LaRose's strategy takes shape

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose seems very concerned about certain election results. Specifically, the Republican is interested in the results of Ohio's 2024 race for U.S. Senate, which he is widely expected to enter. For LaRose to make it to the general election and challenge U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Cleveland, he needs to win what will likely be a crowded and brutal GOP primary. Thus far the only Republican to enter the race is state Sen. Matt Dolan, who finished third in the 2022 GOP primary won by now-U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Cincinnati. Dolan distinguished himself during that race as the only GOP candidate flatly to reject former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. LaRose chose a slightly different route in his reelection bid last year. With Trump's endorsement, he fended off an election-denying primary opponent and then cruised to victory in November. Although LaRose acknowledged that Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 and defended the sanctity of Ohio's elections, he also cast aspersions on other states' electoral processes. LaRose managed to stay on the dry side of the election-denying swamp last year, but he's edging dangerously close to the waterline these days. At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, LaRose bought a table at a dinner featuring failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. The Republican has denied she lost last year, all evidence to the contrary. LaRose also appeared on a CPAC panel with the unfortunate title of "They Stole It From Us Legally." He was joined on stage by several Republicans who have denied the reality of election outcomes they didn't like. The Columbus Dispatch reported that the panel originally was supposed to have been called "Easy to Vote, Hard to Cheat." That's a phrase LaRose loves to deploy when discussing how elections work in Ohio. Unfortunately, LaRose has been working to make it harder to vote. He cheered the Ohio General Assembly when it passed a law featuring new voting restrictions in the lame-duck session last year. The law limited acceptable forms of identification at the polls, largely banned curbside voting and reduced the time span within which mail-in ballots must arrive at elections boards from 10 days after Election Day to four days. As a member of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, LaRose voted in favor of gerrymandered maps for congressional and state legislative districts that the Ohio Supreme Court repeatedly ruled unconstitutional. He's pushed for a constitutional amendment that would increase the threshold for passage of future constitutional amendments to 60 percent of voters from a simple majority. LaRose is mulling pulling Ohio out of the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC. It's a bipartisan organization that was created to allow states to share election data to detect voters who have died or moved to a different state. Earlier this year, LaRose praised the system, calling it "one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have." No longer. Several other Republican states have already pulled out of the compact because of right-wing conspiracy theories. LaRose, ever eager to remain on Trump's good side, has demanded that ERIC bend to conservative demands or Ohio will leave. What's driving LaRose in all of this? He knows that a good chunk of the GOP base buys into the fiction of rampant voter fraud. He watched as Vance won his primary in large part on the strength of Trump's endorsement. In order to get that endorsement, Vance had to embrace Trump's stolen election falsehoods. Vance was an outlier. As LaRose is no doubt aware, numerous candidates backed by Trump won their primaries last year only to lose in the general election in part because of their embrace of election-fraud conspiracy theories. LaRose's plan is as obvious as it is cynical: Appeal just enough to the election-denying wing of his party to make it through the primary without going so overboard that he turns off voters who don't buy into such nonsense when the general election rolls around. It just might work.