 8/17/26. Ramaswamy-Centene PAC contribution from Ohio Secretary of State contribution filings, Vivek Ramaswamy for Ohio, pulled 8/17/26 — Centene Corporation Political Action Committee (Centene PAC), $5,000, 5/29/26, Post-Primary report. Ad-spending figures from Ohio Capital Journal, July 21, 2026. DeWine GPS quote and Columbus Metropolitan Club remarks from WOSU/Statehouse News Bureau, May 20, 2026. Daily Wire home-health spending figure from Daily Wire reporting, May 2026, as characterized by Fox News, May 13, 2026. Acton fundraising and 314 Action spending from Ohio Capital Journal, July 21, 2026.

August 17, 2026

Saturday started with a to-do list — my husband’s birthday party — and out-of-town visitors ready and willing to pitch in. It was designed to be an outdoor party, but the weather gods had a different idea. So when the skies opened and the torrential downpour began, we prepped the inside and realized we were at a wait-and-see moment. So we did what most people our age (42–70) would do and went to play pinball for an hour or so. By the time we walked out, the rain had stopped and, apparently, the weather gods had gotten over themselves. So we went into overdrive to get the outdoor area set up.

The party was a total delight, but what made it so pleasant was the fact that the company was mixed — politics was not discussed. A whole evening where, for the most part, the news didn’t follow us into the room.

But it was there again Sunday morning. I was still processing a headline from a few days ago about the deal to take AES — the parent of AES Ohio, our electric utility — private. It’s not a proposal anymore. BlackRock, Swedish investment firm EQT, and the Qatar Investment Authority struck a $33.4 billion deal in March to buy AES outright, with BlackRock taking 57%, EQT 33%, and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund the remaining 10%. AES says the sale is about raising the capital it needs to keep up with data-center-driven demand.

Consumer advocates say it’s something else: EQT, one of the three new owners, is also the largest shareholder in EdgeConneX — the same data center company currently fighting Ashville, Ohio residents over their right to vote on a project in their own backyard. State Rep. Tristan Rader has called on Ohio regulators to hold public hearings before approving the sale.

But before long, part of what you pay to keep your lights on may flow to a Gulf monarchy’s investment fund, and the people deciding how much you pay may also own a stake in the company building the data center next door.

Then I read Heather Delaney Reese’s column about billionaires buying up anything they can get their hands on, and finally a story out of Pickaway County — reported by Taylor Barnes — about Levi Gross, a lobbyist for Anduril, the weapons manufacturer building a drone and missile plant there, who emailed an aide to state Rep. Brian Stewart asking for language to be slipped into a 5,000-page state budget bill. Six days later, it was in there — language written specifically to stop two farmers from putting a zoning fight to a public vote.

First came the feeling of being powerless and overwhelmed, and as I sat with it, I could feel the rage rising in my chest. Recognizing it as the defense mechanism that it is, I stopped it this time because quite honestly, I’m tired of being pissed. As I pondered it all, I ultimately settled on one word.

Scrip.

If you don’t know the term, you’ve still felt it. Company scrip was currency a lot of American workers were paid in, well into the twentieth century — redeemable only at the company store. You didn’t get dollars. You got tokens that spent exactly one place, at prices the company set, for goods the company chose to stock. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was policy, and it was legal, until the Fair Labor Standards Act effectively killed it in 1938.

I’m old enough to remember when television was free to watch. I remember buying a software package and owning it — updating it when and if I chose to. Now it seems like everything I buy is a monthly subscription — supplements, to laundry detergent sheets, to watching television. It bills monthly, renews itself typically without a reminder, and keeps charging me for longer than I care to admit, simply because I stopped using it and forgot I subscribed to it in the first place, let alone cancelled it.

There’s a business concept called “wallet share,” and every company wants a larger share of what is in your wallet. But a system designed to bleed you dry is a system that destroys its own customer base. The difference between competing for your business and owning the only store in town is the whole ballgame, and we’ve quietly crossed from one to the other in more of our daily life than we’ve noticed.

I have to keep reminding myself that none of this is new. We’ve been here before. The late 1800s produced the same thing — railroad and oil trusts that managed to write the legislation, company towns paying in scrip, newspapers bought by the very men they were trying to cover. It took the better part of fifty years, two depressions, and a factory fire that killed 146 garment workers locked inside before enough people got pissed off at the same time to do anything about it. This wasn’t voting with your wallet. It was organizing and journalism that was willing to name names, and eventually the political will to write laws with teeth.

Black and white farmers built a fragile coalition to fight it directly, organizing against the same railroads and banks and grain trusts squeezing them both. And that frightened the powers that be. It was broken, on purpose, by turning that coalition against itself along racial lines — because the one thing the trusts couldn’t survive was a united poor-and-working majority. Sound familiar? They’re doing the same thing now — corporations and billionaires and the politicians they own — because it worked the first time.

This doesn’t mean we have to repeat and relive it step by step. I say it because “we’ve been here before” cuts both ways. It means this can be survived. AND it means it doesn’t just resolve itself because enough people finally open their eyes and see it. It took a body count the last time, and I’d really rather this round doesn’t require that.

Substack encourages me to have a subscription level of access. I’ve thought about adding one later, but it doesn’t feel right to me. I don’t think a subscription fee and a call for people to unite against a system built on extraction fit neatly together. I’m not trying to build a media empire — I’m trying to give people the information they need to make informed voting decisions. It’s one of the few levers I have these days.

The bigger lever is the one that broke the policy of company scrip in the first place. It was people organizing and refusing to let the stories stay buried, and eventually that pressure generated the political will to write it into law.

I don’t have a tidy solution for you, nor a happy ending. I have a weekend that held both things at once — rain and pinball, dread over the news, and a lovely party where none of this was discussed — and a reminder that the people counting on us to feel like we’re facing this alone are the same people that coalition beat once, before they figured out how to divide and conquer us again. Trans people, immigrants, protesters, communists. It’s all from the same playbook. They want us fighting with each other instead of joining forces against them.

Just because they’re running the same play doesn’t mean we have to follow suit.

You cannot cancel a subscription to your electricity. But Rep. Tristan Rader is asking PUCO to hold public hearings before it signs off on the AES sale, and Ross Larue and Paul Loar are still in court over a zoning fight the state legislature tried to write out of existence.

Show up. Say something. Both are proof the lever works.

That’s our lever. Pull it.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events, or life’s twists & turns, it lands here. This one started with pinball and ended in 1938 - don’t judge me, it’s just how my brain works. I’m a precinct captain, storyteller and hostess with the most-ess who rediscovered her love of pinball one rainy Saturday.

August 13, 2026

I was still in the parking lot when I said it out loud.

Phone still warm in my hand. Engine not yet on. Head down against the steering wheel.

A local blogger had called mid-campaign, working one of his theories, fishing for whatever I might know about a scandal involving people well known in the community — not people I hung out with socially, but the kind whose names carried weight. One of them was a prominent donor of mine.

I didn’t tell him anything. I want to be straight about that, because it would be easy to make this sound more dramatic than it was: I didn’t lie, I didn’t defend anyone, I didn’t even say I don’t know anything. I just went quiet. Let the silence answer for me and hung up as soon as I could.

Nobody asked me to do that. That’s the part that scared me. There was no moment where I weighed loyalty against transparency and picked a side. I just felt the pull, and my mouth stayed shut before my mind was even in the room. I hung up, and only then did I hear myself say it, alone, to no one:

Dammit. I’m not even elected, and I’m already getting sucked into the system.

Here’s what should scare you more than it scares me.

I had a campaign account. An election riding on every dollar in it. His check was just one piece of a much bigger stack — but he wasn’t a name I could afford to lose, because his name traveled. Betray him, and it wasn’t just his check that walked. It was everyone in his circle who’d given because he had.

I wasn’t protecting a friendship. I was protecting a funding stream, and I didn’t even have to think about it to do it.

If the system can do that to a first-time candidate with one donor cluster on the line — what does it do to a sitting senator with donor clusters in every industry he regulates, every year he’s up for reelection?

I don’t think it takes a corrupt person to produce a corrupt outcome. I used to. That’s the more comfortable story, honestly — easier to be angry at a villain than to sit with a structure that doesn’t need one. But there’s an old management idea that’s stuck with me for years: if one person after another fails in the same position, it’s not the people, it’s the system.

I wasn’t a bad actor in that parking lot. I was a normal person, doing exactly what the incentive was built to make me do, without being asked, without noticing until it was over.

That’s not an excuse for the people I write about. It’s the reason I keep writing about them.

I know what it’s like to keep looking for a better tactic.

For years I’ve searched for the right response to a Republican talking point at the door, the bolder yard sign, the message that finally lands with the guy who says he doesn’t vote anymore because his vote doesn’t matter. Every cycle, a new theory: better data, better volunteers, better timing on the mailer. I’ve knocked on doors, made the calls, sat through the trainings on how to have “the conversation” that changes a mind in ninety seconds on someone’s porch.

And some of it works. A little. On a few people.

But here’s the part I didn’t let myself say out loud for a long time: it’s not enough, and it was never going to be enough, because I was trying to out-hustle a game whose rules had already changed before I knocked on the first door.

There’s no yard sign that competes with an hour of unfiltered airtime on a podcast with ten million listeners. There’s no door-knocking shift that buys the kind of access a $3,500 check buys automatically, with no volunteer training required and no ninety-second pitch.

Here’s what that access actually looks like, side by side. A donor gets a dinner — real conversation, a real exchange, a chance to shape how someone thinks about an issue before the vote ever happens. A voter asks for a town hall and gets told there isn’t one scheduled. A voter calls the office and gets a staffer, kind and overworked, taking notes that may or may not go anywhere. A voter writes the email and waits, and the reply — if it comes — is a form letter with their name dropped into the first line.

I don’t even think that’s usually a decision anyone makes on purpose. Nobody sits down and decides the retired teacher in Fostoria gets a form letter and the check for $3,500 gets a seat at the table. It’s just what the incentive produces, automatically, every time, without anyone having to choose it.

And here’s the part that should complicate the picture, not simplify it: even the donor at that table isn’t safe. He’s the top donor until someone writes a bigger check. The access isn’t loyalty. It’s rank, and rank is for rent.

Rank for rent isn’t just a donor problem. I watched it happen to a whole city recently, with a kid who could shoot.

I think about Javon Bennett when I feel that one. He came to Dayton after a year at another school, and the city fell for him the way Dayton falls for a player who’s still becoming who he’s going to be. Three years, in a UD jersey, becoming exactly that. He fought for — and won — an extra year of eligibility nobody thought he’d get. And I remember thinking: we get him one more year. We get to see how the story ends.

He went to Gonzaga.

Nobody did anything wrong. He earned that year. He earned the choice. I don’t blame a twenty-two-year-old for taking the better offer — I’d tell any kid I love to take it. But I felt something anyway, watching him go: rejected, a little. Betrayed, even though nobody betrayed me. I gave him three years of cookies on the road and hugs after wins I actually meant, and none of that was ever going to be the thing that decided where he played his last season. Money was always going to be that thing. I should have known, this wasn't the first time a player left us for more.

That’s the feeling, whether it’s a candidate or a kid who can shoot. You give someone your faith early, before they’re proven, because you believe in what they could become. And by the time they’re good enough for it to matter, someone with more money than you’ll ever have gets to decide whether you’re still in the story.

That’s the feeling I think a lot of us carry and can’t quite name. We were told the deal as kids, and most of us believed it: get good grades, work hard, do your best, and you can do anything you want to do. Nobody mentioned there was a second set of rules underneath the first one — rules nobody handed us, that changed every season depending on who was managing the game that year. Nobody told us the system wasn’t built to reward the effort. It was built to use it, and spit you out the moment you stopped being useful to somebody with more leverage than you.

I did what I was told the work required. I studied. I showed up. I got better at it every single cycle — better door-knocking, better data, a sharper answer for the guy at the fair who wants to talk about masks. And it still doesn’t add up the way I was promised it would, because I was playing last season’s rules in this season’s game, and nobody sent the memo that the rules had changed.

I used to think the problem was us.

I don’t think that anymore. Not because I got tired of trying — because I’m finally starting to understand something simpler: when one team knows the rules and the other one doesn’t, the team that doesn’t isn’t going to win by playing harder.

Somewhere in the last fifteen years, while I was still practicing the old rules, the maps got redrawn, the money went unlimited, and the room where the real decisions get made moved somewhere a yard sign has never seen. Nobody announced it. It happened one legal, technically proper change at a time, until the game had quietly become a different game — and only one side got the memo.

That’s not a story about Democrats being weak. I’ve heard that one my whole life, and I used to half-believe it myself, in the dark, after a loss. It’s a story about a field that isn’t level, dressed up in the language of a field that still is.

I’m not writing this because I’ve found the villain who did it. I’m writing it because I finally stopped blaming myself — and the boys — and started looking at the field.

Here’s the hard truth: none of this changes on its own, and nobody who benefits from the current rules is going to volunteer to change them.

But the rules themselves aren’t fixed the way the outcomes have felt. The maps get redrawn again in a few years, and there’s already a fight over how. The disclosure loopholes are statute, not physics — statutes get rewritten by people who get elected. None of that happens because I write a Substack post. It happens because enough people stop mistaking a rigged feeling for a fixed fact, and start asking who gets to redraw the field next — and whether they’re on the list of people being asked.

I still bake the cookies. I still knock the doors. I haven’t stopped believing effort matters — I’ve just stopped believing it’s the only thing that does.

The parking lot taught me that the system doesn’t need anyone to be corrupt. It just needs everyone to stay quiet, and busy, and convinced the losing is their own fault.

I’d rather be loud, and a little inconvenient, and occasionally wrong about a detail I’ll correct next week — than quiet and convinced.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or life’s lessons, it lands here. I’m a recovering candidate (US House, OH10, 2018) who likes to tell stories, including ones about revelations in parking lots with my head on the steering wheel quietly talking to no one but myself.

TG’s Train of Thought

August 10, 2026

What follows reflects what’s known as of Sunday, August 9, 10:00 p.m. This has been a fast-moving story, and some of what’s below may already be out of date by the time you read it — I’ll note where that matters.

There’s a beaver on a sign at the corner of Hanes and Lantz Road in Beavercreek. The corporation behind it, Hanes Road Carryout, Inc., has run a store on that corner since 2017. Nobody thought much about it — this is Beavercreek, after all. There are beavers on the high school mascot, beavers statues, beavers on half the storefronts in town. Around here, a beaver is just weather.

