I got involved in politics soon after I moved to Sylvania, Ohio, 10 years ago. When the local Democratic Party was looking for people to help phone-bank and canvass in 2010, I volunteered. Our congresswoman, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, was running for reelection against a tea party Republican who dressed up for Nazi reenactments in his spare time. He was outspending her 2 to 1. It was her closest race in decades, but Kaptur won. I was satisfied knowing that I was being represented well, by someone who was directly engaged with our community. Sylvania is a union town, and people here knew Kaptur as the kind of politician who wasn’t afraid to go down to a picket line and see how she could help. People knew her well, and we trusted her.
Then Ohio Republicans redrew the map. Ever since then, my town has been roped into the Fifth Congressional District, where we’re represented by a Republican from Bowling Green, Robert E. Latta. My former district, meanwhile, got stretched into a long, narrow squiggle, less than a mile wide in some parts, reaching all the way to Cleveland, almost 100 miles away. In 2012, the new “Snake on the Lake” district forced Kaptur to run against a fellow Democrat, and he lost his seat. Meanwhile, Latta cruised to reelection, and he has in every race since.
Since then, I’ve gotten to know Latta’s political views and positions. He voted to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which would leave thousands of his constituents without insurance. He’s voted against legislation that would offer a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children, and for the Trump tax cuts, which massively benefited corporations and the wealthy at the expense of lower-income families. He’s tried, over and over, to permanently repeal the estate tax.
