On front porches in a new 34th District, Weinstein and Bigham hear very different concerns

Republicans are ready to reclaim the old 37th Ohio House District in northeastern Summit County, which has largely been redrawn into the new 34th House District on the November ballot.

“I would say it's the most competitive race in the state of Ohio right now,” said Beth Bigham, R-Hudson, who’s again challenging incumbent Rep. Casey Weinstein, D-Hudson.

Democrats say Republicans unfairly gerrymandered the new Statehouse map this year, violating the will of the 74% of Ohio voters who approved a state constitutional amendment to “end the partisan process for drawing congressional districts.”

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But while Republicans remade the maps in their favor, they may have inadvertently given Weinstein a safer district to defend — a district Republicans have been gunning for since Weinstein flipped it for Democrats in 2018.

Even Bigham agrees that the new district, which now includes all of Cuyahoga Falls, has tilted toward Democrats in recent elections. Internal polling and recent election results have Weinstein and, due to split ticket voting, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine ahead in the suburban district.

In-depth:What the candidates for Ohio's 34th House District have done and what they'd do if elected

Weinstein did better in 2020 than his first Statehouse victory in 2018. His get-out-the-vote effort would get the most traction driving turnout from Democrats in the new Cuyahoga Falls battleground. And Bigham is making the case with more conservative voters who dominate Stow and Hudson in local elections.

But both need the majority of voters in the political middle to win.

Tight race between Weinsten and Bigham is getting tighter, more expensive

Three factors point to a tightening race.

Of the 27,352 voters with a party affiliation on their registration status, 16.1% are Democrats and 16.4% are Republicans — a difference of only 282 votes. The race will be decided, instead, by the side that can turn out more of their base and persuade enough of the nearly 57,000 unaffiliated voters living in the district.

Despite Weinstein's better showing in 2020, lower turnout midterms historically favor conservatives, especially with concerns over the low approval rating of the Democrat in the White House.

Finally, Republicans continue to hammer Democrats on inflation. Likely midterm voters in Ohio are twice as likely to prioritize the economy over threats to democracy or abortion, according to polling this month by Suffolk University and the USA TODAY Network, which includes the Akron Beacon Journal.

Weinstein is busy reminding voters that he’s the worker-endorsed candidate. He's got the backing of every major trade, police, firefighter and teacher union in the state. And his campaign is pulling in nearly four times the donations with $192,000 on hand compared to Bigham’s $75,000, as of the Sept. 9 filing.

"I will never apologize for having support from public safety workers, from teachers, from labor groups," Weinstein said in response to criticism from Bigham that his campaign is funded by union political action committees. "I am pro-worker. I am pro-teacher. And I am very proud of the fact that they have supported me time and again."

Put another way, no Republican or Democrat running for an Ohio House seat in Summit County has raised more this year than Weinstein — an indication of how doggedly Democrats will fight to defend their recent gain.

In her first challenge, Bigham trailed far behind Weinstein in political donations until the Ohio Republican Party pumped $105,000 into her campaign in the last two weeks of the 2020 election — a cash infusion that accounted for 1 in 3 dollars she raised that election.

And she's again trailing.

But Bigham has conservative friends in Columbus ready to “level the playing field,” as Steve Caraway with the Ohio House Republican Alliance characterized a "significant" investment coming her way this month. OHRA is a fund fed by incumbent Republicans and led by donations from GOP House Speaker Bob Cupp’s campaign. Along with helping Bigham into office, Caraway said OHRA is prepared in Summit County to help defend incumbents Bob Young of Green and Bill Roemer of Richfield, who each have given $10,000 or more to the fund this year.

And Americans for Prosperity, a dark money group founded in 2004 by industrialists David and Charles Koch, is already spending to get Bigham elected.

Democrats, meanwhile, have tried for months to keep liberal voters fired up over two issues: the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capital and conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning a national guarantee to abortion, which Ohio Republicans swiftly moved to criminalize providers.

What the new 34th District looks like

The old 37^th District — which Weinstein represents today — includes Twinsburg, Macedonia and the northeastern corner of Summit County. Reconfigured as the 34^th, the new Statehouse district — which the winner would represent come January — drops Twinsburg, Macedonia and other communities while picking up 80% of Cuyahoga Falls.

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A more compact 34th now neatly covers all of Cuyahoga Falls, Hudson, Stow and nearly 5,900 registered voters in the tips of Northwest Akron. The Akron precincts favor Weinstein. But Stow, Hudson and Cuyahoga Falls — and the 78,445 registered voters in them — give Republicans hope for victory in a local election.