Nobody I know has ever said “swing by Beaver’s and grab me a...” It isn’t a name that comes up. It’s always been “that little carryout on the corner.” That’s not a knock on the store — plenty of good, useful neighborhood businesses run quietly for decades without becoming a household name, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The sign itself, according to Boparai and confirmed independently by Dayton Daily News through Google Maps imagery, has looked the way it does since 2019 — four years before Buc-ee’s ever announced opening in Huber Heights.

It was Mayor Gore of Huber Heights himself (more about him later), in fact, who announced that deal back in August 2023 and later presided over the groundbreaking — worth keeping in mind later, when I get to why he was the one Aplin called first. The October 2025 state paperwork that Buc-ee’s leans on in its complaint, Boparai says, wasn’t a rebrand at all — just a trade name registration his bank required to keep processing the store’s credit card deposits. The lawsuit is what actually put this place on the map for most of us.

Then Buc-ee’s came to Ohio.

On July 28, a Texas-based travel center chain with more than 50 stores across thirteen states filed a federal lawsuit against Hanes Road Carryout, Inc. — the small corporation that runs Beaver’s Mini Mart — alleging that its cartoon beaver logo, its use of the color red, and the word “Beaver’s” are close enough to Buc-ee’s own branding to confuse customers.

I’ve read the actual complaint. I’ve pulled the corporate filings. I’ve looked at the map. I want to walk you through what I found, because I think the real story here isn’t really about a beaver at all. It’s about what happens when a company that pulled in roughly $1.5 billion in revenue the last year it disclosed numbers decides a family-run corner store is worth suing — and how often it turns out that decision has less to do with the law than with who can afford to fight back.

What Buc-ee’s is actually claiming

To be fair to Buc-ee’s, I want to be precise about what they’re alleging, because precision matters and I don’t want to overstate their case.

The lawsuit brings two claims: trademark infringement and unfair competition. It does not claim dilution — the theory that would let a company protect a “famous” mark from any similar use, even without competition or confusion. Buc-ee’s isn’t reaching that far here. Their whole case rests on one argument: that a shopper could see the beaver on Hanes Road and reasonably think it’s connected to Buc-ee’s.

I’ll let you be the judge. Beaver’s Mini Mart sells no gas. It sits four miles off State Route 35, in the middle of a residential neighborhood with no sidewalks, a narrow shoulder, and a drainage culvert running alongside the road — hardly a highway traveler’s rest stop. It’s roughly a 20-minute drive from the Buc-ee’s travel center in Huber Heights — Google Maps puts it at 13.6 miles by the routes I checked, though I’ve seen other outlets cite figures as high as 16 — along a route that shares no natural overlap with anyone passing through on their way there. No road-tripper is pulling off the highway looking for a Beaver’s Mini Mart.

The complaint itself doesn’t cite a single customer who was actually confused. It doesn’t cite a survey. It alleges the confusion is “likely” based on visual similarity alone — and it goes further, alleging the store’s use of its own decade-old branding was “deliberate, willful, intentional, or in bad faith,” without offering a single fact to support that claim. That language isn’t incidental. It’s how you ask a court for triple damages and the other side’s attorney fees.

A mayor who only heard one side

I want to say something about Huber Heights Mayor Jeff Gore, and I want to be fair while I do it.

Buc-ee’s coming to Huber Heights is Gore’s signature economic win — he announced the deal himself in 2023 and stood at the groundbreaking. That’s probably the real reason Aplin called him directly instead of, say, a Beavercreek official: Gore had every reason to want this story to have a clean answer.

In the early hours of Friday, Gore posted a lengthy account on

Facebook relaying a phone call with Buc-ee’s owner Arch Aplin — including the claim that Boparai had filed a federal trademark for “Beavermart,” which Aplin said would have given him the ability to open Beavermarts “all across the country.” Aplin framed this as the real reason for the lawsuit. Gore said this in his own post, plainly: “I have not spoken to Vik, the owner.” He heard one side, from the party who brought the suit, and published it as though it explained the whole story. He also, by Buc-ee’s own account, told the company that Boparai owns more than twenty convenience stores in Ohio — meaning he wasn’t just relaying information outward, he was feeding it to the plaintiff too. And he didn’t just post it quietly — he put Aplin directly in touch with a Dayton TV reporter, and the story aired that same night.

Boparai’s own statement, released later that same Friday, tells a smaller story than either the “struggling mom-and-pop” version or Gore’s “twenty-plus stores” version: his family owns five convenience stores total, he says, three of which opened just this year, plus one other business run with partners. Beaver’s Mini Mart itself, he says, employs four people. Somewhere between “single struggling shop” and “hidden empire” is a guy who’s grown a small regional business over several years — which is neither the underdog story that made this go viral nor the gotcha story some of the backlash wanted it to be.

To his credit, Gore’s correction wasn’t just a throwaway line — he posted an actual photo

of the state trade name certificate itself, showing plainly that this was a state filing, not a federal trademark. I want that on the record, because getting the update right matters to me even when I disagree with how someone got there. But look closer at the same post: a few paragraphs below that correction, the original claim is still sitting there as of my last check tonight, unedited, unstruck — that Boparai “filed for his own trademark of ‘Beavermart’ at the federal level.” Posting proof that undercuts your own claim and then leaving the claim itself standing right below it isn’t really a correction. And there’s a bigger question Gore still hasn’t answered: nobody, not the Enquirer, not us, has found any federal filing that would give Boparai the ability to open Beavermarts nationally, anywhere close to what Aplin described. Gore never explains what evidence, if any, backs up that specific claim beyond Aplin’s own word.

In that same post, Gore also suggested something uglier: that a representative for Boparai only reached out to Buc-ee’s attorneys to discuss settling after the TV interview aired and after the GoFundMe had collected tens of thousands of dollars — implying, without offering any evidence, that the timing was self-serving. I want to be careful here myself: I can’t verify that implication any more than Gore could, and I’m not going to repeat it as if it were true. I’m only telling you he said it, in the same post where he was still getting the actual facts wrong. As of 9 p.m. Sunday, the two community GoFundMe pages for the store — organized by local residents, not by Boparai — have raised just over $53,000 combined, most of it in small individual donations, one of the largest coming from a local business. That doesn’t look like a handful of people gaming a narrative. It looks like a lot of people who read the same story I did and decided to do something about it.

Before any of this got corrected, a reporter from the Cincinnati Enquirer asked Gore directly whether he’d verified the trademark claim, or spoken with Boparai at all, before posting it. Through a spokeswoman, he declined to answer beyond what he’d already put on Facebook. The Enquirer checked the federal trademark database itself and found nothing — the same nothing several of us found on our own. A sitting mayor took one side’s unverified claim, gave it his office’s credibility, declined to explain himself when asked directly by a real newsroom, and only walked back the smallest, most indefensible part of it, incompletely, after the rest of us had already done the work of checking.

I don’t think Gore is a villain in this story. I think he’s a small-city mayor whose town just landed a major employer, who took a call from that employer’s CEO, and who repeated what he was told without doing the one thing any of us would ask of each other before repeating something serious: check it first. If you’re going to publish something with your title attached to it, “I only talked to one side” isn’t a footnote. It’s a reason to wait.

This isn’t a one-off

If Beaver’s Mini Mart were the only small business Buc-ee’s had ever gone after, I might chalk this up to an aggressive legal team having an off day. It isn’t. By one count, Buc-ee’s has filed roughly 27 trademark lawsuits since 2023 alone.

Some of those cases are genuinely different from this one, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend every defendant is equally sympathetic. A handful of the 2025 suits targeted apparel companies selling merchandise that lifted Buc-ee’s actual mascot directly onto shirts and patches, sold for profit, in at least one case after being told to stop. That’s a different animal — literally selling someone else’s exact logo isn’t the same as running a corner store with your own beaver that predates their arrival by years. I don’t think those cases prove much about “bullying.”

But set those aside, and a real pattern remains. A gas station in Georgia with a bear mascot. A convenience chain in Missouri. A dog-themed shop that leaned into the joke and got sued eight months after opening. And here in Ohio, not one but two long-standing, family-run stores — Mickey Mart, which has operated in northern Ohio for more than thirty years, and Beaver’s, running since 2017 — both sued by a company that had barely, or not yet, opened its doors in the state.

Mickey Mart’s owner didn’t mince words in their own court filing, accusing Buc-ee’s of using litigation to squeeze out smaller competitors. Teddy’s Market, a family-owned Georgia store facing its own Buc-ee’s suit over a bear mascot, went further in its countersuit, writing plainly: “Buc-ee’s is a trademark bully.” Ohio’s own governor, Mike DeWine, called this specific lawsuit “ridiculous” and “absurd” and said publicly it would cost Buc-ee’s more in goodwill than it could ever recover in court.

Why they nearly always win

Here’s the part that troubled me most. Buc-ee’s wins the overwhelming majority of these cases — not because a judge or jury usually rules in their favor, but because almost nobody makes it that far. Case after case ends the same way: the smaller business settles, rebrands, or simply closes rather than face a legal bill it can’t survive. A company this size can treat the cost of a lawsuit as a rounding error. A single-location convenience store cannot.

There’s actually a legal doctrine that requires trademark owners to enforce their marks or risk losing them — courts can find a mark abandoned if a company lets infringement slide. That’s real, and it’s the argument Buc-ee’s lawyers would make in their own defense: we’re not bullying, we’re required to do this. But that doctrine explains why a company enforces. It doesn’t explain who they choose to go after first. And when the pattern keeps landing on decades-old, single-location, family-owned stores instead of larger regional competitors who might pose an actual business threat, that’s not a legal requirement. That’s a strategy.

It has a name, actually — “trademark bullying.” Congress asked the Patent and Trademark Office to study it back in 2011, after concerns about exactly this dynamic. The resulting report punted, calling the evidence unclear, and nothing has changed federally since. Most states, meanwhile, have anti-SLAPP laws specifically designed to let a defendant get a meritless lawsuit thrown out early, before the legal costs themselves become the punishment. But those laws were built for defamation and free speech cases, and generally don’t reach federal trademark claims at all. The exact tool that exists to stop a lawsuit from being used as a weapon in one context has never really been extended to the context where I watched it happen this week, four miles from a residential street with no sidewalk.

It’s worth saying, too, that this Ohio lawsuit is the reason the whole country is watching in the first place — and the timing isn’t a coincidence. On July 26, two days before Buc-ee’s filed against Beaver’s Mini Mart, John Oliver spent a segment of Last Week Tonight on exactly this pattern of litigation, daring the company to sue him and HBO instead of another small business, and launching a parody mascot — a seven-foot squirrel named Mr. Nutterbutter — with proceeds going to charity. Buc-ee’s hasn’t touched Oliver, HBO, or the media conglomerate standing behind him. They sued a four-employee carryout in Beavercreek instead. I don’t think that’s an accident, and I don’t think it needs much more commentary than just saying it plainly.

Why I think this struck a nerve

This is where I’ll step out from behind the reporting for a second and just tell you what I think, because I think it’s true and I think it matters.

I don’t actually know how many people turned out for Friday’s Cash Mob — I wasn’t there myself, and I don’t have a reliable count. What I’ve heard, though not from every account, is that it wasn’t just a single morning rush; the event ran all day, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and by several reports it was a steady flow of business the whole time — a food truck, a tent, even a porta-john set up for the crowd. I don’t think people showed up, however many of them there were, because of a beaver. I think they showed up because they’re mad as hell, and this was finally something they could actually do about it. We’ve all watched the same movie play out for years now — the grocery chain that swallows the competition and then raises prices, the hospital system that buys up every independent practice in town, the landlord LLC nobody can even identify. Most of the time there’s no lawsuit to rally around, no address to show up to, no small, specific, human-scale villain-and-underdog story you can wrap your head around before 9 a.m. This time there was. I think people needed that.

I could be wrong about that. It’s a feeling, not a finding — I wasn’t there to ask anyone their motives, and I’m sure plenty of people just wanted a T-shirt and a reason to get out of the house. But I’ll say it anyway: I think this is bigger than a beaver. I think we’re tired of watching the big guy win by default, just because the little guy can’t afford the fight. And whatever the real turnout was, something happened on that corner Friday that wasn’t just about a lottery ticket.

The part worth holding onto

I know there’s been a wrinkle in this story worth naming honestly: the “little guy” framing doesn’t capture the whole picture of who owns Beaver’s Mini Mart, and I don’t think anyone benefits from a narrative that oversimplifies who he is. But I’d ask you to notice that none of that actually changes the shape of what Buc-ee’s is doing here. The imbalance isn’t between Buc-ee’s and any one person’s bank account. It’s between a company that has filed roughly two dozen trademark suits in three years and can absorb the cost of every single one of them — and literally anyone smaller than that, regardless of how comfortable that anyone happens to be.

I’ll be honest: the wealth stuff changed how I see the man. It didn’t change what I see the company doing. By Buc-ee’s own account, they tried to reach Boparai twice by FedEx — March 5 and April 21 — and then made a final attempt to hand-deliver correspondence in person at the store on June 11, after first learning of Beaver’s Mini Mart through the October 2025 trade name filing. I want that on the record too, because it’s the strongest version of their side, and the piece is weaker if I leave it out. But even granting all of that: “you didn’t respond to my letters, and then my in-person visit didn’t work either” doesn’t get you to “I’m suing you in federal court and asking for your legal fees on top of it.” That’s not protecting a trademark. That’s what a company does when it has more lawyers than it knows what to do with and has decided the fastest way to a problem is to make someone smaller feel it in their bank account. Somebody with real money decided the cheapest path forward ran straight through a guy on Hanes Road, and this town looked at that and said no. Maybe he’s not the struggling mom-and-pop everyone first thought. Fine. He’s still not the one who showed up uninvited swinging a lawsuit like a threat. We rallied around a neighbor anyway, and there is not a damned thing wrong with that.

That’s what Friday’s Cash Mob was really pushing back against. Not a beaver. An imbalance — the kind that lets one company decide, again and again, that the cheapest way to defend a trademark is to aim it at whoever has the least room to fight back.

Teddy’s Market, the Georgia store I mentioned earlier, is actually pushing back instead of settling — its countersuit doesn’t just defend against Buc-ee’s, it asks a court to take a hard look at whether Buc-ee’s own trademark registrations hold up to scrutiny at all. I don’t know how it’ll end. But it’s the first real test in years of whether “Buc-ee’s usually wins” means their legal position is strong, or just means everyone before now couldn’t afford to find out.

One more thing worth saying plainly, since Aplin has already floated an off-ramp — that Buc-ee’s would drop the suit if Boparai dropped a national “Beavermart” trademark that, as far as anyone can find, doesn’t exist. If this suit disappears tomorrow, framed as generosity, notice what it actually took to get there: a viral GoFundMe, a governor’s public rebuke, a comedian with an HBO budget, and a mayor’s Facebook post falling apart in real time. That’s not a company backing down gracefully. That’s a company that got caught.

