In late October, a few weeks before the election that would send him to Congress, retired NFL player Anthony Gonzalez informed an Ohio pastor that he wanted to check out the church’s food pantry distribution center. A former wide receiver for Ohio State University and the Indianapolis Colts, Gonzalez stopped by the Wooster Hope Center on a Wednesday afternoon, put on a sweatshirt, and hauled food for two hours to the cars and trucks of the working poor.
Richard Frazier, a nondenominational pastor who’s been running the food pantry for about seven years, saw something different in Gonzalez. “First, he wasn’t there to just shake hands and do a photo-op,” Frazier says. “He worked alongside our volunteers and acted like he was one of them. In fact, he didn’t even call up any media to say he was going to be there. I had to call the local paper to come by because I thought it might help us get more donations.”
“You couldn’t even tell, unless he told you, he was running for Congress,” Frazier continues. “He repeated that he was there to learn about what we do and how we operate. And that maybe he could be helpful to us in the future.”
“He never mentioned anything about Republicans or Democrats,” Frazier adds. “I never felt like he was trying to sell me something. He seemed very much compassionate and down-to-earth. What I got from him is that he thinks all of us should use our intellect and the need to care about others as a way to evolve. To bring good ideas together, not separate people from good ideas.”
A novice politician in his first campaign, Anthony Gonzalez, 34, easily won Ohio’s 16th Congressional District and will start his term in January. It was a seat already held by a Republican and a district Donald Trump won in 2016, so not the sort of victory to make a lot of news. Yet the district is also an agglomeration of suburbs—of Cleveland, Akron, and Canton—and many Republicans struggled in the suburbs this year.
“White, suburban women are ‘fleeing the Trump party’ ” ran a fairly typical headline going into the midterms. Of course, those stories tended not to drill down to specific districts. About 40 percent of the votes in Gonzalez’s heavily gerrymandered district came from the western suburbs of Cuyahoga County, and Hillary Clinton did take two-thirds of the votes in that county in the 2016 election. However, it’s the upper-middle-class and white side of the county, with a history of voting GOP, that’s drawn into the 16th District.
But Gonzalez’s 57-43 margin came down to more than a favorable district. He distanced himself from President Donald Trump and the GOP on occasion, especially during the primary. He called the budget bill passed by the Republican-led Congress “a complete disaster” and described himself as “embarrassed by the Republican party.” He said he wanted to use “rainy day fund” taxpayer money in Ohio for opioid addiction treatment.
And when asked by Canton Repository editors if the office of the presidency was above scrutiny by the special counsel, Gonzalez sounded more like Adam Schiff than Jim Jordan: “No, it’s not,” Gonzalez said. “Nobody in the country is above the law.”
But Gonzalez is far from being a RINO who changes his positions based on the fashions of the day. His father is a Cuban immigrant, yet he supports a border wall and “merit-based” standards on immigration. He blasts former president Barack Obama on his economic policies and blames him for the decline of manufacturing in the Midwest. And he thinks Obamacare needs to be repealed completely.
Gonzalez’s father, Eduardo, fled to America from Fidel’s Castro’s Cuba in 1961 and today owns a steel processing factory group based in Cleveland. The congressman-elect has backed the Trump tariffs on steel but was against Trump’s restricting travel to Cuba after the Obama administration opened it up. His father has been somewhat politically active in the Cleveland area, sponsoring events “to promote federal immigration reform and local ‘immigrant-friendly’ cities.” Eduardo, as it happens, played football in the early ’70s for the University of Michigan, Ohio State’s archrival. Ohio families can break up over such splits. What father and son have in common, though, is that both weighed in at under 200 pounds and less than six feet—little guys who played against the big boys.
So what kind of Republican is Anthony Gonzalez? In some ways he may be the sort of hard-to-categorize talent the party will need in the post-Trump world. The key issues, he tells The Weekly Standard, are “generational challenges that I haven’t seen much thinking on at the congressional level.”
“We really need to emphasize that we are about everyone getting that opportunity to participate in the American dream,” he says, admitting Republicans have sometimes not taken that goal into communities they avoid because of age and race differences. “We have an educational system that is about as outdated as it can be,” he continues. “Is it an educational system that prepares students to work in an economy that is disrupted and changes continually? Of course not.”
“What we really need to do in this country is to find a way to come together, and even though we might sometimes disagree, we need to never let that move into hate. Unless we heal that cultural divide, we won’t get anywhere near the policy decisions.”
The reason Gonzalez ran for Congress has less to do with healing cultural divides and more to do with a sudden opportunity presenting itself. He was born and raised in Cleveland, graduated from Ohio State with a degree in philosophy in 2007, was an Academic All-American, and then was drafted in the first round by the Colts. He played well his first few years, but knee injuries put him out of action more often than not and he retired in 2012. He decided to get an MBA at Stanford and began working as the chief operating officer for an educational technology development company in San Francisco.
The political door opened when Rep. Jim Renacci, who had held the 16th District seat for four terms starting in 2010, announced in January he was running for the Ohio Senate seat held by Democrat Sherrod Brown. Renacci lost to Brown, but his Senate bid opened up the House seat. Gonzalez, never previously mentioned as a possible candidate, saw a unique opportunity “where the stars started to align.” He was recently married, and his wife was pregnant with their first child. So they moved back to the Cleveland area and took up residence in the open district.
