YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Republican Sen. Rob Portman’s retirement announcement Monday didn’t just send shock waves throughout the halls of the U.S. Capitol. Ohioans said they said were blindsided as well.
But perhaps they should not have been, given few politicians in Washington have any motivation to work together — something Portman said in his announcement he found untenable.
“It has gotten harder and harder to break through the partisan gridlock and make progress on substantive policy, and that has contributed to my decision,” said the two-term senator who was up for reelection in the 2022 midterm elections.
Portman first ran and won in 2010, at the height of the Tea Party movement. He won again in 2016, running with then-candidate Donald Trump at the top of the ticket. Like Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of neighboring Pennsylvania, he will bow out after serving two terms.
Both Ohio and Pennsylvania are considered critical states in both presidential and midterm election cycles. No Republican has ever won the presidency without Ohio, and Pennsylvania proved decisive for both Trump and President Biden. Ohio is the more Republican of the two — indeed, Trump’s outsize victories there made it resemble a red state.
Toomey and Portman are on the way out as both parties realign and struggle to understand who their core voters are.
Here in Ohio, GOP base strength has gone from more college-educated counties like Franklin in suburban Columbus to Rust Belt blue-collar counties such as Mahoning and Trumbull.
Youngstown State political science Professor Paul Sracic said he was one of those Ohioans surprised by Portman’s announcement, “But maybe I shouldn’t have been.”
Portman, like his counterpart to the Southeast, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, is what Sracic said he is beginning to call a legacy politician.
Like Manchin, who is often at odds within his own party’s Leftward shift, Portman was elected by a Republican Party that is quickly going out of existence.
Sracic said to think of politicians like the late George Voinovich. “Voinovich was conservative, but not a bomb-thrower,” he said. “He had a deep knowledge of government, having served as mayor of Cleveland before going on to become governor and then senator.”
Portman is similar, having had a long career in government that included stints in both the House of Representatives and in the George W. Bush White House.
“Career politicians are not what the increasingly Jacksonian Republican base is looking for anymore,” said Sracic.
They are also not looking for economic conservatives who care about budget deficits and free trade.
Republicans like Portman, a former OMB director and U.S. trade representative, are rapidly losing their natural home in the GOP. Portman and Toomey, both mild-mannered apostles of free trade and critics of excessive government spending, have seen their party move in a very different direction in the Trump era.
Dave Myhal, who was Portman’s fundraiser in 2010, said he was also caught off guard by the announcement, a long time Columbus based Ohio Republican strategist says the big thing that changes about this race is that the amount of money that will now pour in from the Democrats to flip this seat.
“That is the big dynamic change. When Portman was on the ballot, all the big, Democrat money was focused on places like Pennsylvania,” Myhal explained. “They weren’t going to dump a ton of money here because they had other opportunities to flip a seat.”
That will change now, Myhal said. “Democrats are going to look at this race seriously, which means money will start flowing into it,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily change voters’ minds, but Trump won by 8 points, and no money was spent in Ohio.”
Trump won Ohio twice. So did Barack Obama.
Myhal mentioned several Republicans and Democrats who are going to scramble to consider a run for the open seat for their party’s nomination — current state Attorney General David Yost, Rep. Jim Jordan, Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, former Ohio treasurer Josh Mandel, and author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance.
On the Democrat side, it was all about Trumbull County congressman Tim Ryan, who tweeted out Monday afternoon he was “overwhelmed by supporters who are reaching out to encourage me to run for Senate. I haven’t made a decision yet but I’m looking seriously at it.”
As far as Portman goes, Sracic says, at least in the immediate future, it frees him from political considerations when voting on the Trump impeachment charges.
“Voting for the charges would have invited a strong primary challenge in 2022, but now that is irrelevant,” he said.
Sracic says Portman dropping out has a bigger significance than whether or not Republicans hold the seat in the Senate. The extinction of the centrist from both parties in the chamber hasn’t completely played itself out quite yet.