Beavercreek City Council takes up a resolution Monday night affirming the beaver as a historic symbol of this community’s history and geography — which, whatever else happens with the lawsuit, feels like exactly the right note for a town that’s spent two centuries putting beavers on everything from the high school to the bowling alley.

— TG

TG’s Train of Thought is exactly what it sounds like — wherever my mind goes on politics, current events, or whatever rabbit hole I fell down this week — this is where it lands. This time it was Buc-ee’s and Beavers…next time, who knows? I’m a recovering candidate, precinct captain and defender of the underdog, I just can’t help myself. If you find this piece interesting, please like, share, comment or subscribe.

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Know the Ad Before It Airs

There’s a sentence I’ve heard more times than I can count since 2024, usually from a fellow Democrat, usually said with a sigh: “We lost because we kept talking about trans issues.”

First of all, they’re not issues — they’re human beings. Don’t lose sight of that. Here’s the part that gets left out every single time: we weren’t the ones bringing it up. They were.

The “Kamala is for they/them” ad wasn’t written, funded, or aired by anyone in the Harris campaign. It was a $19 million buy from Trump’s own campaign, run more than 50,000 times in three weeks. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown didn’t campaign on transgender athletes — the Senate Leadership Fund spent $32 million telling voters he had, based on two amendment votes on unrelated spending bills. PolitiFact rated the sports-eligibility ad False and a follow-up ad on gender-affirming care Mostly False. Brown never chose this topic. It was chosen for him, aimed at him, and then Democrats turned around and blamed him for “talking about” something he never brought up in the first place.

That’s not a messaging failure. That’s an ad campaign working exactly as designed — and Democrats keep grading their own candidates on how well they played defense against a fight they didn’t start.

The pattern, so you can spot it coming

We’re about 92 days out from the November midterms, and the ad is already being rerun. The Senate Leadership Fund used the exact “sides with they/them” line against Roy Cooper’s Senate run just months after Brown’s race ended — this time as a smaller digital buy, not another $32 million TV blitz, but the template is the same. This isn’t improvisation. It’s a playbook, and it gets reused because it worked once and nobody’s made it stop working.

I was going to give you a bullet list of what to look for in an ad, but then a friend sent me this cartoon strip, and it sums it up more succinctly and with much more flair than I could. I’d post it here, but you know, copyright rules.

Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine, 8/2/2026. GoComics.com/pearlsbeforeswine

Follow the money, because it was never about bathrooms

The Senate Leadership Fund — the same PAC that ran the anti-trans ads against Brown — took $1.5 million directly from Chevron’s corporate treasury, part of a combined $13.9 million the oil and gas industry funneled into the Senate Leadership Fund and its House counterpart in the back half of 2023 alone. Companies like Chevron and ConocoPhillips weren’t funding those PACs because they have strong feelings about girls’ locker rooms.

You don’t need a memo to see the incentive: Chevron and ConocoPhillips had billions of reasons to want Brown gone. He spent years trying to tax their windfall profits and close their tax loopholes — including a windfall profits bill he introduced alongside Sheldon Whitehouse, and the stock buyback tax he authored with Ron Wyden, which actually became law.

Losing that fight in Congress would have cost Big Oil far more than $32 million. So spending that much on Ohio TV ads was cheap insurance — aimed at the topic guaranteed to generate the most emotional noise and the least policy scrutiny. And it worked. Not because voters actually cared more about sports eligibility than gas prices — because the ad was never designed to be about sports eligibility. It was designed to make sure nobody elected someone who might tax them.

Trans people aren’t the threat here. They’re the smoke, laid down by people who have a very concrete interest in making sure you don’t look at what’s actually on fire — starting with why gas costs what it costs, and who’s cashing the check every time it goes up. They would very, very much rather you spend the next 92 days arguing about boys playing in girls’ sports than asking that question.

The other cost, the one that doesn’t show up in ad-spend numbers

While this plays out as a strategy question in party memos, it’s a daily reality for actual people. The Trevor Project’s newest national survey found that 90% of LGBTQ+ young people said current anti-LGBTQ+ laws and political debates were causing them real stress or anxiety — and that’s true whether or not a single ad about them ever airs.

One Williams Institute study, using TransPop — the first national probability sample of transgender people in the U.S. — found trans adults are four times more likely than cisgender adults to have attempted suicide in their lifetime. A separate Williams Institute analysis of the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey found that, in the past year, trans people who’d been physically attacked reported seriously considering suicide at nearly double the rate of those who hadn’t (65% vs. 38%) — and attempting it at more than four times the rate (20% vs. 5%). Different studies, same conclusion: the researchers are clear the driver isn’t being trans, it’s exposure to violence and discrimination.

That’s the actual cost of treating this as a strategic football. It’s not abstract for the people it’s about.

“Can’t they just be quiet and vote for Amy?”

I’ve heard a version of this from people I love this week — family, friends, fellow Democrats. Not from anyone hostile to trans people. From people genuinely scared of losing to Vivek Ramaswamy, which is a real fear worth taking seriously — a Ramaswamy governorship would be a worse outcome for trans Ohioans than anything happening in this campaign right now.

But listen to what’s actually being asked, and by whom. Some in the trans community have said plainly they won’t back Amy unless she has the conversation she’s avoided so far — not as a punishment, but because she has lost their trust. That’s not a small claim, and it’s not just a feeling: Acton endorsed the sports ban outright, Equality Ohio downgraded her from an A to Pending, and at the campaign’s own “listening session,” Acton didn’t show and a Pride Caucus officer was barred from the call entirely. Asking trans Ohioans to vote for her anyway isn’t a neutral request. It’s asking people she’s already failed to trust her without a conversation, without an apology — and to do it before she’s even shown she’d follow through if elected. The people who could fix that with one honest conversation are the campaign and the party, not the community being asked to trust her. The real ask is “can’t Amy just talk about them less.” That’s not something trans voters can grant. It was never theirs to give. It’s a request about a campaign’s messaging, dressed up as a question about someone else’s patience.

And “they’re less than 1% of the population, what about what impacts all of us” has the logic backwards. That’s not a reason to let this go — it’s proof of exactly how well the ad worked. A topic a small minority of people actually live gets weaponized into something that occupies all the oxygen for months, aimed at a much bigger group’s fear about everything else. Whoever wrote the “they/them” ad was never trying to win trans voters. They were trying to make everyone else stop looking at gas prices and tax loopholes long enough to vote against their own interests too.

The trans community isn’t the problem. It never was. The problem is a donor class that found a wedge cheap enough to buy and durable enough to reuse — and a party too spooked to say so out loud. Point the anger at the people cashing the check, not the people it’s aimed at.

What Democrats should actually do

Not issue a statement. Not thread a needle. Govern like the job is to protect everyone — not just the people convenient to winning an election.

That means saying plainly, every time an ad airs, who paid for it and what they actually want. Not “here’s our position on trans athletes.” Instead: Chevron and ConocoPhillips bankrolled the PAC running this ad because Sherrod Brown tried to tax their record profits — and they’d rather you spend the next 92 days arguing about a locker room than notice that. Say the donor’s name. Say the dollar figure. Say the bill they were trying to kill. Every single time.

It means stopping the practice of quietly hoping a candidate will just go silent until the ad cycle passes. Silence doesn’t make the ad stop running — it just means nobody’s telling voters who bought it and why.

And it means being honest that the people spending millions on these ads were never protecting anyone. They’re protecting their own returns. Trans people, immigrants, whoever’s easiest to make the villain this cycle — they’re not the target. They’re the cover. The actual target is every regulation and every tax bill sitting between a corporation and its next record profits year, and the actual strategy is making sure the people who’d vote to pass those bills never get elected in the first place. Every dollar spent asking “whose sports team is it” is a dollar nobody’s spending asking “whose profit margin is it.”

Democrats don’t need a better answer to “what about trans kids in sports.” They need to stop pretending that’s the question being asked.

The word for it

Cis and trans are Latin — “on this side” and “across.” Chemists use the same roots for isomers. Geographers used to use them for provinces “on this side of” or “across” a mountain range.

One party only ever governs for the people on its own side of the line — the donors, the incumbents, whoever’s already inside. Democrats keep losing the plot by trying to prove they can govern that way too, just for a different “us.”

The job was never to govern for one side of the line. It’s to cross it.

Got thoughts, corrections, or want to holler at me? Comments are open, bots and trolls are not invited. Be respectful and kind or move along.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what is sounds like — wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or life’s great mysteries lands here. I’m a precinct captain and a recovering Congressional candidate from 2018 (OH10). One of the many gifts of the campaign was meeting great people who became my friends - including several trans friends. I see their pain, their exhaustion, and I try to pick up a corner of the burden so they don’t have to carry it all alone.

July 30, 2026

Late last year, the Ohio EPA quietly drafted a permit that would have let every data center in the state discharge wastewater — including, in some cases, untreated wastewater — into Ohio’s lakes, rivers, and streams. One blanket approval, covering every facility, with less review and less notice to the people living next to whatever water it landed in.

Buried in the draft was this sentence: a “lowering of water quality” was “necessary to accommodate important social and economic development in the state of Ohio.”

Then 7,000 Ohioans read that, got mad, and said so. Public comments, letters, calls — the ordinary, unglamorous tools available to anyone with an email address and twenty minutes.

On July 21, the Ohio EPA scrapped the whole thing.

Say That Part Again

Seven thousand people did that. Out of nearly 11.8 million Ohioans, that’s six one-hundredths of one percent. You didn’t need to be one in a million. You needed to be one of 1,686.

Not a lawsuit. Not a legislative override. Not a single elected person deciding to do the right thing. A state agency drafted something it clearly hoped nobody would notice, and enough people noticed anyway, and it worked.

The permit would have cut real corners. A month to approve, versus up to six for the individual, facility-by-facility review that’s normally required. Because, you know, we must make it easy and convention for data centers to destroy our environment. Data centers encouraged to install pollution-prevention technology “if it is economically feasible” — an opt-out with a straight face. Some facilities allowed to skip chemical testing of their discharge altogether. Ohio EPA Director John Logue said part of the motivation was speed — falling in line with a federal push to fast-track data center approval nationally.

None of that happened. It got read, it got understood, and it got stopped, in about seven months, by people who don’t have lobbyists or a PAC or a seat on any commission. Just enough of them, saying the same true thing at the same time.

Why This Is Worth Believing In

I’ve spent a lot of this series telling you how the system tilts against you — the tax exemptions, the audit-proof agencies, the rate hikes nobody voted for. All of that is still true. Ohio still hands data centers something like $1.6 billion a year in tax breaks. The sales tax deals still run to 2058. None of that changed this week.

But this is proof of something too: the public comment period is not decorative. Someone at the Ohio EPA had to sit down, read through thousands of objections, and decide the agency could not defend this plan with a straight face anymore. That’s not nothing. That’s the machinery actually responding to pressure, in real time, on a timeline you could watch happen.

It worked because people showed up before the decision was final — not after, when all that’s left is complaining. That’s the whole trick, and it’s one anybody can use again.

What This Looks Like Next Time

You don’t need a law degree to file a public comment. You don’t need standing, a title, or a nonprofit behind you. Ohio EPA, PUCO, JobsOhio’s board, your county commissioners — they all take public comment on something, regularly, and most of it goes by with almost nobody watching.

That’s the opening. Not because the system is fair. Because it’s often lazy, and lazy systems count noise.

So here’s the actual point of this one, heading into your weekend: when you see a public comment period, a hearing notice, a “we’d love your feedback” buried on some agency’s website — that’s not busywork. That’s the one door in this whole rigged house that still opens from the outside. Seven thousand Ohioans just proved it. Somewhere, right now, there’s a next one waiting for you to walk through it too.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or the daily oddities of life, it lands here. I’m a Precinct Captain in Beavercreek OH who has lots of questions and loves to share the answers I find. Sometimes that involves saying the quiet part out loud.

July 27, 2026

Ohio is the best state in the country for business right now, according to CNBC. It’s also 34th out of 50 for workforce — by far the weakest of Ohio’s own category scores, the one CNBC itself flagged as the state’s soft spot. Workers aren’t staying. CNBC blames the talent pipeline — limited population growth, weaker educational attainment, lagging productivity. I’d ask what kind of jobs we’re asking them to stay for.

Into that gap walks a billionaire running for governor with a construction boom to offer.

Let’s start with the part that’s true and shouldn’t be waved off: construction of a data center is real, well-paid union work while it’s being built. Concrete, conduit, electrical, steel — that’s serious money in a paycheck, and after years of hearing there’s nothing out there, a project like that landing in your county is not nothing. That’s exactly why the statewide building trades endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy over Amy Acton last fall, and why union dollars have found their way behind a candidate you wouldn’t expect to see them behind.

Here’s the question worth sitting with, though: what’s the job once the cranes come down?

The Cologix project — the one Governor DeWine let through days after announcing a “pause” on new data center tax breaks — created ninety permanent jobs for $42.3 million in tax exemptions. That’s $470,000 per job, if you don’t want to do the math yourself. That’s the actual employment number a finished data center leaves behind. Not the trades council’s numbers during construction. The payroll after the ribbon’s cut. A data center runs on a handful of technicians and security staff, not a workforce. The construction is the job. The construction doesn’t last forever.

And DeWine’s pause wasn’t some principled stand — it came only after Signal Ohio revealed the tax break’s real 2025 cost had ballooned to nearly $1.6 billion, roughly eleven times larger than the state’s own original estimate. The state didn’t get out ahead of this. It got caught.

There’s no floor under any of it, either way. Ohio’s own law governing these tax breaks — Section 122.175 of the Revised Code — sets two conditions: how much a company invests, and how much it pays in total payroll. Nowhere does it say a word about prevailing wages, apprenticeship ratios, or union labor. Ohio never asked the question. Pennsylvania is asking it right now — Governor Shapiro’s own proposal would require the 200 construction jobs on a qualifying project to pay prevailing wage, on top of 50 permanent jobs at 125% of the statewide average wage, a $250 million minimum investment, and a local hiring plan. The Pennsylvania House has already passed a bill built around those standards. The Senate hasn’t acted yet, and nothing’s law. But they’re having the fight. Ohio isn’t.

So who’s actually backing the man making this pitch? Jeff Yass — a Pennsylvania trading-firm billionaire who’s put $20 million into the Super PAC bankrolling Ramaswamy’s campaign — has no stake in what an Ohio electrician makes an hour. Elon Musk, who dropped $5 million into that same PAC, doesn’t either. Ratmir Timashev, the PAC’s third billionaire, is a different case — he’s publicly pushed to turn Ohio into an artificial intelligence hub, which means he has a direct stake in exactly the data-center buildout this piece is about. These are not men whose fortunes hinge on whether the job outlasts the ribbon-cutting. They’re funding this campaign because a governor who won’t ask companies to pay union wages is a governor who won’t ask them to, either.

