Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval to face Cory Bowman, JD Vance's half brother, this fall
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval will face Cory Bowman, the half brother of Vice President JD Vance, this fall after the pair were the top two vote-getters in Tuesday's primary.
Pureval placed a dominant first in the nonpartisan three-way contest, in which third-place finisher Republican Brian Frank was eliminated. Under the rules of the southwest Ohio city's nonpartisan primaries, only the top two primary finishers advance to the November general election.
With more than 80% of the votes counted, Pureval led Bowman by about 70 percentage points Tuesday night, highlighting the uphill fight that Bowman will face in November.
If Bowman pulls an upset in this predominantly Democratic city, he would be the latest family member of a president or vice president to serve in office. That includes the brother of Mike Pence, President Donald Trump's first vice president, elected to Congress during their previous administration.
In a statement, Pureval said the city deserves a 'substantive and healthy debate of ideas about the future of our city' headed into the fall.
'There is work ahead of us in Cincinnati, but I am incredibly proud of what we've accomplished over the past few years,' he said. 'We have made meaningful, tangible progress for folks across our community, and this is a moment to keep building on the momentum we've worked so hard to create.'
Bowman did not have an immediate comment. He has said he wants to improve his city, not get involved in national politics.
Pureval, 42, is viewed as a Democratic up-and-comer. A former special assistant U.S. attorney, congressional candidate and Hamilton County clerk of courts. He won the 2021 mayor's race with nearly 66% of the vote to lead Ohio's third-largest city.
Bowman, 36, founded an evangelical church on the city's West End and owns a coffee shop. He has never held public office but says his half brother's inauguration inspired him to enter politics.
Vance didn't take an active role in the campaign, but he posted a message of support for Bowman on Tuesday.
'He's a good guy with a heart for serving his community,' the vice president wrote on X. 'Get out there and vote for him!' Bowman thanked Vance in reply: 'Love you brother!'
Voters in Cincinnati and across Ohio also approved
State Issue 2
on Tuesday, the reauthorization of a program that will provide $2.5 billion for roads, bridges and other needed local infrastructure projects over the next decade.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies
In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations 'unethical.' Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies. Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH. 'We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,' the staffers wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research agency, according to the non-profit organization Stand Up for Science, which also posted it; while many employees signed anonymously because of fears of retaliation, nearly 100 - from graduate students to division chiefs - signed by name. It comes the day before Bhattacharya is due to testify before Congress once more, in a budget hearing to be held Tuesday by the Senate appropriations committee. It's just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director. 'If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,' said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH. The letter, which the staffers said they also sent to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH, urged Bhattacharya to 'restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue,' citing work in areas including health disparities, Covid-19, health impacts of climate change and others. They cited findings by two scientists that said about 2,100 NIH grants for about $9.5 billion have been terminated since the second Trump administration began. The NIH budget had been about $48 billion annually, and the Trump administration has proposed cutting it next year by about 40%. The research terminations 'throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,' the NIH staffers wrote. 'Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.' They also urged Bhattacharya to reverse a policy that aims to implement a new, and lower, flat 15% rate for paying for indirect costs of research at universities, which supports shared lab space, buildings, instruments and other infrastructure, as well as the firing of essential NIH staff. Those who wrote the Bethesda Declaration were joined Monday by outside supporters, in a second letter posted by Stand Up for Science and signed by members of the public, including more than a dozen Nobel Prize-winning scientists. 'We urge NIH and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leadership to work with NIH staff to return the NIH to its mission and to abandon the strategy of using NIH as a tool for achieving political goals unrelated to that mission,' they wrote. The letter called for the grant-making process to be conducted by scientifically trained NIH staff, guided by rigorous peer review, not by 'anonymous individuals outside of NIH.' It also challenged assertions put forward by Kennedy, who often compares today's health outcomes with those around the time his uncle John F. Kennedy was president, in the early 1960s. 'Since 1960, the death rate due to heart disease has been cut in half, going from 560 deaths per 100,000 people to approximately 230 deaths per 100,000 today,' they wrote. 'From 1960 to the present day, the five-year survival rate for childhood leukemia has increased nearly 10-fold, to over 90% for some forms. In 1960, the rate of measles infection was approximately 250 cases per 100,000 people compared with a near zero rate now (at least until recently).' They acknowledged there's still much work to do, including addressing obesity, diabetes and opioid dependency, 'but,' they wrote, 'glamorizing a mythical past while ignoring important progress made through biomedical research does not enhance the health of the American people.' Support from the NIH, they argued, made the US 'the internationally recognized hub for biomedical research and training,' leading to major advances in improving human health. 'I've never heard anybody say, 'I'm just so frustrated that the government is spending so much money on cancer research, or trying to address Alzheimer's,' ' said Dr. Jeremy Berg, who organized the letter of outside support and previously served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. 'Health concerns are a universal human concern,' Berg told CNN. 'The NIH system is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but has been unbelievably productive in terms of generating progress on specific diseases.'
