An Ohio State Senate candidate, Melissa Ackison, lost her primary bid against incumbent District 26 Republican state Rep. Bill Reineke on Tuesday. According to the Marion Star, Reineke pulled in almost two-thirds of the vote. Ackison blamed the Republican political machine for her loss but applauded herself for getting to “walk away knowing that I win in life and that I didn't have to compromise my conservative principles."
Some of those principles included attempting to put herself front and center at the mid-April astroturf protests down by the Ohio Statehouse, demanding that Ohio give up its rights to Donald Trump and reopen amidst the coronavirus pandemic. At the time, she explained that she supported Trump’s make-em-up right to override local municipalities. Seems like even conservative Ohioans didn’t share her fervor.
Rep. Reineke had the support of notable dirtbag GOP establishment luminaries like accused serial sexual assault accessory-after-the-fact Rep. Jim Jordan. Ackison, somehow, found a tiny niche just right of the already fascist-leaning Republican establishment. It’s hard to do, but the Republican Party can always find some deeper, angrier places to go. The photo at the top of this story shows Ackison wearing a campaign sweatshirt and protesting. Here’s a slightly more famous image of her and others trying to disrupt Gov. Mike DeWine’s daily press conference.
Ackison is the woman in the window on the left.
Ackison ran an interesting campaign insofar as it showed the strange relationship the Republican Party has with its perceived “base.” According to Cleveland.com, Ackison’s campaign swung wildly at the GOP establishment while fending off internal lawsuits and even the Trump administration—who seemed embarrassed by her use of the photos she and her family took with Trump and Pence and used during her campaign.
And while Melissa Ackison sounds awful, she did attack Rep. Jordan for the abuse accusations against him. She also slammed the Republican Party, writ-large, for the opioid epidemic. She sued a bunch of other Ohio Republicans, former Ohio mayoral candidate Joe Gergley, and pastor Gary Click for all kinds of crazy stuff. So that was cool.
Ackison was called “simply unhinged” by Ohio Republican Party spokesman Evan Machan, but her anger at the Republican establishment is interesting. Right now it’s the contradiction of the party on full display. Voters who are angry and racist and believe that Donald Trump still represents them but that everyone else doesn’t, including everyone around Trump. The tragic flaw, of course, is that while on the one hand Ackison is right in being angry at the GOP establishment for deceiving their constituents and doing nothing to help them, she is also being used by the Republican establishment as canon fodder in the war against democracy.