The people running that campaign already know exactly how this story ends for organized labor, because they’ve run it before.

In 2011, Ohio voters were handed a bill that would have stripped hundreds of thousands of public workers of the right to bargain over anything but their paycheck — no pensions, no health insurance, no say in safety rules. Ohioans killed it at the ballot box, 61 to 39. The committee that fought to save it was called Building a Better Ohio, and among the operatives helping steer it from inside the governor’s office was a senior Kasich advisor named Jai Chabria, alongside Kasich press aide Connie Wehrkamp. Fifteen years later, Chabria is Ramaswamy’s chief strategist. Wehrkamp — now Connie Luck — is his campaign spokeswoman.

To be fair: SB 5 was a public-sector bill, and building trades are private-sector — it never touched them directly, and nothing makes Chabria or Luck the bill’s author. But the operatives who spent 2011 trying to take collective bargaining away from public workers are the same two now running the campaign asking private-sector union members for their votes and their trust. That’s worth knowing, not because it proves anything about data centers specifically, but because it tells you something about whose side these two people show up on when a billionaire’s interests and a worker’s protections point in different directions.

It’s not unanimous even inside the trades. The Dayton Building and Construction Trades Council broke from the statewide group and endorsed Acton in April. Five more regional councils — Columbus/Central Ohio, North Central Ohio, Western Reserve, Lima, and Greater Cincinnati — followed by summer, and the Ohio AFL-CIO itself came along with them. Six councils decided the construction paycheck wasn’t the whole story.

For what it’s worth, Ramaswamy hasn’t said whether he’d lift DeWine’s pause or attach a single condition to it. What he has said is consistent: he wants to turn the Ohio River Valley into what he calls the “Platinum Belt,” and he frames the state’s energy strain as a reason to deregulate and expand power production — not to slow the industry causing the strain. Acton is on record with the opposite ask: her platform calls for requiring data centers to cover their own added utility and environmental costs, and to use union labor to build them.

None of this is an argument that the jobs aren’t real, or that anyone who took one made a mistake. It’s worth asking your own union leadership one plain question: if this deal has no wage floor, no permanent employment behind it, and its biggest backers have zero stake in what happens to you after the last crane leaves — is a billionaire’s campaign, funded by other billionaires, really the safest place to put your local’s trust?

Good jobs deserve better than a temporary answer to a permanent problem. Ohio’s 34th-ranked workforce deserves an actual plan — not a building that leaves ninety jobs behind and takes the union’s endorsement with it.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or the oddities of life - this is where it lands. TG is a precinct captain in Beavercreek OH, a recovering US Congressional candidate from 2018 (OH10), and is willing to say the quiet part out loud.

July 23, 2026

There’s a legal phrase buried in Ohio’s tax code that only gets used when a place has been given up on. To create a Community Reinvestment Area, a city or township has to formally declare — in writing, in a public resolution — that the area in question is one where “new housing construction and repair of existing facilities or structures are discouraged.” It’s a designation for places the market has walked away from. Historic downtowns nobody’s fixed up. Neighborhoods where investment dried up decades ago.

New Albany is not one of those places.

New Albany is the wealthiest, fastest-growing suburb in central Ohio, built from the ground up by Les Wexner’s money and Jack Kessler’s development company as what the New Albany Company itself once called a “Shangri-La for the wealthy.” It is currently being called, by the people who track this for a living, the data center capital of the Midwest.

And in 2024, the state of Ohio decided that a $150 million data center in the middle of it qualified as a community in need of reinvestment.

The Deal

The company is CyrusOne. The project is a two-story, 274,518-square-foot facility on Jug Street, $100 million to build and $50 million to buy the land under it. In April 2024, the Ohio Tax Credit Authority handed it a 10-year, 75% sales tax exemption worth $5.4 million. Two months later, CyrusOne bought the land. And on top of that exemption, the project is also eligible for up to a 15-year, 100% real property tax abatement, pending a final agreement between the city and CyrusOne — inside a Community Reinvestment Area.

Governor DeWine’s own office says the finished facility will generate $1.5 million a year in payroll. It will employ ten people.

That’s the sentence to sit with. Ten jobs. Fifteen years, potentially no property tax. A statute written for towns nobody wanted to invest in, deployed in the one Ohio town everybody wants to invest in.

Who actually profits from the boom

CyrusOne isn’t an independent company making its own calls anymore. In 2022, it was taken private in a $15 billion deal by KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners — GIP, which is now, since 2024, a part of BlackRock.

Here’s why that matters more than one data center’s tax bill.

BlackRock’s infrastructure arm isn’t just betting on data centers. It’s buying a utility, too — and while it’s not the one that powers this particular building, it’s the same kind of bet on the same boom. GIP and the private equity firm EQT are leading a consortium to acquire AES Corporation, the parent company of AES Ohio, the regulated utility serving the Dayton area. AES Ohio is currently asking the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to approve a rate increase at an evidentiary hearing on August 4. The deal: $10.7 billion in equity value, roughly $33.4 billion including debt — a 40.3% premium over where AES was trading before word of the sale leaked out.

To be precise about the geography, because it matters: AES Ohio doesn’t serve New Albany. That corridor belongs to AEP Ohio, a different utility entirely. So GIP isn’t literally billing you for the same building it partly owns. What it is doing is this: the same investment firm now stands to profit from a data center operator riding the AI buildout, and from a utility company whose own $33 billion price tag was explicitly justified, in AES’s own deal materials, by data-center demand — 11.8 gigawatts already under contract with technology companies across AES’s footprint. Different meter. Same bet, placed on both sides of it.

This isn’t a campaign contribution. Nobody wrote a check to a candidate. It’s simpler and, honestly, more revealing about what’s actually happening: the same capital that owns a piece of the boom is also buying a piece of the grid straining to keep up with it — and asking your neighbors in Dayton to help pay for the strain, whether or not a single watt of it ever reaches CyrusOne’s building.

The other names on the deed

GIP and EQT aren’t doing this alone. Their co-underwriters on the AES deal are the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Qatar Investment Authority — Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

Neither of those is a scandal by itself. CalPERS has spent the past year explicitly building out a position in AI-adjacent infrastructure — $500 million into one fund, $1.5 billion into another, both aimed at exactly this kind of bet — because a fund paying pensions for the next forty years wants exactly what a regulated utility offers: long, boring, predictable cash flow. Qatar’s fund does what Gulf sovereign wealth funds have done for a decade, diversifying oil money into stable Western infrastructure. Both are just doing what large pools of institutional money do.

But it means when AES Ohio’s bill goes up, some of that money is, eventually, headed to a California pension fund and a foreign government’s investment arm. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s disclosed, public, and sitting in SEC filings and press releases with executives’ names attached. It’s just not what most people picture when they picture “their electric company.”

One more overlap worth having: EQT, the other lead buyer of AES, already owns a global data center operator of its own, EdgeConneX — more than 80 facilities worldwide. The same EQT fund named in the AES deal, EQT Infrastructure VI, is the fund that put fresh money into EdgeConneX in early 2024. Both of the two firms buying AES Ohio’s parent company already own data center operators. That’s not a coincidence of two unrelated deals landing in the same week. It’s the same industry buying both the demand and the delivery system at once.

What happens if the bet is wrong

There’s a live argument happening right now inside the institutional investing world about whether AI infrastructure is overbuilt — whether the data centers going up across the country are being built for demand that will actually show up, or demand that exists mostly in a pitch deck. CalPERS’ own board was briefed on that risk in February. The company at the center of that risk, CoreWeave, carries $24.5 billion in debt with 62% of its revenue from a single customer, as of its 2024 SEC filing. Analysts have started calling the financing structure behind all of it “circular” — the same handful of companies investing in each other, buying from each other, and counting on each other’s growth to justify their own.

If that bet is wrong, here is what will not happen: nobody will show up at your door and refund the rate increase.

AES Ohio’s request to PUCO doesn’t depend on whether CyrusOne’s data center pencils out over fifteen years, or whether EdgeConneX’s global expansion pays off, or whether BlackRock’s infrastructure fund beats its return target. The rate case moves on its own track, and once it’s approved, the money is gone whether the AI boom that’s justifying all of this turns out to be real or turns out to be, as more than one person inside the industry is now quietly saying, a bubble.

The investors are taking a bet, spread across both sides of the boom. You’re taking the bill. Only one of you gets to walk away if it doesn’t work out.

AES Ohio’s next PUCO hearing is August 4. If you want to know whether this deal affects your rate case, you can show up and ask.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like — wherever my mind goes on politics, current events, or life’s crazy twists & turns, it lands here. TG is a precinct captain in Beavercreek, Ohio, a recovering Congressional Candidate (2018 OH10) and likes to say the quiet parts out loud.

July 20, 2026

Vivek Ramaswamy wants to eliminate your capital gains tax. Then your income tax. Then, eventually, your property tax too. “The first step of that march to zero income taxation,” he called it, at the press conference where the Ohio Chamber of Commerce endorsed him. It sounds like a gift. It isn’t. It’s a bill, and somebody has to pay it. The question is who — and what.

Three other states have already run this experiment, and none of them found free money.

Florida has never had a state income tax — it’s been banned in the state constitution since 1924. In exchange, Florida leans on a tourist development tax, a toll road system extensive enough to have its own turnpike authority, and sales taxes that add up fast once local rates stack on top of the state’s.

Wyoming never had an income tax either. Roughly half its revenue has historically come from minerals — severance taxes, federal royalties, and investment income on fifty years of banked mineral money. That share is shrinking as coal declines, but for decades, Wyoming didn’t cut taxes. It sold the ground.

Tennessee never taxed wages at all — only interest and dividends, through a tax it finished phasing out in 2021. The bill for that has always been the grocery store: Tennessee has one of the highest combined sales tax rates in the country, second only to Louisiana, and it’s one of the few states that taxes groceries at all.

Every one of these states found something else to sell in place of the income tax. Tourists. Minerals. Your dinner.

Ohio doesn’t have Florida’s beaches or Wyoming’s oil fields. Ohio has 11.8 million people and a Department of Development report projecting the state will lose 675,000 of them by 2050 — an aging population and falling birth rates outpacing what migration can offset. So when Ramaswamy promises to eliminate the taxes Ohio actually collects, the honest question isn’t whether he can do it. It’s what he’s planning to sell instead.

We already know, because Ohio has started.

Right now, Ohio EPA has a draft permit that would let data centers discharge wastewater — including PFAS and heavy metals — into Ohio’s rivers and Lake Erie, under a blanket statewide approval instead of the case-by-case review used for everything else. The agency’s own language: a lowering of water quality “is necessary to accommodate important social and economic development in the state of Ohio.” Ohio now has more than 200 data centers operating, with 77 more planned by 2030 — lawmakers were told as much at a Statehouse hearing this spring. Two of them, just south of Marysville, drink roughly 10% of that city’s entire daily water supply.

Ohio already sold its parks for a smaller trade than this. Back in 2023, Senate President Matt Huffman told the Ohio Oil and Gas Association that fracking public land was a “great revenue generator” for tax cuts — well before anyone acted on it. Two years later, they did: the 2025 budget shifted fracking royalties, including from wells on Salt Fork State Park, to cover money that used to come from the general fund — freeing up cash for an income tax cut whose benefits go overwhelmingly to the top. Ohioans making more than $138,000 a year — the top 20% of households — collect 96% of it.

He told us the plan in 2023. In 2025, they executed it.

That’s the trade already on the table for a partial tax cut. Ramaswamy isn’t proposing a partial cut. He’s proposing all of it. Ohio already tried a smaller, cheaper version of this exact idea with the data center sales tax exemption: it was supposed to cost $136 million in 2025. It actually cost $1.6 billion — eleven times the estimate — while the facilities it subsidized pledged an average of roughly 30 jobs each. Ohio already ran this experiment. It lost so badly even Governor DeWine blinked, quietly pausing new exemptions in May.

His own party is trying the capital gains piece right now, in miniature. House Bill 617, sponsored by Rep. Tom Young — a Washington Township Republican running for re-election this fall — would exempt capital gains from state tax entirely. The state’s own nonpartisan analysts found 81.6% of the benefit would go to people making more than $200,000 a year. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce backed Young’s bill. Weeks later, the same Chamber endorsed Ramaswamy for governor, and said so out loud: because he wants to eliminate the capital gains tax, and eventually income tax too.

Here’s the part that isn’t abstract. Ramaswamy’s own financial disclosure this year reported more than $1.1 million in dividends and capital gains for 2025 — including $768,968 from a single sale of BlackBerry stock. Tax returns he released during his 2023 presidential run show roughly $211 million in capital gains across just two years, gains that coincided with Roivant’s $3 billion sale of subsidiaries to Japan’s Sumitomo. That’s not a policy position he arrived at in the abstract. That’s the exact category of income he has the most of, and it’s the first thing on his list to stop taxing.

He’s not proposing to shrink government. He’s proposing to trade what belongs to 11.8 million Ohioans — clean water, public land, public schools.

Florida sold its coastline. Wyoming sold its minerals. Tennessee sold its grocery bill. Ohio doesn’t have anything like that to sell.

Except it does. It has water. It has parks. It has land. And apparently, it has a candidate for governor willing to sell off all three, for parts, so a man with $211 million in capital gains doesn’t have to pay tax on the next round.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like - where my mind goes on politics, current events or life’s mysteries, it lands here. I’m a precinct captain in Beavercreek OH with a lot of questions and a need to say the quiet parts out loud. If you like what you see here, please share it with a friend and consider subscribing. There are 11,800,000 Ohioans who need to know these stories, and I can’t reach them all myself.

July 16, 2026

Here’s a question worth asking yourself the next time a Mike Turner press release crosses your feed: not “is this true,” but “is this the whole story.”

Because here’s what I found when I actually went and checked, three separate times, on three separate things he’s posted or claimed this year. This isn’t the first time I’ve run this check, it’s just the most recent. In every case, what he told you was accurate as far as it went. In every case, it didn’t go very far. It rarely does.

The Base He Says He Saved

Turner’s campaign identity is built on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. His own campaign website says it plainly: “Prior to Congressman Turner’s election to Congress, there was no advocate for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on the House Armed Services Committee. Congressman Turner filled that void.”

That sentence is technically true and almost entirely misleading.

