Rubber match
How important was Akron, Ohio to the growth of this country? During the first two decades of the last century, it was the fastest growing city in America, a boom riding on B.F. Goodrich, Firestone, and Goodyear Tires, which is still headquartered there. To drive the point home, the Akron Rubber Worker Statue, which is pretty awesome and a fairly recent addition, welcomes you downtown.
My journey starts off a bit flat in my driveway in Belmont, and I’m a little baffled at how the rear passenger tire on my car went quickly totally so. I had just returned home with Willa from the dog park, barely enough time for my imagined mortal enemy to slash and dash.
Back in the day a quick change to a full spare was possible by the normal human, a skill I believe I could still execute, but not so today. A roadside specialist is dispatched at the insistence of my owners manual and an inflatable spare is fitted, a wide flat metal piece visible in the flat one when removed. My true mortal enemy, happenstance, wins again!!
Luckily I have access to another car with four fully inflated Goodyears, and I’m west on I-90, all the way to Ohio, with a stop in Utica, NY.
Blu-Tique, a Tribute Portfolio Hotel, is next to the Akron Summit County Public Library, which will host the night’s Secretary of State debate between Democrats Alison Russo, the term limited House Minority Leader, and Bryan Hambley, the leukemia doctor I first met at the Republican Convention in 2016, there to help him and his wife Jana, also a doctor, in support of Muslim doctors under assault by the recently crowned nominee, Donald Trump.
Since then Bryan has thrown himself into politics, first in the failed ballot measure to restrict gerrymandering, and given that the Secretary of State, a Republican, approved the purposely confusing language of the petition, into looking at running for that office himself.
We met at his house in Loveland, just north of Cincinnati in March of 2025 to talk through doing just that. I write about the meeting in How the Democrats Lost America in a chapter called “Tilting at Windmills.” Ha! But the joke may be on me. I’ve talked to him from time to time and he’s hitting all the important marks for a political outsider. He’s raised almost a million dollars. He has insider endorsements. He’s got a good, young, campaign team that works hard, as he does, and he’s been everywhere in the state, at county and city committee meetings or to any willing group gathered in a neighborhood living room. He is not beaten down by the process and tells me he loves it.
The library auditorium is surgery room cold, causing the hundred or so attendees keep their coats on, but recent polls showing the Democratic nominee for governor Dr. Amy Acton ahead of Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, who is already airing TV ads, warms the pre-debate discussion.
But this evening is a down ballot affair, and most voters generally have little awareness of who or what a secretary of state is. Marco Rubio? But those attending from the Summit County Progressives are acutely aware of the stakes, as the next State’s Secretary will sign off on the next election maps. And for Democratic activists in attendance the question boils down to experience vs vision. Alison makes the case that she is best prepared to understand the intricacies of the politics of maps and Gerrymandering. It’s the same case the longest serving Secretary of State in the country is making, Bill Galvin back home in Massachusetts, who cleared the prospective competition with the same argument.
Bryan makes points trying to elevate the discussion, saying that a lot of people in Ohio have been left behind and the Democrats need to connect with them. His campaign slogan is “Care for Ohio”, a leukemia doctor who took his Cincinnati cancer program from last in the state to the top 10% in the country. I’m struck that the candidates running for governor have no elective experience and voters seem fine with that, but Alison is hinging her campaign for this office on the need of it.
I have some experience with this phenomenon. Back in 2006 I helped Tim Murray run for Lt. Governor of Massachusetts and our poll showed people wanted someone with experience for the job, which Tim had as the Mayor of Worcester. But the same poll showed voters wanted an outsider, new blood and not a politician, for governor. Our pollster explained that voters have developed opinions of what they want from the Chief Executive of the state but have little understanding of the offices below governor, so default to looking for experience in some elective office.
The twenty nine members of the Summit Progressives have a straw poll after and vote 15 for Bryan and 14 for Alison. A recognition, perhaps, that Democrats want someone who knows the nuts and bolts of how to fight assaults on voting rights AND also understands the need to connect with those it has not been reaching for years. It’s been a long time since the Democrats elected someone to a state Executive office here. We value experience but Ohio just voted out Sherrod Brown as their senator, and you can’t beat his experience. But they did anyway. And if voters aren’t persuaded by experience, what do they want?
Back at the hotel, a former cigar factory where the current restaurant was an actual cigar bar where the men would hang “while their wives shopped” and the salesmen booked sales from the upstairs offices, Jane juggles her restaurant job with her day one spent as a realtor, but it’s a tough business. You have to sell a lot of three hundred thousand dollar houses to make a living just doing that, and there isn’t a lot for sale. It’s not like the east coast where the available stock may be the same but the price means you only have to sell a few to make your year.
But she’s riding a high tonight, looking forward to time off, even with the sacrifice of lost pay for that time, to celebrate her daughter’s graduation from the University of Cincinnati, in both the art of and the business of interior design. Her daughter’s Dad moved “deliberately” three hours away when they split, but he’ll be back for the ceremony.
She wants her daughter to take some time before looking for a job, some time Jane can take to think what her next move might be. She mentions South Carolina and a long term guest of the hotel says maybe real estate would be more lucrative there. But that’s tough, different rules and starting over. Jane seems ready for a clean break. New place, new job. This chapter of her life successfully concluded, her daughter launched in life.
Having had dinner in the hotel with Bryan and his campaign team after the debate I’m ready to try something different and walk to Crave near the stadium for the Akron RubberDucks, the double A Cleveland affiliate, with a younger, more diverse an louder clientele.
The bartender tells me he’s a registered Republican but really a Democrat who pulled a Republican ballot to vote against a senate candidate who he thought was too extreme. He has never heard of Bryan or Alison. He introduces me to the other bartender, the “daughter of the former mayor.” I say “Horrigan?” She nods. “The Akron Rubber Worker Statue!”
The Ohio primary will be held on May 5th. Let’s go Bryan!