Friends,
I first started the job as Ohio Democratic Party Chair in January 2021, and it’s seemed like a fast-paced sprint ever since. While it’s hard to believe the three-year mark of my tenure is just around the corner, it’s incredible to think about the progress we’ve made in three short years.
This past Sunday, my extended family had our annual Christmas celebration. We enjoy good food, presents, catching up with all my cousins and their children and being in the warm embrace of people who don’t care so much what your title is at work. When we gather this group together throughout the year, I am always struck by how lucky I am to have them, and how deeply they have influenced my path in life.
I come from a proud, large, messy Irish Catholic family. My mom is the oldest of seven girls – yes seven girls. I wouldn’t be here without her. Or my aunts or my grandma or my cousins. These women helped shape me into the leader I am today and helped shape my vision of right and wrong, fair and unfair. And I’m sure all of you can also appreciate that like all families, my own has our imperfections and moments of conflict.
These three years as Chair have been an immersion in a kind of chaos and challenges that only a big, messy, loving family could prepare you for. And the lessons I learned long ago from that big, messy family? The only way to get to where you want to be is to keep your head down, rely on grit and hard work, and organize. And organize we did.
In 2021, we had one of the best election cycles for Democrats in the nation. In 2022, for the first time since 2008, Ohio Democrats won a competitive Congressional race. Not just one, but 3. We improved Democratic performance in 84 of 88 counties. And several pundits have argued that because of the Senate race we ran and the resources the other side was forced to spend here, Ohio helped protect the Senate for Democrats. We lost a seat by 6 points that we lost by 20 in 2016. It was incredible progress.
While we were monumentally proud of our work in such a short time, we knew there was lots more work to be done. In politics, moral victories don’t count.
This year, despite bipartisan concerns, the state legislature passed and Governor DeWine signed a bill that would created an August special election to end citizen-led ballot initiatives in Ohio and more realistically – as Secretary LaRose later admitted – prevent Ohioans from protecting abortion rights in Ohio’s Constitution. The bill passed in May, and we had less than three months to bring together a wide coalition of our progressive partners, a coalition we hadn’t seen in Ohio since our successful SB 5 fight in 2011.
And as I had done so often in my own family, we had to bring the family together, we had to overcome our differences and find our common ground and we had to move forward together. And that’s exactly what we did.
We formed a broad, bipartisan group of folks from all across the state who came together to defeat the first Issue One. We held rallies, we hosted press conferences, we knocked on nearly 250,000 doors and made more than one million phone calls in 80 days. We implemented a new organizing structure at the Ohio Democratic Party that invested in, reinvigorated, and relied on our County Parties. Our approach allowed our local officials the flexibility to make the strategic decisions that worked best for them and their local communities.
We also invested heavily in digital communications, knowing the landscape of information has changed. While many Ohioans still rely on traditional news sources for election information, most get their political information online, from sources ranging from Facebook to Twitter and more. We had to meet people where they are, rather than where we wanted them to be.
And those investments, that hard work, grit and organizing paid off, as our coalition defeated Issue One by more than 14 points, one of the most lopsided victories for Ohio Democrats in decades.
We took about 1 day off, reflected on what went well and what didn’t and then got right back at it. Because we once again found ourselves in one of the biggest fights of our lives. The fight for abortion rights in November was deeply personal. And Republican politicians had picked a fight we planned to win.
It was clear that if we didn’t win this election, if we didn’t stand up together and say ‘enough is enough,’ they weren’t going to stop coming for us. Today, it was abortion rights, tomorrow: civil rights, labor rights, voting rights. They didn’t know what they’re up against.
Together, with the help of the entire progressive ecosystem, that same set of politicians who tried to take away our rights learned the hard way what happens when you pick a personal fight with women all over Ohio.
But it’s clear they’re not finished. Our work is far from over. As many times as we told them, ‘we won’t go back,’ they keep trying to send our state backward. Just this week, we saw statehouse politicians trying to overturn the will of the voters on Issue 2. We saw comments the night of November 7 indicating that we’re not done playing politics over the issue of abortion rights in our state. We’re in desperate need of a redistricting process and voting rights that put people, not politics front and center.
Ohio is the only state in the country with the opportunity to flip our state Supreme Court in 2024.
Control of the U.S. House will undoubtedly run through Ohio.
And Sherrod Brown is one of two Democrats who serve states that Donald Trump won in the 2020 election. If Sherrod Brown doesn’t win in 2024, Democrats will lose control of the Senate. Full stop.
These goals and this work isn’t for the faint of heart. But because of my family – both my family of folks I’m related to and the family of people who are with me in this work, I know we can succeed.
As individuals, none of the work I listed above would be possible. As much as I may sometimes want to, I can’t run every election, I can’t talk to every voter and I can’t decide all of the strategies we undertake and when. But as an institution, as a family, we can work together to do hard things.
So to make a very long story short, my end-of-year message for all of you today is very simple:
Don’t count out our family.
As long as I have the privilege of serving as the Chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, I’ll do everything in my power to protect my Democratic family – however loud, messy and chaotic we may be. At the end of the day, the Democratic family here in Ohio always has each other’s backs. And whatever challenges life throws us in 2024, I can promise you the Ohio Democratic family will band together to overcome the odds.
Over the coming weeks and months, heading into one of the most important elections in Ohio history, you’ll hear a lot about Ohio Democrats. You’ll hear about a lack of bench, or you’ll hear about Sherrod Brown being the only statewide Democrat left. You’ll hear that Ohio’s a red state or a Trump state. You’ll hear that voters have given up and the glory days of the Party are far behind us.
But you should never underestimate family and what can happen with a little grit and hard work, and organizing.
I hope you’ll join us.
In closing, I am sharing my favorite lines from The Hill We Climb, the poem Amanda Gorman read at President Biden’s inauguration. I keep it in my office at ODP as a reminder not only of the challenges we face as individuals, as families, as a state and as a nation, but of the great solutions we can achieve if only we’re brave enough to try together, as one big Ohio family:
When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.
We braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.
Wishing you all a healthy and joyful holiday season.
With Gratitude –
Chair Liz Walters