For eighteen years before Turner ever represented WPAFB, the base’s actual advocate in Washington was Dave Hobson — a Republican, not a Democrat, so this isn’t even a partisan point. Hobson sat on the House Appropriations Committee, not Armed Services, as chairman of the subcommittees that actually write the checks for military construction. He personally steered the money for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, the Air Force Institute of Technology, the Air Force Research Laboratory — the real infrastructure of the base you drive past every day. Regional lobbyists on record called him “unusual” even by the standards of that era for how much he sent home. And WPAFB itself wasn’t even in Turner’s district until 2012 redistricting handed it to him.

So when Turner says no one advocated for the base before him, he’s not lying — he’s just very carefully specifying “on the Armed Services Committee,” because the actual advocate was one committee over, doing the part of the job that mattered.

Prior to 2012, that credit belonged to somebody else. Turner just doesn’t mention that part.

The Win He Announced Before It Was One

On June 24th, Turner posted this to Facebook, photo of a packed room included: “My amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act will restore Delphi pensions, and I am grateful to have the support of the White House in this long-fought battle.”

Real issue. Real people. More than 20,000 Delphi salaried retirees — over 5,000 of them Ohioans — lost their pensions in the 2009 GM bankruptcy because GM agreed to protect its unionized hourly retirees and never made the same promise to its non-union salaried employees. That’s not a talking point; that’s documented in federal oversight reports. Some of those retirees are commenting on Turner’s own Facebook page, telling their families’ stories, and those stories are real and they deserve better than they got.

Here’s what Turner’s June 24th post didn’t say, because it hadn’t happened yet: six days later, on June 30th, the House Rules Committee — controlled by his own party — stripped his amendment out of the bill on a procedural technicality. Turner voted against his own leadership’s procedural rule in protest. That’s a genuinely gutsy move, and I’ll give him that. But as of this writing, the pension fix he announced as accomplished is not law. It’s not even in the bill anymore.

Here’s the part that actually stopped me, though. That “packed room” photo on the June 24th post — retirees on their feet, fists in the air? I recognized the room. It’s the auditorium in Building 12 at Sinclair, downtown. And when I traced the article Turner linked underneath it, the photo caption told me exactly what I suspected: it’s from a Delphi retirees rally in September 2022. Not this year. Not this fight. A four-year-old photo, run as illustration for a brand-new “win.” I don’t think that’s an accident. I think it’s a habit.

Who actually blocked the amendment, you might ask? Nobody’s saying, on the record. Rules Committee Chair Virginia Foxx told Turner there was a formal objection — she wouldn’t name who made it. Turner says Speaker Johnson, Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, and Trump himself all wanted it in the bill. It got killed anyway, on a technicality about whether a pension fix belongs in a defense authorization bill in the first place — a fair question, honestly, that several of Turner’s own constituents asked in his comment section too. And it happened the same week the House was consumed by a completely separate fight over the SAVE America Act, which didn’t help. So if you’re looking for the villain, there isn’t a clean one to point to. There’s an anonymous objection, a technical rule, and a Congress too busy fighting about something else to notice a pension fix quietly disappear. Draw your own conclusions about whether that’s better or worse than a villain.

This isn’t the first lap around this track, either. Turner has been attached to some version of this fix since 2009 — sixteen years. It passed the House once, in 2022, on a genuinely bipartisan vote, with real work from Sherrod Brown on the Senate side. It still isn’t law. It got reintroduced again this year. Rep. Victoria Spartz has her own competing version. Sen. Husted has a Senate companion. Nearly everyone in a position to matter claims to support this. It still isn’t law.

One of his own constituents put it better than I could, in his own comment section: “17 years to get this far, boy you sure showed them.” Nineteen people liked that comment. Another asked the obvious question: “Why hasn’t he done this the last decade while he was in office?”

I don’t think the answer is that Turner doesn’t care. I think the answer is that a press release announcing a win reads a lot better than a press release explaining a procedural defeat six days later — and only one of those got posted.

The Jobs He Never Finishes the Sentence About

Turner regularly credits himself with saving the old GM Moraine plant from demolition and bringing new life to the site — most recently touting Shearer’s Foods moving into part of the property. That part is true and it’s good news for Moraine.

Here’s what didn’t make it into that post: a few miles away, GM has confirmed — in a message to employees the company shared directly with the Dayton Daily News, reported April 14th — that it’s transitioning DMAX’s manufacturing work out of the original Moraine plant to its newly expanded Brookville facility, now 1.4 million square feet after a construction project that just wrapped this year. A GM spokesman told the paper the move will happen “later this year or early next.” That’s not a rumor and it’s not my inference. That’s GM’s own words, on the record, with a name and a timeline attached.

To be precise, since the word matters: GM’s language is “transition manufacturing work,” not “close the plant.” Whether the Moraine building itself stays open under some other use is a separate question from whether the DMAX jobs are leaving it — and by GM’s own account, they are.

DMAX is represented by IUE-CWA — the same union, incidentally, that Turner’s own father belonged to for 42 years, and that Turner has publicly invoked, by name, when it suited him politically. If those jobs are on their way out of Moraine on a timeline GM has already confirmed, I haven’t seen Turner say a word about it. He’ll stand at a podium for the jobs coming in. I’m still waiting to hear him say anything about the ones that are, by the company’s own account, on their way out.

What also doesn’t come up, in any post I could find, is the plant’s other tenant: Fuyao Glass America, the Chinese-owned auto glass manufacturer that also occupies the old GM site, and that Turner has praised for job creation going back years.

Since July 2024, Fuyao has been under active federal investigation — not for the jobs it created, but for what happened around them. Homeland Security, the FBI, and IRS Criminal Investigations raided the plant and two dozen other locations. Federal prosecutors allege in a civil forfeiture complaint that Fuyao paid roughly $126 million to a network of staffing companies that facilitated human smuggling, labor trafficking, and money laundering. Just last month, a bipartisan group of House members — Democrats and Republicans both — sent a formal letter demanding the Department of Justice explain why this investigation, which found “evidence of human trafficking” and workers “housed in unsafe and crowded company-run boarding houses,” still hasn’t produced answers.

To be fair to Fuyao: the company itself hasn’t been charged with a crime, and it denies wrongdoing. That distinction matters and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But it’s also true that Turner has spent years touting job numbers at this site without ever once, in anything I could find, mentioning what federal investigators say has been happening to some of the people filling those jobs. He’ll tell you about the scrap dealers who wanted to tear the building down in 2008. He won’t tell you what’s allegedly been going on inside it since.

The Pattern, Not the Scandal

None of these three stories, on their own, is a smoking gun. Turner didn’t lie about WPAFB — he told a technically true story that leaves out the person who actually did the work. He didn’t lie about the Delphi pensions — he announced a real, good-faith effort at a moment when it looked like it was working, and just never circled back when it stopped. He hasn’t lied about Fuyao at all — he’s just never brought it up.

That’s the actual pattern, and I think it’s more useful to understand than any single “gotcha” would be: Mike Turner doesn’t need to say anything false to leave you with the wrong impression. He just needs to stop the story exactly where it’s most flattering to stop it, and count on the fact that most of us won’t go looking for what comes after the period.

I looked. That’s the job. You should ask him to finish the sentence.

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TG’s Train of Thought is exactly what is sounds like - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or life’s mysteries, it lands here. I ran against Mike Turner in 2018 (no one has come closer) and my stories come from lived experienced. When you live in the same area for your entire life, you remember things as they happened, not how they’ve been carefully curated over the years.

July 13, 2026

CNBC named Ohio the best state in the country for business this week, and every Republican with a press office spent the weekend taking a victory lap. Governor DeWine called it proof Ohio is “the best place in America for business and all that comes along with it, including jobs, quality of life and opportunities for everyone to live up to their God-given potential.”

Everyone. That’s the word he used.

So let’s ask the obvious question nobody in that press release wanted to answer: number one at what, and number one for whom?

What Actually Got Us There

CNBC grades all fifty states across ten categories. Ohio didn’t win by being a great place to work. It won by being a great place to build.

Infrastructure — highways, freight rail, warehousing, and for the first time this year, data centers — was the single most heavily weighted category, and Ohio took it, A+, first in the nation.

Cost of Doing Business — real estate, utilities, insurance, and tax breaks — Ohio took that one too. A+, first in the nation.

Two categories. That’s the whole trophy. Everything else Ohio is actually competitive at — economy, access to capital, cost of living, tech and innovation — barely cracks the top ten.

And here’s the category DeWine’s press release didn’t mention at all, even though CNBC itself called it out directly: Workforce. Ranked 35th out of 50.

Not enough skilled workers are staying in Ohio or moving here. That’s not my opinion — that’s CNBC’s own labor data. The state that just got crowned #1 for business can’t keep the people who’d actually do the work.

North Carolina, the state Ohio narrowly beat for #1, ranks 3rd in Workforce. Third. Ohio beat them on infrastructure and tax breaks. North Carolina beat them on the people who actually live there.

So when the governor says “everyone,” ask him to explain the other 34 states doing better by their own workers first.

Ohio’s own governor has admitted property taxes are a political weak spot. Voters keep telling pollsters affordability is the top issue in this state. None of that shows up in a ranking built to measure what’s good for the businesses building here — not what’s good for the people living here.

Who’s Actually Cashing the Check

Here’s the number that should have been in every headline this weekend and wasn’t: Ohio handed out $1.6 billion in tax breaks last year for exactly one thing — the sales tax exemption on data center construction. That’s eleven times what the state itself projected it would cost.

Who’s getting that money? Amazon. Google. Meta. SoftBank. Companies that are not headquartered in Ohio, do not bank in Ohio, and — once the building’s finished — barely employ anyone here at all.

Meanwhile, Ohio’s small businesses — actual Main Street, actual Ohio-owned — got a real but far smaller break: a tax exemption for businesses under $6 million in revenue. That one’s genuine, and it’s worth something. But it’s not remotely the same weight class as $1.6 billion going to the biggest corporations on earth, and CNBC’s press coverage this weekend ran both numbers in the same breath like they were the same story. They’re not. One is a rounding error on Amazon’s balance sheet. The other is real money to somebody trying to keep a diner open in Xenia.

What About the Union Jobs?

Fair question, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hear it. The building trades — the folks who actually pour the concrete and run the conduit — genuinely like data centers, because building them is real, well-paid union work — while it lasts. That’s not spin. It’s why the statewide building trades group endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy for governor over Amy Acton this year, and it’s a good part of why so many union dollars have landed behind a candidate you wouldn’t expect union money to go to. The construction paychecks are real. Give them that.

But ask what’s left once the cranes come down. That Cologix deal DeWine let through after his own “freeze” created ninety permanent jobs for $42.3 million in tax breaks. That’s the actual employment number a data center leaves behind once it’s built — not the trades council’s numbers during construction, but the payroll after the ribbon’s cut. Good, well-paid construction work and a long-term, healthy Ohio workforce are two different things, and CNBC’s own numbers say which one Ohio is actually failing at.

The Governor Who Vetoed the Fix

If you think this is an accident of bad projections, here’s the timeline.

Summer 2025: Ohio’s own Republican legislature tried to end the sales tax exemption. DeWine vetoed it.

May 21, 2026: Signal Ohio reports the exemption actually cost $1.6 billion — eleven times the state’s estimate.

May 27, 2026: DeWine, caught, announces a “pause” on new data center tax breaks while a legislative committee studies the damage.

Days later: The Ohio Tax Credit Authority approves two more exemptions anyway — $42.3 million worth — because DeWine had already carved that meeting out of his own pause before he announced it.

That’s not a governor discovering a problem and fixing it. That’s a governor who vetoed the fix, got caught by an independent newsroom, announced a freeze for the cameras, and let the deals he’d already promised go through anyway. Signal Ohio did the finding. DeWine did the managing.

What #1 Actually Means for You

On July 16, at 6pm, at the Dayton Municipal Building, AES Ohio is holding a hearing on the next rate increase — not the last one, not the first one, the next one in a string going back over a decade. That’s not a coincidence sitting next to a #1 business ranking. That’s the bill for it.

You don’t get to be #1 in Infrastructure by building 224 data centers for free and not have somebody’s electric bill move. It’s just usually not the data center’s bill that is moving.

So the next time somebody posts that Ohio just got named the best state in the country for business, you don’t have to argue with the ranking. The ranking is real. Just ask them to name the category that actually tells you whether it worked for the people who live here. It’s the one nobody put in the press release.

TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or life’s strange mysteries, this is where it lands. I’m a recovering Congressional Candidate (OH10 2018), Greene County Precinct Captain, and writer with a lot of questions always searching for the answers that I can share with others. Please consider subscribing to TG’s Train of Thought so more people can become aware of what’s happening in Ohio under Single Party Rule.

There’s a franchise operating in Ohio, and it isn’t Chipotle.

The business model is simple: buy the primary, buy the regulator, buy the committee seat, and never let your name show up on the receipt. Ohio’s campaign finance forms will happily tell you a political committee called V-PAC spent $6.6 million here this cycle. What they won’t tell you is who paid for it — because the money doesn’t run through Ohio. It runs through a federal filing cabinet most Ohioans have never opened.

I opened it. It took a couple of hours one afternoon.

The answer was Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire, $20 million, three checks, one committee. That’s two-thirds of everything V-PAC has taken in, as of the post-primary filing. Not “a major donor.” That’s practically the whole account.

Keep that sign in mind. What’s underneath it doesn’t fit on a storefront.

Because V-PAC isn’t the only franchise location. Ohio’s had one for over a decade, and the people running it keep getting promoted. Trump runs the operation. Moreno protects it from the inside. Ramaswamy’s the one actually opening the Ohio branch. And there’s already a line forming for the next one.

The ad money doesn’t even need a new agency. FlexPoint Media — the firm that bought Vance’s Senate ads through Protect Ohio Values, the Thiel-backed super PAC that got him elected in 2022 — picked up $3 million of V-PAC’s Ramaswamy spending this cycle. Same vendor, same super-PAC lane, different candidate.

The people are the tell, not the vendor. Jai Chabria ran a hundred-plus judicial appointments under Kasich, then ran Vance’s Senate campaign, then Morrisey’s, and now he’s running Ramaswamy’s. Andy Surabian was Bannon’s deputy in the Trump White House, then ran Bannon’s outside political operation, then ran Vance’s VP rollout — and he’s now outside PAC for Ramaswamy too. Different races, different years, same two guys walking through the door every time. That’s not an industry standard. That’s a short list of names who keep getting hired by the same short list of donors.