Joe Biden did better than Hillary Clinton in Stow, Hudson and Cuyahoga Falls. That factored into political observers giving Weinstein an early advantage in this, his fourth Statehouse race.

After losing in 2016 to incumbent Kristina Roegner, R-Hudson, Weinstein caught Republicans off guard by flipping the district in 2018 when a term-limited Roegner moved to the Ohio Senate. That year in the sixth-closest Statehouse race in the state, Weinstein beat Mike Rasor, R-Stow, by a mere 707 of the 56,427 votes cast.

Higher 2020 turnout driven by enthusiasm from suburban Democrats helped Weinstein beat Bigham in their first showing by 2,013 votes. Though he did better than two years earlier, Weinstein won with just 51.4% of the vote. And general election turnout this year could more closely track 2018 when, despite narrowly winning the district, Weinstein lost Hudson and Stow by about 500 votes each. (Observers also expect less of the pandemic-era mail-in voting that surged in 2020 when Weinstein managed to tie Bigham in Stow and lose Hudson by only 211 votes.)

"We ran a great campaign last time," said Bigham. "We lost by less than 3%. It was a tough year with certain elements on the ballot, a presidential year. And so, it's a different race this time. And we're not running in the middle of COVID where people are trying to call me Bubonic Beth."

Bigham went to great lengths in 2020 to ease public health concerns about her door-knocking, even posting on her website that her volunteers went straight home to wash their hands and shower. This time, she's not cowing to criticism.

She's containing costs to stretch her limited resources while Weinstein's fundraising allowed him this summer to hire a small team of teenagers at $15 per hour each to make a first round of door-knocking in new Cuyahoga Falls territory.

Weinstein’s campaign is still in “persuasion” mode, he said while knocking on a few more doors last week before picking up his daughter from school. Like his opponent targeting undecided voters, he visited Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters alike. He doesn’t knock but leaves flyers at homes marked “no soliciting.” And he doesn’t shy from Republican yard signs — unless they carry his opponent’s name.

“I try to be respectful of their wishes,” he said of skipping yards with red Bigham signs.

What are top concerns for voters?

The candidates are knocking on doors in the same communities and hearing very different issues, including less prominent concerns their respective political parties are amplifying in the midterms.

“I think we're up against extremism,” said Weinstein, echoing fears of a right-wing agenda that goes further than denying the legitimacy of elections or attempting to overturn them.

Bigham most often hears frustrations about the rising price of goods with year-over-year inflation reaching a 41-year high this summer.

In a poll of 500 likely midterm voters released Monday, Suffolk University and the USA TODAY Network, of which the Beacon Journal is a member, asked voters to pick one of five top concerns they identified a month earlier. Nearly 44% said the economy/inflation; 19.4% said threats to democracy; and 18.8% said abortion.

Bigham’s neighbor owns a restaurant that, like other businesses, is dealing with higher food, labor, storage, energy and utility costs.

“I hear from those small business owners that they're really hurting, and all that stuff gets passed on to the end consumer,” she said. “So that's how we end up paying $15 for a taco and $12 for a drink.”

Weinstein tacks the economy at the end of a long list of concerns that start with extremism.

“People are concerned about public schools, public education. They're concerned about first responders and making sure we have funding coming to local governments. And yeah, the economy, for sure,” he said.

He’d rather talk about standing against Holocaust deniers, “against targeting LGBT kids, against invasions of privacy into women's health care decisions. I think we live in in stark times. We’re going into a lame duck session where the president of the Senate has already said they're going to push through an abortion ban.”

Bigham talked about a woman who stopped her on the street after shots fired from a nearby bar flew by her home. Republicans are hammering Democrats on public safety, trying to paint police union-endorsed candidates like Weinstein as weak on crime and sentencing.

But only 3% of survey respondents picked public safety as their top concern when Suffolk University and USA TODAY polled them on a broader list of 11 issues in September. The poll didn't ask about crime this month as Republicans stayed on message with a flurry of mailers blasting Democrats across the state for supporting cash bail reform, which some Republicans have supported, or defunding the police, which Weinstein and other Democrats backed by the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police have never embraced in the General Assembly.

Reach reporter Doug Livingston at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3792.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Ohio 34th House candidates Casey Weinstein, Beth Bigham campaign