POLITICS • Ohio Dems to pick new leader tonight

Regardless of outcome, state’s elected black officials need to find ways  to increase influence

By R.T. Andrews

The Ohio Democratic Party’s executive committee will meet virtually tonight to select a successor to outgoing chairman David Pepper, who is stepping down after five years on the job. 

Liz Walters

The new chair is expected to be Liz Walters, the party’s former executive director, a Summit County Council member who was recently elected as council president. Walters has the endorsement of U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown and will also receive support from the major labor unions that contribute heavily to the party’s treasury. 

Antoinette Wilson

Walter’s main challenger is Antoinette Wilson, a Franklin County-based political consultant. Her firm, Triumph Communications, touts  a sterling record of victories in many high profile races, including four successful election campaigns for Columbus mayor Michael Coleman, along with recent wins for Franklin County Commissioner Kevin Boyce and Ohio Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Brunner, who outpaced President-elect Joe Biden on the state ballot.

Despite this record of achievement, Wilson is clearly not a favorite of the party’s bigwigs, although she is endorsed by Janet Carson, who leads the party’s county chair association.  Wilson was a candidate for the post in December 2014 but lost out to Pepper, who was labor’s choice. 

Whatever chance Pepper had for a successful tenure may have been lost when his  sidekick, former state senator Nina Turner, left his leadership team after a few months to join U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign to win the 2016 Democratic nomination for president. Pepper and Sanders had promised to institute "a culture of high ethics, accountability, transparency, trust and fairness" and to promote diversity and inclusion in their administration.

The measurables for those lofty goals were not high on Pepper’s watch, and the party’s lackluster performance in those areas was not counterbalanced by success at the ballot box, where Republicans continue to batter Democrats statewide, outside of the state supreme court, where Democrats in the last few years have gone from being shut out 7-0 to winning three seats.

And on that score, had Pepper taken seriously the pleas of black elected officials not to clear a path yet again for John O’Donnell — he of Brelo case fame — to make his third run at a Supreme Court seat, the Democrats today might be enjoying majority status on that bench.

Which brings us back to tonight’s choice. At a Facebook forum earlier this week both Walters and Wilson made pledges to consult frequently with black elected officials in state party affairs, swore to promote diversity and inclusion, and in fact to help underwrite the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus. They also promised to be respectful of the importance of the black vote.

I don’t know either Walters or Wilson, although I have spoken with the latter about her candidacy. I suspect that whoever wins is likely to be more solicitous of black input than has traditionally been the case at party headquarters. It won’t take much for that to be the case.

But even as most black legislators and the Ohio Young Black Dems fall in line behind Walters, the same problems persist. Black elected officials who want to be respected and consulted must do the work of turning out their districts in elections. They need to spend less time supplicating party officials and more time studying what Pepper’s law school classmate, Stacey Abrams, did in Georgia to get out the vote in Georgia, and figuring out how to adapt those methodologies to Ohio’s undervalued black electorate.

When the turnout in black precincts advances from subterranean to at least sea level, their representatives won’t have to mope around, hat in hand. In that regard, at least in Cuyahoga County, black state legislators may be indirect beneficiaries of the energy jolt that Nina Turner’s Congressional bid and Justin Bibb’s mayoral campaign promise to inject into the local black body politic.

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