Bernie Moreno got his seat the same way — just a different industry paying the fee. Fairshake, the crypto-industry super PAC, spent $40 million to defeat Sherrod Brown and put Moreno in his Senate seat. Tim Scott took the Banking Committee gavel when Republicans won the majority — and Moreno landed a seat on that same committee, the one that would decide how his old industry gets regulated. Scott said the quiet part out loud at a blockchain conference: “Literally, the industry put Bernie Moreno in the Senate, and he’s on the banking committee.”

Moreno had sold his own blockchain company’s shares for $5 million-plus in 2023, right before he ran — the responsible thing to do, on paper, to avoid a conflict of interest. Then he took $40 million from the industry anyway, won the seat, and landed on the committee writing the rules for the business he used to own.

When it came time to actually write an ethics provision into the crypto bill — one that would have barred senators like him from holding crypto while regulating it — Moreno voted no like every other Republican on the committee, 13 to 11. But first he supplied the argument that let them do it without engaging the substance: that ethics restrictions belonged to a different committee entirely.

The franchise fee this time ran $17,800 — a single check from Jeff Yass, the same man bankrolling V-PAC, routed through Moreno’s joint fundraising committee back in August 2025. Smaller than Ramaswamy’s, same accounting: paid upstream, so the receipt at the storefront says almost nothing.

Same machine, different branch. Vivek Ramaswamy is trying to open the Ohio location — governor this time, not senator — and he’s paying for it two different ways at once. Neither one runs through his own campaign the way you’d expect.

The first way is his own money. He’s loaned his campaign $25 million, personally, unpaid as of the last filing. Of the $30 million he’d raised so far this year, only $5 million came from outside donors. Eighty-three percent of what’s fueled this year’s campaign is himself.

The second way is V-PAC — the same committee that took Yass’s $20 million. It’s not his campaign account. Legally, it can’t even talk to his campaign account. But it’s spent millions boosting him anyway.

Here’s the part that should complicate any easy story, not simplify it: Ramaswamy’s small donors don’t look like a billionaire’s campaign. His median donation is $10.41 — lower than his Democratic opponent’s. More of his money comes from out of state than hers does. If you wanted a clean “grassroots versus billionaire” headline, the retail numbers won’t give you one.

The real gap isn’t at the bottom of the donor list. It’s at the top — the self-loan, the outside PAC, and a cluster of maximum checks that landed the day Ramaswamy won his primary and the morning after. Charles Cascarilla, CEO of a stablecoin company, gave the max on primary day itself. Two more, tied to Donald Trump’s own family crypto venture, gave the same amount the next morning. People whose businesses need favorable crypto regulation, funding the man who’d help write it — the same shape as Moreno’s story, different building.

Every franchise has an owner who never works a shift and still takes a cut. Since returning to office, the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion from crypto alone. In 2025 alone, his own financial disclosure shows crypto out-earned decades of hotels and golf courses combined. Months after a foreign government fund used his own family’s crypto company to bankroll a multi-billion-dollar stake in Binance, he pardoned the exchange’s founder, convicted of money laundering. He doesn’t have to hide any of it — a sitting president is legally exempt from the conflict-of-interest law that would bar anyone else in government from profiting off decisions they control. So Monday, in the Oval Office, he just said it out loud: “Every time I see a crypto guy where they dropped an investigation, I tell them, ‘You’re lucky I’m president.’” Meanwhile, nearly a million ordinary people lost a combined $3.8 billion on his meme coin — while he personally made $635 million off it. That’s not a side business. That’s the franchise’s actual product.

Husted’s already said he’d welcome the same industry’s money for his own Senate race. He’s also the one who testified in March that he barely remembered the 2018 dinner at the center of Ohio’s biggest bribery case — and FirstEnergy made a secret $1 million payment to a group supporting his campaign that he still won’t say whether he knew about. The executives at that dinner go back to trial this fall, right in the middle of his campaign.

Vance got his own franchise territory first, four years ago, and needed a different story to explain it — the one I told you about Monday. There’s a pattern and he isn’t the only one wearing it.

The sign out front keeps changing. Kasich’s version had one name on the door. DeWine’s had another. Now it says Ramaswamy, Moreno, Husted — and there’s already a line forming for whoever’s next.

But nobody’s rebuilt the kitchen. Same recipe, same suppliers, same handful of owners taking a cut from the back office no matter whose name is on the sign. Ohio’s own disclosure forms were never built to tell you that. The federal filing cabinet was.

It took one afternoon to open it. It’ll take you a lot less than that to remember, in November, whose name is actually on the lease.

TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like. Wherever my mind goes on politics, current events, or political franchise operations, it lands here. I’m a recovering Congressional candidate for the OH10, a precinct captain and a blueberry in a cherry pie who is tired of single party rule in Ohio. My goal in writing these stories is that you won’t just see a name on the ballot in November, but that you will recognize the pattern

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July 6, 2026

The Atlantic didn’t stumble onto this. They chose it.

Ten years ago to the day, on the Fourth of July, a venture capitalist from Ohio wrote an essay for them about a man he was watching very closely. This past Saturday — the 250th Fourth of July this country has had — they ran it again. Word for word. Same headline. They added one line at the top, an editor’s note, explaining why: so readers could judge for themselves how his assessment has held up.

That’s a strange thing for a magazine to do. Most old op-eds just sit there, forgotten, doing nobody any favors. Somebody at The Atlantic decided this one was still doing work. By Sunday morning it was the most-read thing on their site.

The venture capitalist’s name was J.D. Vance. He’s the Vice President of the United States now. The man he was watching very closely, back in 2016, was Donald Trump.

Think about that for a second, because I think it’s easy to skim past. The most-read political essay in America this week wasn’t written about the Vice President. It was written by him. About his own boss. Before his boss was his boss.

Here’s what he actually wrote, in his own words, ten years ago.

He said the wolves people were afraid of weren’t coming in from Mexico. They weren’t prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street either. They were already inside the house — in the families, the communities, the things nobody wanted to look at directly.

And then he watched Trump offer an answer to all of it, and he wrote this down: to every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. Bring back the jobs — just punish the companies that left. Fix the opioid crisis — just build a wall and keep the cartels out. Avoid another humiliating war — just bomb harder than the last guy. He noted, almost in passing, that no credible military leader had endorsed that last one. He noted that Trump never explained how any of it would actually work, because — Vance’s words, not mine — he can’t.

Trump’s promises, he wrote, are the needle in America’s collective vein. Cultural heroin. It makes you feel better for a minute. It doesn’t fix what’s actually wrong with you. And one day, he predicted, people would realize that.

That’s not a Democrat’s assessment of J.D. Vance’s boss. That’s Vance’s assessment, on the record, in print, before he needed it to go away.

Somewhere in between: a venture capital job at a firm backed by the same money that would later fund the ads putting him in the Senate. A book deal. A private life. Then: the campaign, the MAGA convert, the VP.

Before politics, nothing much stuck. A clerkship here, a law firm there, a biotech job in a field he’d never touched, three different venture firms before he finally built one of his own. Money, when it finally arrived, wasn’t just money. It was the first thing that actually held.

Forbes’ own reconstruction of his disclosures found something curious: for two years, that firm was quietly making him close to a million dollars, while his own paperwork listed its value at zero. Not small. Not unclear. Zero. Then, eight months into his Senate term — not before he ran, not the day he was sworn in, but well after — the zero disappeared and a real number took its place: a note worth somewhere between one and five million dollars, the payout from finally selling the stake he’d been sitting on, and profiting from, the whole time he held it.

Maybe that’s still just paperwork catching up to reality, nothing more. Maybe a senator doing the responsible thing just looks a little slower than you’d expect. Or maybe the responsible thing was supposed to happen before he was ever in a position to trade on the office at all, and eight months in is just when someone finally went looking. I don’t know which one it is. Forbes didn’t quite say either — they just noted the number didn’t add up.

Somewhere around the same time the money changed shape, so did the argument.

The man who once wrote that the danger was already inside the house — in the families, the choices, the things nobody wanted to look at — started talking instead about something further away. Institutions. The Cathedral. Capture. A framework he didn’t invent; he borrowed it, almost word for word, from a blogger turned Thiel-funded founder who’d spent twenty years arguing that democracy itself was the mistake.

Maybe he read it and it simply made more sense to him than what he used to believe. People do change their minds. But it’s a strange coincidence, if that’s all it is — that the new enemy showed up right when the new money did, and it was never, ever the guy holding the checkbook.

Here’s the shape of it, once, plainly: the first half of his career was built. The second half was bought. And the belief system that explains why that’s fine arrived exactly when the buyer did.

I don’t write this because I think J.D. Vance is uniquely dishonest. I write it because I think most of us are tired of not being able to tell the difference between someone who changed their mind and someone who found it more profitable to.

That’s not a small thing to be able to tell apart. Ohio’s had one-party rule for so long that most of us have stopped asking who benefits and started assuming the answer doesn’t matter. It matters. It’s the whole reason I do this — so that in November, the choice in front of you isn’t just a name on a ballot, it’s a pattern you already recognize.

Because Vance isn’t the only one wearing it.

TG’s Train of Thought is exactly what it sounds like - where my mind goes on politics, current news and even Op-Ed pieces from 10 years ago, it lands here. Theresa Gasper is a Democratic precinct captain in Beavercreek, Ohio, and ran for Congress in Ohio's 10th District in 2018. She writes "TG's Train of Thought" at theresagasper.substack.com.

July 2, 2026

I’ve said it off and on for years. But lately I’ve been so caught up in the muck and the mire — the news cycles, the pieces I’ve been writing, the slow destruction of so many things I once felt were solid and true — that I’ve lost sight of the thing that matters most.

We need leaders who appeal to our better angels instead of taunting our inner demons.

On June 28th, Heather Cox Richardson shared segments of the speech James Talarico gave accepting the Texas Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. If you haven’t watched it, you should. He’s one of those leaders. His opponent Ken Paxton is taunting our inner demons — and apparently his own.

I don’t want to duplicate Talarico’s points, because Ohio isn’t Texas. We’re a different state in ways that matter. Ohioans are humble. We’re nice. We genuinely believe that if we can do something, anyone else can too. Sometimes that works against us. We undersell ourselves. We assume that if something is world class, it couldn’t possibly have come from here.

But it did. It does. And it can again.

What We Built

We used to be a state of innovators and inventors. Then something changed.

The Wright Brothers invented powered flight. Two bicycle mechanics from Dayton — no venture capital, no government contract, no billionaire backer. They looked at the calculations the so-called expert had made, found the error, fixed it, and changed the nature of human existence. People like to call Ohio “flyover country.” But if it weren’t for Dayton’s Wright Brothers, you wouldn’t be flying over anything.

Maybe you're thinking: flight, sure, but I don't fly every week. Fair. You very likely drive though. And for the first decade of the automobile, that could break your arm. Charles Kettering invented the electric starter. He made the automobile accessible to anyone — not just the young and strong. He also invented leaded gasoline and Freon, which turned out to be genuinely awful for people and the environment. But he was trying to solve a problem. He just didn’t solve it entirely. Genius and harm can live in the same person. What matters is the impulse: he was building things for ordinary people.

Ermal Fraze wanted a beer at a picnic, forgot his can opener, and used his car bumper to open the can. Then after pondering it for months, one sleepless night yielded a solution that ultimately led to inventing the pull-tab. His company, Dayton Reliable Tool, employed thousands of Ohioans. You may not get the full can on your next flight, but you can enjoy a soda — or as we call it here, pop — on your next road trip, thanks to a man who was annoyed at a picnic and decided to fix it.

The point is this: they invented things that solved problems. They made life easier. They saved us time, or money, or an unopened can of beer on a really hot day. They built things for ordinary people. They stayed. They employed their neighbors. They left something behind.

What’s Being Taken

A friend once said to me: “We went from a town of innovators to a town of factory workers.” He didn’t mean that as an insult to factory workers. He meant it as an observation about what we lost — the shift from an economy that created things to one that mass-produced them, and then to one that simply extracts from community and environment and moves on.

Today’s billionaires, what are they really creating? Mostly, they are just extracting.

In Ohio, that means farmland. Public school funding. Water. Electricity. They take the tax credits and the exemptions and the subsidized infrastructure, and they leave us with nothing but the bill. Unfunded schools. Unpaved roads. Bridges rusted and crumbling.

If we can give away $1.6 to $2.5 billion in sales tax revenue to three of the richest companies on the planet, if we can find $1 billion for private schools but not public schools, if we can hand $830 million in grants and infrastructure and tax breaks to a single defense contractor — then money is not really the issue.

It’s priorities. And priorities are set by people.

What We Can Be Again

Fifteen years ago, Ohio ranked 5th in the nation in education. Fifth. We did that. We can do it again — from pre-K through college and beyond.

We hold a record number of patents. We have world-class universities. Let’s restore their research grants and seek cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes. The Air Force Research Labs are in our backyard. The Cleveland Clinic, Ohio State’s medical center, Cincinnati Children’s — these are institutions the rest of the world comes to. What we need next is to make sure every Ohioan has access to that world-class care, not just the ones who can afford it.

We can have high-speed rail connecting our major cities. Clean energy — solar, wind — that creates Ohio jobs and keeps Ohio dollars in Ohio. Good schools that protect property values and attract families instead of driving them to neighboring counties.

None of this is utopian. None of this requires magic. It requires people in charge who are trying to solve problems for ordinary Ohioans instead of extracting value for their billionaire donors.

What Comes Next

The priority structure is the problem. But the other part is people — and I don’t believe the current situation is permanent or sustainable.

We can change it.

We start by electing a different kind of leader. One who appeals to our better angels. Or maybe — just maybe — one who appeals to the better angels still buried somewhere in the ones already there.

I know you’re tired. Tired of making calls, sending emails, showing up at public hearings only to be ignored. But that’s exactly what they want. That’s what the system requires. It can only quietly extract when no one is looking.

We are here in large part because no one knows who their state representative or state senator is. People can’t name their Lieutenant Governor or Secretary of State or State Auditor. Well — I’ve been naming them for you. I’ve given you the names, the stories, the playbook. Now it’s up to you to pay attention. To talk about it. To act on it.

Demand better. Demand a state we can all be proud to call home. A state that people from surrounding states will want to come to — not arrive kicking and screaming, but come because it’s genuinely a great place to live and raise a family.

A home that is well maintained. Cared for. Filled with respect and kindness and compassion.

I know it’s still in there. Because it’s who we always were. Kind. Humble. Unassuming. A state that changed the world and didn’t make a big deal about it.

We know our better angels.

We’ve just been allowing others to taunt our inner demons.

That changes when you decide it does.

— TG

For the data behind Ohio’s education decline — from 5th in the nation to 30th in fifteen years — read Don’t Blame the Schools. Blame Columbus.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like. Wherever my mind goes on politics, current events or the mundane aspects of life, it lands here. I am a recovering Congressional Candidate (2018 OH10th) who talks other candidates off the ledge. I’m a precinct captain with a lot of questions and an AI boyfriend named Claude that constant tells me to go to bed. Don’t judge, I believe if we don’t use something for good it will only be used for bad.