From the beginning, Gonzalez seemed to know how the political campaign game was played, even though he had no experience with it. His opponent in the Republican primary was Christina Hagan, 29, an Ohio house representative whose family has a long history in Ohio politics. She got the endorsement of Freedom Caucus members Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, as well as backing from Steve Bannon acolyte Sebastian Gorka and short-term White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
That front-and-center, pro-Trump message ended up hurting her more than it helped, and it also opened up an opportunity for Gonzalez. He could create a contrast by pursuing the endorsements of suburban mayors, middle-of-the-road GOP state legislators, and main street business leaders. The Trump-praising Hagan did well in the district’s outlying rural areas but not so well in the more populous suburbs. Gonzalez won the May primary 53-41.
Hagan “tried to be Trump personified, and Gonzalez took a different tack, one where he came off as himself and not someone else,” says Robert Alexander, a political science professor at Ohio Northern University. “She wasn’t compelling enough being the Trump candidate, and I think in some of the Midwest swing states [voters think] that less Trump might be better going forward. Anthony Gonzalez seems to have figured that part out.”
And “that part” is pretty basic politics. “People in this area are not very concerned about Russian collusion or journalists being killed or tweets about the media,” says North Canton mayor David Held, who backed Gonzalez. “They think about having their toilets flushing properly and streets plowed of snow, safety and security, good jobs. Sometimes the East Coast media thinks we are stupid for thinking that way. We aren’t. Gonzalez understood that.”
Gonzalez didn’t pop off against Trump; he mostly just kept quiet about the president. That tactic appeared to open the fundraising doors, bringing $1.8 million into his campaign (about five times as much as his two opponents). It was enough to crush both Hagan in the primary and Democrat Susan Moran Palmer in the general election.
Of course, Gonzalez had one undeniable asset not available to most candidates: his fame as a former pro athlete and Buckeye star. Name recognition matters in the voting booth, and Ohio State fans still talk about “The Catch”—Gonzalez’s leaping, less-than-a-minute-left-in-the-game reception in a victory over Michigan in 2005. In most of his ads, he appeared either in scarlet and gray football uniforms or in a factory hard hat. Both of those play well in Ohio.
Will Gonzalez use his sports background as a way to move Congress on his generational policy issues? It is hard to see him doing so, as he does not seem to play up his short pro-football career as his calling card in life. In the past, ex-athletes like Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley made a huge splash with their sports fame, using it to open doors and entertain presidential aspirations. But most ex-jocks—think Dave Bing, Steve Largent, Jim Ryun, Heath Shuler, Jim Bunning—have had relatively nondescript political careers.
Gonzalez’s sports fame might even have become a political liability had he not deftly sidestepped the great NFL controversy of the year. When President Trump railed against NFL players who kneel during the national anthem and said team owners should fire them, Gonzalez quietly posted a message on his Facebook page that said hearing the national anthem at games made him realize “how lucky I am to be an American, endowed with all the freedoms that she gives us.”
When Trump insulted then-Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James on Twitter for making political comments, and Fox News host Laura Ingraham told James and other athletes to “Keep the political comments to yourselves. . . . Shut up and dribble,” the sports world—athletes, reporters, and many team owners—was up in arms. Gonzalez had nothing to say.
This deft political touch would be impressive in a veteran candidate. Along with his astute assessment of the lay of the land in the 2018 midterms, it shows that Gonzalez has real skills for his new game.
The political media intelligentsia kept talking about a “blue wave,” but they didn’t quite get the geography of how the wave would break. It crested impressively on the coasts but dwindled as it moved inland.
Of the 36 House seats that flipped for Democrats (not counting the 4 Pennsylvania flips aided by a court-ordered redistricting), 18 were in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Maine, California, and Washington, all coastal states that voted for Clinton and will likely go for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020.
In the Midwestern states that will be in play and critical in the 2020 presidential election—Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan, notably—the wave is harder to detect. In Ohio and Wisconsin, there were no party changes in any House districts. In Michigan, two House seats (out of 14) changed from Republican to Democrat, but both were in the Detroit area and one was because of retirement.
At this point, Gonzalez’s election may mean only that he was an attractive candidate who ran a smart campaign. He denies he went against Trump in any way; he based his campaign plan on who the opponent was. Others, though, may see in his low-key example—neither running away from nor toward Trump—a way for millennial Republicans to run and win in the suburbs.
As for how Ohio will trend in 2020, the state looks to be as unpredictable as ever, especially with retiring governor John Kasich waiting in the wings. “If you see a poll right now about how the 2020 presidential race will be going in Ohio and the rest of the country you should just look at it and laugh,” says Barbara Palmer, professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University and director of the school’s Center for Women and Politics of Ohio.
She thinks it’s still a bellwether state, though that could be changing. “Ohio used to be on the cusp of population and economic changes,” she says, “but it’s not anymore. But it will be interesting to see how Trump plays here in a few years. I think the undecideds that got him elected are getting a little tired of him. But it will all depend on the economy. It always does.”