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Czech court sentences Colombian to 8 years for arson attack which officials think is tied to Russia
PRAGUE (AP) — A court in the Czech capital sentenced a Colombian national to eight years in prison on Monday for an arson attack and planning another one, in a case which authorities believe may be linked to Russia. Prague's Municipal Court also ordered Andrés Alfonso de la Hoz de la Cruz to pay damages worth 115,000 koruna ($5,300). The court approved a plea agreement between prosecutors and the defendant, who pleaded guilty. The 26-year-old Colombian was arrested a year ago after setting ablaze three Prague public buses at a depot at night. The court said that he recorded what he did and left. Local workers managed to extinguish the fire. The court said the man received orders on the Telegram messaging app and was promised $3,000. He was also planning one more attack, possibly at a movie theater in Prague. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala previously said the failed arson attack was likely part of Russia's hybrid war against his country. Czechia, which is more widely known in English as the Czech Republic, is a staunch supporter of Ukraine in its fight against Russia's full scale-invasion. Western officials have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of attacks and other incidents across Europe since Moscow launched all-out war on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, according to data collected by The Associated Press. They allege the disruption campaign is an extension of Russian President Vladimir Putin's war, intended to sow division in European societies and undermine support for Ukraine. ___ Follow the AP's coverage of the war at
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The Democrats Have an Authenticity Gap
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Since President Donald Trump's victory last fall, Democrats have been trying to reengage with male voters, find a 'Joe Rogan of the left,' and even fund a whole left-leaning 'manosphere.' Young men—Rogan's core audience—were among the voting blocs that definitively moved toward the GOP in 2024, as a comprehensive postmortem by the data firm Catalist recently illustrated. In response, many powerful liberal figures have obsessively returned to the same idea: If we can't compete with their influential manosphere, why not construct our own? One high-profile progressive group, the Speaking With American Men project, is embarking on a two-year, $20 million mission to build 'year-round engagement in online and offline spaces Democrats have long ignored—investing in creators, trusted messengers, and upstream cultural content,' though its leaders say they're not looking for a liberal Rogan. Another effort, AND Media (AND being an acronym for 'Achieve Narrative Dominance'), has raised $7 million and, according to The New York Times, is looking to amass many times that amount over the next four years to back voices that will break with 'the current didactic, hall monitor style of Democratic politics that turns off younger audiences.' But in recent conversations with people in all corners of Democratic politics—far-left Bernie bros, seasoned centrists of the D.C. establishment, and rising new voices in progressive media—I came away with the sense that Democrats don't have simply a podcast-dude issue, one that could be solved with fresh money, new YouTube channels, and a bunch of studio mics. The party has struggled to capitalize on Trump's second-term missteps. It has yet to settle on a unifying message or vision of the future. Given this absence, such a tactical, top-down fix as deputizing a liberal Rogan looks tempting. The big problem is: That fix is both improbable and illogical. [Read: Democrats have a man problem] The party's 'podcast problem' is a microcosm of a much larger likability issue. 'We are a little bit, you know, too front-of-the-classroom,' Jon Lovett, a former Obama speechwriter and a co-host of Pod Save America, told me. In a sense, the show's production company, Crooked Media, already tested the 'make your own media ecosystem' proposition: Five years after its independent founding in 2017, Crooked announced that it had received funding from an investment firm run by the Democratic megadonor George Soros. Lovett seemed less skeptical of the new initiatives than other Democrats I interviewed, but also acknowledged some limitations. 'We believe how important it is to invest in progressive media,' Lovett told me. 'But in the same way you can't strategize ways to be authentic, you can't buy organic support.' The limits of this approach have already become clear. 'If you're trying to identify and cultivate and create this idea of a 'liberal Joe Rogan,' by definition, you're manufacturing something that's not authentic,' Brendan McPhillips, who served as campaign manager during John Fetterman's successful Pennsylvania Senate bid in 2022, told me. 'This fucking insane goose chase that these elite donors want to pursue to create some liberal oasis of new media is just really harebrained and misguided.' Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and other prominent voices in the existing manosphere are not inherently political and, even when they do touch politics, don't adhere to GOP or conservative orthodoxy. Although Rogan and Von did attend Trump's second inauguration, both have also been enamored with Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont; and recently, Von delivered an emotional monologue about the destruction in Gaza, drawing ire from many of his listeners on the right. In short, these guys are guided not by ideology, but by their own curiosity and gut instinct. Fluidity in belief is central to their appeal, and helps explain their cross-party success. Their audiences also blossomed over time, not after the stroke of a donor's pen. Throughout my interviews, I heard constant lamentations over the inescapable 'D.C. speak' in both Democratic politics and the left-leaning press. 'Normal people aren't out here talking about and paying attention to the kind of things that tie senior Democratic strategists up in knots,' McPhillips, who lives in Philadelphia, told me. You can't read white papers and study what goes on in the states from afar, he argued; you have to be there at eye level, living among real people, talking like a real person. What politicians have been advised to do for decades—stick to short cable-news hits, repeat the same few points over and over—are habits that today's voters find, in the words of a senior official who worked both in the Joe Biden White House and on the Kamala Harris campaign, 'repulsive.' Although this person, who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely about party strategy, discounted the premise of finding a 'Rogan of the left' as a fool's errand, they did say that, from now through 2028, Democrats should try to infiltrate sports-focused podcasts, paying particular attention to YouTube. This operative has come to view the current moment less as center-left versus center-right, and more as a larger battle of institutionalists versus anti-institutionalists: 'The psyche of a liberal in this moment is institution defense.' Also: fear. Too many Democrats, they believe, approach every public conversation and media interview with a level of trepidation about what they're saying—not in fear of Trump, but in fear of the wrath of their own potential voters. During her 2024 campaign, Harris reportedly feared the potential blowback within her own team from sitting down with Rogan. 'There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn't want her to be on' his show, Jennifer Palmieri, who advised the second gentleman Doug Emhoff, said a week after the election. (Palmieri later revised her comments.) This year, some progressives have found a way to break through. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who's proved capable of acing a hostile Fox News interview, has now grown facial scruff and has been popping up on the podcast circuit. Several Democrats I spoke with praised both Buttigieg's recent media tour—his appearance on the brash bro show Flagrant was singled out—and Sanders's ability to win over certain manosphere hosts. 'They're able to do that because they have the confidence and the skill to go on a program like that and just be themselves, and people believe what they say because they're being honest,' McPhillips told me. On the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, and in his frequent podcast appearances, Sanders has positioned himself as an accessible and righteously angry force. Faiz Shakir, Sanders's 2020 campaign manager and now an adviser to the senator, told me that Democrats 'are too far removed from organic and interesting conversations that people want to hear about, and have become too reliant on a one-way push at people about the things we want to tell them,' rather than actually listening to voters. Although he himself is a Harvard alumnus who lives and works in D.C., Shakir criticized the Democratic Party's perpetually buttoned-up ethos, the opposite of an unstructured podcast hang. He spoke about the power of anger—the defining emotion of the past political decade—as something that many Democrats don't know how to wield effectively. 'If you're angry, you're uncouth,' Shakir said. 'Calm down! That's not professional!' Unless Democrats stop worrying about politely conforming to pre-Trump communication mores, he believes the chasm with voters will continue to exist, hypothetical new-media ecosystem be damned. [John Hendrickson: Jake and Logan Paul hit the limits of the manosphere] Two things can be true at the same time: Many centrist Democrats may be too timid or genteel, and lack the moxie to speak with the anger that resonates with voters. But the cause of men's alienation from liberal politics cannot be distilled simply into perceptions of gentility. Nor is voicing rage a plausible way to hack the manosphere. When it comes to podcasts—the medium of the moment—a different emotion reigns: curiosity. Hosts such as Rogan and Von succeed across party lines not because they're indignant, but because they're inquisitive and, crucially, persuadable. Their talent is to seem real and relatable without trying. Throughout my conversations, I asked why liberals have not organically produced a figure of Rogan's magnitude and influence. No one really had an answer. But one thing became abundantly clear: No amount of strategic parsing will let Democrats fake their way through this moment. You can't buy authentic communication. Article originally published at The Atlantic