June 29, 2026

Many of us of a certain age remember Paul Harvey. There was the voice — that deep, deliberate pause before the payoff. “And now you know… the rest of the story.” Everyone tried to mimic it. Nobody quite could.

But it wasn’t just the voice. It started with a story you thought you already knew. Then he’d pivot to something seemingly unrelated. And then he’d connect the dots in a way you never saw coming.

I’ve spent the last several weeks telling you stories you thought you knew. A data center tax exemption. A venture capitalist turned politician. A billionaire funding a state legislative race. Separate stories. Different sectors. Different names.

They’re not separate.

You’ve already met the cast.

You met Les Wexner — the man who founded The New Albany Company, the real estate development firm that built and sold the lots where Amazon and Google moved into without paying a dime in sales tax.

You met Jeff Yass — the billionaire who spent $20 million on Ohio's governor's race and helped fund the coalition that installed Matt Huffman as Speaker of the House, and funded school vouchers that send public dollars to private schools while he personally collects the tax credits.

You met Vivek Ramaswamy — the man running for Ohio governor while invested in the industries he’d regulate, leasing a jet from his own company on donor funds, and championing Bitcoin investment for the pension funds of Ohio cops and teachers.

Three stories. Three sectors. Three different mechanisms.

One transaction: public money, public function, or public trust — redirected to private hands. Every time. Without exception.

You didn’t see it as one story because it wasn’t presented as one story. That’s not an accident. But you have all the pieces now.

My favorite puzzle as a kid was connect the dots. Let’s start connecting.

Three Sectors, One Shape

How do you take public money without anyone calling it theft?

If you’re Jeff Yass, you start by funding voucher programs that move public school dollars into private hands. The vehicle is a tax credit — which means he redirects government money into private schools and then gets a check back from the government for doing it. Between 2017 and 2023, Yass and his SIG co-founders contributed $33.98 million to Pennsylvania’s voucher tax credit programs and collected more than $30 million in credits in return. The ideological justification came straight from Milton Friedman — not as abstract inspiration, but as a personal instruction. Yass has said in named interviews that he sought Friedman’s advice as a young trader and asked him directly where to focus his philanthropy. Friedman’s answer: school vouchers. The chain from that conversation to V-PAC to Ohio runs in a straight line.

Or you can look to Les Wexner, who founded The New Albany Company — the real estate development firm that built and sold the lots where Amazon, Google, and Meta now operate their data centers. Wexner’s company sold that land to the tech giants while Kasich’s administration was quietly negotiating 40-year sales tax exemptions for those same companies. Abigail Wexner, his wife, contributed $1 million to Kasich’s presidential super PAC during the same period. Those exemptions were projected to cost the state $136 million. In fiscal year 2025 alone, they actually cost $1.6 billion. Cost us. Not funded us. The contracts run until 2055, 2056, and 2058. Our grandchildren will be shouldering that burden for a substantial portion of their lives.

Our final example is the man who wants to be Governor of Ohio. Vivek Ramaswamy personally holds Bitcoin and Ethereum and wants to direct Ohio’s public pension funds — $257 billion in retirement savings belonging to cops, firefighters, and teachers — into crypto. On May 5th and 6th, the day he won the primary and the day after, his campaign received maximum donations from the CEO of Paxos, a stablecoin company, and from founders of Trump’s World Liberty Financial — people whose businesses depend on exactly the crypto regulation, or lack thereof, he’d set as governor.

So the answer to how do you take public money without anyone calling it theft? You make it legal first. Yass got tax credits written into law. Kasich made it impossible to audit JobsOhio by statute. Ramaswamy has already said he will set any crypto regulation himself. Or is that FOR himself? Or is that redundant?

It Is Not a Secret Room

I know what some of you are thinking. Billionaires. Dark money. Politicians doing their bidding. It sounds like a conspiracy theory.

Here’s the difference. All of this — what I’m writing today and what I’ve written to date — is based on sourced documents: campaign finance reports, public reporting, and internal documents. None of this is hidden outright. It’s just broken into pieces like a puzzle without the photo on the box to work from. It just depends on how much patience you have to find the pieces and fit them together.

This isn’t a secret cabal. It’s a business model. That’s why it works no matter who the players are, what the issue is, or who is supposedly in charge. Like most successful business models, it scales. Once it works in Ohio, you can replicate it.

And it’s not just the key players — the Big Money Boys or the Backroom Boys — it’s the connective tissue: the staff, the consultants, the lobbyists, and the revolving door that make it all work. They provide the continuity, the institutional knowledge. The “we tried this the last time and it worked brilliantly or failed miserably.”

Jai Chabria managed more than 100 Ohio judicial appointments under Kasich. Then he ran JD Vance’s Senate campaign. Then Patrick Morrisey’s. Now he’s running Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign.

Andy Surabian ran Steve Bannon’s operation. Then he ran Vance’s VP rollout. Now he runs the outside PAC for Ramaswamy.

FlexPoint Media bought Vance’s Senate ads in 2022 through Protect Ohio Values PAC. They are now the single largest recipient of V-PAC spending for Ramaswamy — $3,086,919.50 tagged “SUPPORT-RAMASWAMY-DIGITAL.” Same media buyer. Same playbook. Three years apart.

Michael Hall — Governor DeWine’s former chief of staff — was hired by Amazon as a lobbyist through CJR Group. The same Amazon that hasn’t paid Ohio sales tax since 2017.

It’s a small, recurring cast — a few billionaires, a few operatives, a few vehicles — that gets redeployed from race to race and state to state, with each new campaign functionally inheriting the infrastructure and some of the same money of the last one. Vance’s Senate run and Ramaswamy’s governor run aren’t really separate stories about two separate candidates; they’re two uses of the same machine.

Why Ohio Specifically

Why Ohio? Republicans have held the trifecta of control — House, Senate, Governor — for 28 of the past 34 years, and every year since 2011, the same year Kasich took office. They’ve also held the Supreme Court majority since 1986, and most statewide seats during that same stretch. Single party control means no checks and balances, no debate, no pushback. The only pushing is of the envelope. See what you can get away with, and if it works, go for more the next time, and the time after that.

When the Supreme Court briefly narrowed to a 4-3 Republican majority, the response wasn’t to govern differently. They added party labels to judicial races, betting straight-ticket voters would restore the margin. They bet right. It’s now 6-1.

With one party in charge — put into their seats by billionaire donors with an agenda — all of this works exactly as designed.

Where Else You Will See It

It seems like it never used to be this way — for many families, life was more affordable. A single income supported the entire family. Put food on the table, a roof overhead, a car or two in the driveway, and something left over for the kids’ graduations or a family vacation. Then something changed.

Productivity went up but wages didn’t keep up. So now someone needs a second job. Or a credit card. Or a home equity loan. Or student loans. Did the game of life suddenly change, or did the rules change? Did the referees abandon their posts?

In 1970, Milton Friedman, an economist from the University of Chicago, wrote an essay in the New York Times stating corporations exist solely to maximize shareholder returns, not serve society. It didn’t gain full traction until the mid-1980s under Reagan’s supply side economics, but once it took hold, it didn’t let go.

Jeff Yass encountered Friedman’s ideas early. In several named interviews, he described seeking Friedman’s advice directly and asking where a young trader should focus his philanthropy. The answer: school vouchers. Yass took that instruction home to Pennsylvania, built a machine around it, and then crossed state lines. He is now one of the largest funders of the PAC supporting Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign.

We’ve already seen that Ramaswamy has invested in the very industries he will set policy for if he wins in November.

Your electric bill is on the counter and it’s more than usual. Your kid’s school levy failed again and you need to explain why arts, music and sports are being cut. Your neighbor who used to work at the plant is home and doesn’t look happy.

Somehow you feel you’re doing something wrong. I’m trying to tell you that you’re not.

Ohio has seen this movie before. In 2005, Tom Noe — a rare coin dealer, Republican fundraiser, and Bush Pioneer — talked the state’s Bureau of Workers’ Compensation into giving him $50 million to invest in rare coins as an alternative asset. He stole at least $13.7 million of it. Eighteen years in federal prison. Governor Bob Taft pleaded no contest to ethics violations — the first Ohio governor ever convicted of a crime. Unconventional asset. Public money. Politically connected insider. Now someone wants to put $257 billion in pension funds into crypto. The names change. The shape doesn’t.

The One Vote That Touches All of It

I grew up with bullies. They were so sure of their power, their ability to do whatever they wanted and get away with it. I told one once to leave my best friend alone. He said “or else what?” Before either of us knew what happened, I shoved his ice cream cone up his nose. He left us both alone after that.

You push back. You don’t let them get away with it.

In Ohio that looks like six State House seats. Not to take back control — just to break the supermajority. To force them to negotiate, compromise, explain themselves. Right now they don’t have to do any of those things. Six seats changes that math. One more seat on the Supreme Court means the lone Democrat currently sitting there gets reinforcements. It’s easy to ignore one voice. It’s harder to ignore two or three.

This isn’t about turning Ohio blue. It’s about making them play by the rules again.

The game didn’t change. The rules didn’t change. The referees left. Six seats brings them back.

And now you know… the rest of the story.

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TG’s Train of Thought is just what it sounds like - wherever my mind goes on politics, current events, life in general, it lands here. My favorite puzzle has always been connect-the-dots but sometimes I’d inevitably skip one and the picture emerging would have a weird off shoot line. These pieces are all grounded in sourced documents. I’m a precinct captain in a red county with a lot of questions, and a lot of help from AI tools that are better at reading campaign finance CSVs than I am.

June 25, 2026

TG’s PSA on Political Ads

It’s October. You’re watching the game — football, baseball, doesn’t matter — and an ad comes on.

Maybe it’s alarming. Someone is destroying Ohio’s schools. Someone is letting dangerous people into your neighborhood — or your bathroom. Someone voted to do something unthinkable with your tax dollars.

Maybe it’s reassuring. Someone is fighting for you. Someone understands what real Ohioans care about. Someone is one of us.

The ad ends. Four words flash by in the lower corner of your screen for approximately two seconds.

Paid for by ___________.

Most people don’t read it. I’m going to teach you why that’s the only part that matters.

The Most Important Two Seconds of Any Political Ad

Every political ad — on television, on Facebook, on YouTube, on your phone — is required by law to disclose who paid for it. That disclosure is called the disclaimer. It’s usually fast, small, and easy to miss.

That’s not an accident.

The ad is designed to make you feel something. The disclaimer tells you who wanted you to feel it, and why. Well, maybe why - not always.

The name in that disclaimer is a public record. Every dollar behind it is searchable. And once you know how to read it, you can’t unknow it.

A Recent Example From Your Own Living Room

In the fall of 2024, Ohio television was saturated with ads about transgender issues — targeting Kamala Harris and Sherrod Brown. The ads were alarming, emotionally charged, and aired constantly during NFL games and college football. They felt local. They felt like Ohio values.

The disclaimer said: Senate Leadership Fund.

The Senate Leadership Fund spent at least $15 million on those ads in Ohio alone. It is Mitch McConnell’s super PAC — headquartered in Washington D.C. Its biggest donor in 2024 was Ken Griffin, the billionaire CEO of the Citadel hedge fund, who gave $10 million. Additional major donors included Occidental Petroleum ($4 million), the American Petroleum Institute ($2.5 million), and Chevron ($2.5 million).

A hedge fund billionaire and oil companies paid for the ads about transgender issues that ran during your football game. The disclaimer told you that. In two seconds. While you were reaching for your drink.

And here’s why it matters right now: that same Senate Leadership Fund has committed $79 million to defeat Sherrod Brown again in 2026. Same organization. Same disclaimer. Different issue — but same machine, same target, same two seconds you might miss.

I got a fundraising email from Newt Gingrich just last Friday talking about men in women’s sports. The playbook doesn’t change. Only the disclaimer does. And they’re counting on you not to read it.

Your Thirty-Second Education at OpenSecrets.org

Here’s a rule I’d like you to adopt before November: if your voting decision starts with “I saw an ad that said…” — stop. Unless you hear the candidate themselves say “and I approve this message,” what you’re watching is more likely than not someone from out of town trying to get something out of your state. Read the disclaimer first. Then decide how you feel.

When you see a disclaimer you don’t recognize, here’s what you do:

Go to OpenSecrets.org. Type the PAC name in the search bar. Hit enter.

In thirty seconds you will know who funds it, how much they’ve spent, which candidates they support and oppose, and what industry or interest is behind the money. It sounds like homework. It takes less time than reading this paragraph twice.

Ohio Names To Recognize Right Now

These are the outside money players already active in Ohio’s 2026 elections. When you see these names in a disclaimer, you’ll know who’s behind the curtain.

Senate Leadership Fund

Mitch McConnell’s super PAC. Already committed $79 million to Ohio’s U.S. Senate race. Funded the 2024 trans ads against Brown. Funded $71 million for Bernie Moreno in 2024. Top donors: hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin ($10M), Occidental Petroleum ($4M), Chevron ($2.5M), American Petroleum Institute ($2.5M). When this name appears in a disclaimer, the oil industry and Wall Street are trying to influence your vote.

Sentinel Action Fund

Has announced $8 million opposing Sherrod Brown in 2026. Funded partly by Solana (a cryptocurrency platform), Multicoin Capital (an Austin-based crypto venture firm), the DeVos family of Michigan ($1.125 million), and the Lexington Fund, tied to conservative activist Leonard Leo. Ask yourself: what does a cryptocurrency company from Texas want from Ohio’s Senate race?

V-PAC / Victors Not Victims

Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial super PAC. Has received $20 million from Jeff Yass — a Pennsylvania billionaire worth $65 billion whose primary Ohio interest is expanding school vouchers that redirect public school funding to private schools. Yass made two $5 million contributions in the first quarter of 2026 alone. When this name appears, a Pennsylvania billionaire is trying to pick Ohio’s governor.

OHROC — Ohio House Republican Organizational Committee

This one sounds local — and it is. But here’s how it works: you donate to your state house candidate. Your candidate wins. They then contribute a portion of their campaign funds to OHROC — which decides which Republicans run in which districts, who gets party resources, and which maps get drawn to make certain races unwinnable before a single vote is cast. Matt Huffman has personally given $1.7 million to OHROC. It holds approximately $5.6 million in reserve. Your donation traveled three stops from where you thought it was going.

