At Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate in Westerville, Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper galvanized the crowd with promises to turn the state blue — and all the ways President Donald Trump has failed to look after the people who voted for him there.
"Here’s a fun fact for us tonight. Donald Trump has traveled to Ohio more in the past year than any state in the country where he doesn’t own a golf course," said Pepper. "Now why is that? It’s not that he’s golfing here. No. It’s because he’s scared. He’s underwater, and he knows that when Ohio turns blue that’s the end of his presidency. That’s it. And guess what? He’s right. He is in trouble here. Deep trouble, and we agree with him, don’t we? We will be the state that ends the Trump presidency."
"And communities like where we’re standing right here, sitting here in Westerville, are precisely why that’s the case," continued Pepper. "A decade ago, this was a solid red community. John Kasich won here. Mitt Romney and George W. Bush won here. Well, guess what, America and Ohio? Westerville is now blue. In 2016, and even more in 2018, this committee turned blue and is getting a deeper blue every single year and Westerville, you’re not the only one. All across Ohio, communities like Westerville are turning blue, near Cincinnati, near Columbus, and near Akron, communities that used to be the base of the Republican Party are turning blue. Large communities and by the way, driven largely by women. Thank you very much, women, for making that happen."
"And voters and women are shifting and getting energized in these areas because they see a party that used to vote for lurching further and further to the extreme on every issue," said Pepper. "The Westervilles alone presents a big threat to the GOP grasp on Ohio, but the second threat to Trump is that he made a lot of promises here in Ohio. He told — you heard it earlier, he told folks in the valley that all of the jobs were coming back. He said don’t sell your home. He said he’d make health care better. He told farmers he’d go to bat for them. Well, guess what? He broke those promises and his policies — it’s hard to call them that, they’re more like a tweetstorm nonstop — they’ve had a bigger impact on Ohio than almost any other state. Talk to soybean farmers and talk to autoworkers. If you know much about Ohio’s economy, when you go after soybean farms and auto manufacturing, you’re hitting us in our gut, in our core. And the third factor that leads us to scare Donald Trump is if you’ve been a longtime Democrat as many of you here, you’re more fired up than ever, aren’t you? Aren’t you?"
The reason [Sen. Sherrod] Brown won 100,000 voters last year that Donald Trump didn’t win is because of the energy we talked about, the switching in the suburbs, and those broken promises," said Pepper. "These folks around the state — we talked to a lot of them over the last few days — are paying the price for those broken promises."
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