Observations of the 2025 Cincinnati Election Cycle - Democratic Party Domination Edition

The 2025 Cincinnati Elections were historic dominating victories for the Democratic Party.  The wins came in the City Council and Mayoral races.  I must admit I was astonished by the Council election massive victory.  Let me just repeat that: MASSIVE VICTORY.  Based on the unofficial final results the 10th place finisher, Republican Liz Keating, was 9,163 votes away from a seat on council.  That is far greater than both 2021 and 2023.  It is 2.4 times greater than the largest victory since 1989 (which was in 2023 when Keating lost previously.)

The 11th place loser, Republican Chris Smitherman, was far worse. He was 16,194 votes behind the 9th place Democratic winner, Ryan James. Smitherman phoned in his campaign and tried to rely on name recognition and quiet Republican donations.  Smitherman was beat in most of the predominantly black neighborhoods by former council member Laketa Cole who finished 12th.  The only reason Smitherman did better than Charter endorsed Cole was because he got Republican support.

I hope this marks the end of Smitherman's political hopes in the City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.  He has been soundly defeated and his Trumpist views and supporters certainly have destroyed the support he thought he still had.

Smitherman fell victim to two things: 1) a foolish belief that Cincinnati is the same as it was in 2013-2017 and 2) an arrogance fueled ego. The latter is one of his many flaws, but the foolish belief about Cincinnati was shared by many, many Republicans, Charterites, and Moderates.  They still think that West Price Hill and Westwood have some hidden Republican gold plated votes that could be driven out if just the right levels of fear, panic, and racism were floated into the news media.

The way that both the Republicans and the Charter Party pushed the false stories about crime in Cincinnati was despicable. Video footage of white people being assaulted by black people got the racist views of suburban and rural zealots out into social media from all over the Tri-State area and nationally.  I still enjoying thinking about how many ignorant dolts thought they could vote for Mayor of Cincinnati while living in Green Township or Butler County.

Cincinnati's local news media continues to show it does not serve the community. Drama and conflict drove much of the coverage of the election, so any time they can get a national audience, they fluffed up the story to get more eyeballs.  Additionally, I feel there is a clear bias against the local Democratic Party.  There are those with ideological biases, but that is not the core failure that occurred.  The first failure was in how local media was manipulated by the Republicans and Charterites.  The media allowed itself to be suckered into a small group of NIMBYs in Hyde Park that were organized and funded, but did not represent big groups.  This was obviously after the Mayoral Primary in May, but they continued to allow the group, a political front for Republicans and their Charter Party Proxies, to have an elevated status with automatic access to coverage and time.  This was reused over the summer as Republicans/Charter were able to get news articles pushing their agenda published repeatedly.  All the while, the Dems were painted as the problem, without equal access and treatment.

The other main failure of the local media is in the desire to have non-Democrats on City Council. There are members of the local media who are bored and were hoping one or two non-Dems were elected and provide opportunities for Grandstanding and conflict to arise. This comes in the form of the accepted opinion within the media that one party government is bad and should not occur.  They will spout this opinion, presented as fact, all the while ignoring the super majority of Republicans running the State of Ohio. This is on top of the varied other cities, villages, townships and other counties that have and have had Republican single party governments for decades.  For Cincinnati it is somehow bad and worth pontificating on, but when Republicans do it, we don't get a peep about it. This is the same type of bias against Democrats on a national level. Democrats are expected to live up to altruistic ideals while Republicans break laws, ethics, and every norm established, but are not expected to be good, so we get a shrug.  This attitude runs down to local politics as well.

Another fact that every member of media knew: Corey Bowman was NEVER a serious candidate for Mayor, but we were treated to him as a credible candidate for months.  Only at the end of the campaign did we get coverage of his business tax problems. The magical story about an alleged shooting of a window at his church which with a wave a wand and little hocus pocus vanished from the discourse without any follow-up story with the campaign answering questions about the clearly fishy story.

It was also very disappointing to see more than one local opinion writer shrug off this monumental Dem win as just a reaction to Trump.  That is more bias.  Keating and Smitherman lost big time, so the reason they picked was Trump.  The Democratic Party worked hard.  Local people voted against the Republican Party and what the Republican candidates were doing.  Keating and Smitherman both were falsely overstating crime as the center of a panic and fear platform.  There were no substantive issues they professed in their last minute opportunity to exploit crime campaigns. There ONLY issue was to be against the Democratic Party.  They were playing to the worst of the Republican/Conservative mindset, but they get a pass because they are liked by the local media. I don't know what they will tell those who want to get into power in the City at this point.  I fear it will be to just follow along with a Trump brand Fascism that will get pushed by a Republican Governor that will seek revenge on Cites that do not bend the knee to the Republican's and their minions.

Speaking of minions, I am going to close out this blog post with a giant FUCK YOU to John Cranley and his action against the Cincinnati Democratic Party with his support of Chris Smitherman.  Cranley should be ashamed for supporting the Republican. I hope Cranley remains in the private sector and if he wants to jump ship to the Trump Party, I do not think he will be missed.