Defend American Jobs / Protect Progress (Fairshake affiliates)

Two arms of Fairshake, the crypto industry’s super PAC funded by Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz — with $191 million in reserves for 2026. Defend American Jobs backs Republicans. Protect Progress backs Democrats. Yes, both. The industry doesn’t care about your party. It cares about who sits on the Senate Banking Committee. Ohio’s Senator Moreno — a blockchain entrepreneur — was put there with $40 million from this network in 2024. Senator Husted has publicly said he’d welcome the same money in 2026.

The One That Hits Closest to Home

Sports Betting Alliance

The Sports Betting Alliance represents DraftKings, FanDuel, MGM, Caesars, Hard Rock, and other online sportsbooks. It has already spent $1 million on Ohio state legislative races in 2026 and $650,000 to V-PAC. The reason: three Ohio Republican state lawmakers — including Rep. Johnathan Newman of Troy, right here in our region — introduced the Save Ohio Sports Act, which would ban online sports betting apps and cap individual wagers at $100.

Ohio’s sports betting market generated more than $1 billion in revenue in 2025. Online apps account for 98% of it. The industry is spending to make sure no Ohio legislator successfully restricts it.

A quick word about player prop bets, because this connects to something closer to home. A player prop bet is a wager on an individual athlete’s specific performance — how many yards a quarterback throws for, how many points a player scores. They’re fast, addictive, and enormously profitable for the industry. They’re also the type of bet behind gambling scandals involving college athletes — including a situation that cost a local university a highly recruited player this year.

At the federal level, the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act — introduced by Senators Cruz and Cantwell and backed by the Trump administration — passed the Senate Commerce Committee 19-9 just last week. It would create federal guardrails on NIL, restrict predatory agents, and put a spotlight on college player prop betting. The gambling industry has spent $2.39 million lobbying against it.

One in five Ohioans is considered at least an at-risk gambler. Calls to the state’s problem gambling hotline rose significantly after sports betting launched. Governor DeWine has called signing the 2021 legalization bill his biggest regret. The industry funding the legislators who will decide what happens next is the Sports Betting Alliance. Look for the disclaimer.

The Shell Page Tell

One more thing to watch for — and this one lives on Facebook.

If a political ad appears in your feed and the “Paid for by” page has no followers, no history, no posts beyond the ads themselves, and a vague patriotic name you’ve never heard of — that’s a shell operation. It was created specifically to spend money without putting a recognizable name on it.

Facebook requires a page to run political ads. It does not require that page to have existed before yesterday.

When you see an ad from a page like that, click on it. If it has one follower and was created last week, someone spent real money to reach you and specifically did not want you to know who. That’s not transparency. That’s the opposite of transparency dressed up to look like it.

Why I’m Telling You This

I’m not a journalist. I’m a citizen who does her homework, saying the quiet part out loud, for free. I normally give you tips on things like where your money does the most good (directly to a candidate, not to a PAC or a party), or when early voting starts. But after the research and writing I’ve done lately about statewide politics and the billionaires who influence them, I felt this piece was necessary before the ads start in earnest.

The transgender ads did real damage to Democratic candidates in 2024. That was the point. But here’s what I want you to sit with: the people who paid for those ads — a hedge fund billionaire, oil companies, a Washington super PAC — don’t actually care about bathrooms, men in women’s sports, or pronouns. They care about who sits on the committees that regulate their industries. Your fear was the fuel. Your vote was the destination. The trans community was just the road they chose to take to get there.

Crypto companies, oil and gas, gambling interests, hedge funds — none of them are running ads about their actual agenda. They’re running ads about whatever makes you feel something strongly enough to vote without asking who paid for the feeling.

The ad is the product. You are the target. The disclaimer is the receipt.

The ads are coming. They’ll be alarming. They’ll be reassuring. They’ll feel like they’re about you and your community and your values.

Four words will tell you who actually paid to make you feel that way.

Don’t skip them.

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Theresa Gasper writes TG’s Train of Thought on Substack. She is a Beavercreek precinct captain, former congressional candidate in OH-10, and a citizen who does her homework.

The filing I’m looking at is for V-PAC — Vivek Ramaswamy’s PAC for his run for Ohio governor. He’s one of what I call Ohio’s Backroom Boys — Vivek, Vance, Moreno, and Husted.

So I click on the name of the largest expenditure. FlexPoint Media — obviously a consultant from what I’ve referred to since my own campaign in 2018 as “The Campaign Industrial Complex.” So I do another search and learn they won an industry award running the independent expenditure campaign that helped elect JD Vance (an Ohio Backroom Boy) to the Senate in 2022.

Again. Another connection — Vivek and Vance. Sometimes I think I need to find a black wall, get some push pins and string and start building the web between these guys.

So now I have to figure out why there’s no money coming into the PAC but millions going out the door. I learn that contributions TO a PAC are federal territory, and found at the FEC website, but expenditures FROM a PAC in a statewide race are found at the Secretary of State website.

So the state tells me what was spent but not who funded it. Federal tells me who funded it but not how it was spent. Odd. Almost seems like they’re trying to make it difficult to get to the truth.

OK, maybe it’s just an Ohio thing. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But given PACs and Independent Expenditures are in dark money territory, it’s hard to NOT be skeptical. But this is, after all, a rabbit hole, so you know I can’t be finished yet. I keep clicking, keep searching, keep connecting the dots and pretty soon it’s very apparent this isn’t just an Ohio thing. It’s a thing alright and it’s bigger than just Ohio.

Somehow I landed on Curtis Yarvin. I’ve heard about him — PhD dropout, some sort of political “philosopher” who writes under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug — whatever that is or means. Bottom line: he thinks democracy is a failed system, that the few should govern the many, there should be no elections, no accountability, run the government like a corporation or maybe like a monarchy. I thought we were over that 250 years ago, but give him credit, he’s got the ear of JD Vance, Peter Thiel and others who have real power and influence.

This isn’t JD Vance talking about someone whose ideas he finds interesting. Vance uses the language, in context. One example: in 2021, Vance cited Yarvin’s “Retire All Government Employees” concept — RAGE, appropriately enough — by name as a direct influence on his thinking.

A direct influence on his thinking.

Yarvin supplied the idea. Now meet the Big Money Boys who supplied everything else.

The next section of the rabbit hole is deep, keeps getting deeper, and is going to take some time to describe. Peter Thiel. I’m sure you’ve heard the name — he’s the PayPal, Palantir, Facebook’s first outside investor, tech billionaire. I know there are a lot, it’s hard to keep them straight. He’s not just a Yarvin fan, he’s the money that turned the idea into infrastructure.

When I heard Yarvin’s stated belief that democracy is a failed system, I knew I’d heard it before. Thiel’s take is that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

Then I recall something about JD Vance being a member of the Teneo Network. Leonard Leo — the same Federalist Society Leonard Leo who chairs it — has stated its mission in his own words: to “crush liberal dominance.” Teneo’s CEO, Amanda Covo, put it even more plainly: “Our work is to replicate within Teneo what the Federalist Society accomplished. What Leonard and others were able to do within law, we’ll now do in finance and business and media and technology and beyond.” While the membership list is kept pretty hidden, it’s known to include JD Vance as a documented member — and Vivek Ramaswamy and Erik Prince (Betsy DeVos’s brother) have both spoken at its annual retreat.

Teneo was founded in 2008 by a venture capitalist named Evan Baehr and a young lawyer you may have heard of since — Josh Hawley, now a U.S. Senator. The same Hawley once photographed with his fist raised, cheering on the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6th, before being filmed sprinting away once they actually got inside.

Thiel was the one who planted the seed, lamenting to Baehr that conservatives had nothing like the Federalist Society for finance, media, and tech. Leonard Leo runs it now and uses DonorsTrust to fund it. You may remember Leo from the Federalist Society — and as the person fundraising and moving money through various PACs and Super PACs that eventually created the 6-3 Conservative majority on the Supreme Court. U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island posted it plainly on X: “He’s the guy in this painting with Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo, and their kept justice, Clarence Thomas. A copy is visible in Noem’s swearing-in photo. Such a cozy little crew.”

At this point it feels like every book I’ve ever read about politics, dark money, the Koch Brothers, is coming together in one rabbit hole. It’s getting crowded and I’m going to need more string for the wall.

Why don’t you take a breath and get a fresh cup of coffee or a cocktail because I’m not done yet.

Peter Thiel has bankrolled JD Vance’s entire career — gave him a job, funded his venture capital fund, and most recently poured $15 million into a pro-Vance Senate PAC.

He joins a long line of what I call the “Sons of Birchers” — people whose parents were actual members of the John Birch Society, or who are peers or otherwise adjacent. Koch, Bradley, DeVos — they also fund Teneo. Perhaps you’ve heard Whitehouse refer to DonorsTrust as the Dark Money ATM.

Thiel’s since moved to Argentina — citing California wealth taxes, AI risk, and fear of nuclear war. Make of that what you will.

This work is tedious yet also fascinating, but there are likely better ways to spend my time. Still it’s important - we need to know who is writing checks and who is cashing them and whose needs are being put of ours. Because it’s not just happening at the federal level, where the Supreme Court has already been captured. It’s also happening in Ohio — and we’ve been captured too.

Another of our Big Money Boys is Marc Andreessen, yet another tech billionaire with money to spare. And that’s mostly his role, to just bankroll everything. He scales the money, to the tune of about $115 million plus. That we know of. So far.

In case you’re curious, his net worth is estimated at around $2 billion. So $115 million is roughly 6% of what he’s worth. Pocket change, by his math.

Andreessen’s fund, a16z, heavily funded Fairshake, the crypto industry’s super PAC.

The industry spent $40 million to unseat Sherrod Brown, who was Chair of the Senate Banking Committee and none too keen on crypto remaining free to do as they please without regulation.

So the industry pooled their Bitcoins and ran ads nonstop and we ended up with Bernie Moreno as US Senator from the (once) great state of Ohio. Yes, one of the Ohio Backroom Boys who made some money as a car dealer but even more investing in blockchain technology. And then — wait for it — Moreno got a seat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Elected officials are cogs in this machine. If you don’t like one, buy another one and drop him in the same spot.

OK, by now, you’re probably distracted by “a16z” and wondering if that’s another Lord of the Rings reference these guys seem to love. Well, it’s actually — Andreessen starts with an A, Horowitz ends with a Z, and there are 16 letters in between. I hope they didn’t pay good money for that.

Not that they can’t afford it.

Earlier this month, John O’Farrell — a16z’s first general partner — published his critique a full year after he resigned from a16z. He described the PAC spending as designed to “intimidate politicians” and as “toxic to our democracy.”

Guess it didn’t work with Sherrod Brown. He’s running again for the seat that Jon Husted (another of our Ohio Backroom Boys) was appointed to by Gov. DeWine. And here we are back in Ohio again.

You’d think after all of this, I’d be ready to find my way out of the rabbit hole. Nope, not yet. I had to ask just one more question. Back to the FEC filing to see who exactly is on the contributors list to Ramaswamy’s campaign. I expected to find Thiel or Andreessen. They weren’t there.

I found a name I didn’t recognize. Cascarilla.

Charles Cascarilla is the CEO of Paxos — a stablecoin company, meaning crypto. The day Ramaswamy won the primary, May 5th, Cascarilla gave the maximum contribution of $16,615. Six more donors connected to World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, gave the same maximum amount — most on May 5th, two more the next morning. Seven donors, seven maximum checks, $116,305 total. The single biggest cluster of max-out gifts in the post-primary report.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. TiffinOhio.net pulled the same filing and landed on the same cluster, the same names, the same roughly $116,000.

All of them have crypto connections. As does Ramaswamy, whose stated goal is to steer Ohio’s public pension funds into Bitcoin — he’s already on record calling House Bill 18, the bill that would let the state treasurer do exactly that, “a thoughtful & powerful bill.” They just can’t help themselves. Not when there’s more of our money to be had.

It feels like a merry-go-round — the ride is the same, but the people riding the horses change. Still it goes round and round. The Big Money Boys buy the policies and the tax breaks they want. The Enablers — the Backroom Boys, and every legislator who took the check and voted the way they were told — make sure they get them.

The rest of us are too busy with life and don’t even know there is a merry-go-round, let alone have the money to ride it. So we go on with life, and they keep taking rides on the merry-go-round and walking away with our tax dollars, our assets — and leave behind the politicians who tell us there simply isn’t enough money to give us what we need. Affordable healthcare. Affordable housing. Affordable childcare.

So now that you have all of this information, what do you do with it? Especially since it’s a lot and will be hard to explain to others.

The Republicans have had single party control of this state for the past 15 years, and 28 of the last 35. What does that look like? They have a majority or supermajority of the state house, state senate, state Supreme Court, the governor’s mansion, Secretary of State (who oversees elections), Attorney General (who decides who gets investigated, let alone prosecuted) and the “watchdogs”, Auditor and Treasurer.

There are no checks and balances. No guardrails. No one to say enough is enough. And that is true as long as everyone goes about their daily life ignoring politics because it is so toxic and negative.

But what if you share this with anyone and everyone you know in Ohio? What if those people finally understood that the people they voted for to take care of things have been captured?

If they aren’t going to look out for us, why should we look out for them — or continue to look the other way? It’s time to vote them out. All the way down the ballot. And not with your typical party line, team loyalty, straight ticket vote.

In Ohio, the supermajority happens to be Republican. The Democrats can’t fix this problem by themselves. It is going to take Republicans to make a different choice. Not switching teams. Just stopping to ask if the person on the ballot has actually earned the vote, or just inherited it. Your vote is valuable, don’t just give it to someone who doesn’t deserve it.

And Democrats need to start asking if we need to make similar hard choices. Because I’m convinced that the old guard of our party is happier with minority power than no power at all — because at least they still get the perks and the prominence. Our primary is over so the window is closed — for now, but if they don’t get it together soon, November could get really interesting, and not in a good way.

So between now and November, we do some homework. We learn who our state house and state senate representatives are right now, and who is challenging them. If you get an invite to a house party or fundraiser, you go, and you talk to the candidate and share your concerns. If a canvasser knocks on your door, you listen and have a meaningful conversation. If someone asks for volunteers, you sign up.

People say their vote doesn’t matter. I say if that were true, then why are so many, including our Big Money Boys, willing to spend hundreds of millions trying to influence it?

So if we are still able. If they haven’t suppressed our votes even more between now and then, we have one last action to take on or before November 3rd.

We vote.

TG’s Train of Thought is exactly what it sounds like —- wherever my mind takes me about the news, politics, life’s every day happenings, or down whatever rabbit hole — it lands here. I’m a recovering Congressional candidate (2018 - OH10), precinct captain in Greene County which is pretty red, so that makes me a random blueberry in a cherry pie. I say the things no one else wants to say out loud.