All of Columbus votes May 6 in a council primary. Here's what the candidates stand for
Columbus' first primary for city council in years is a heated three-way race for the open seat representing District 7, which includes Downtown and much of the city's urban core.
Whether or not you live in the district, all Columbus residents will vote in the race. Under Columbus' unusual district system, first rolled out in 2023, all nine city council members are elected citywide. Candidates must live in their districts.
The candidates are Tiara Ross, an assistant city attorney who moved back to the district to run and is endorsed by the entire sitting council; Jesse Vogel, a public interest attorney from Olde Towne East motivated by his experience advocating for residents facing eviction and Kate Curry-Da-Souza, former chair of the Near East Side Area Commission.
Ross and Vogel are Democrats and Curry-Da-Souza is running as an independent in the nonpartisan election.
Hear from them in our voter guide: Meet 3 candidates for Columbus City Council in May 6 primary
Housing is the first and last topic on everyone's lips and all three candidates agree that the growing city needs more of it, and it needs to be affordable for people. After all, the canddiates are running to fill the spot vacated by Franklin County Prosecutor Shayla Favor, whose signature issue while on the council was housing.
In addition to affordable housing, the candidates support many of the same progressive ideals, like better public transportation and community-oriented policing. Where they differ is in their ideas for solutions, backgrounds, and how far they stray from the current council's stances.
This is the only city council race this year as three incumbent council members are running unopposed: Emmanuel Remy (District 4), Christopher Wyche (District 1) and President Pro Tempore Rob Dorans (District 3).
Ross and Vogel are sitting on much larger campaign chests than Curry-Da-Souza, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Franklin County Board of Elections.
Vogel has raised more than $130,000 from hundreds of donors in central Ohio and connections around the country. Ross has raised more than $60,000 from donors and received more than $60,000 in in-kind contributions from sitting council members' campaign funds. Curry-Da-Souza has raised about $8,000.
Ross, 37, describes moving back to Downtown Columbus, across from the hospital where she was born, OhioHealth Grant Medical Center, as a full-circle moment for her. Ross lived much of her childhood and adult life with her grandparents in Reynoldsburg. Ross says she spent a lot of time during her childhood in the Milo-Grogan neighborhood, where her grandfather, Bishop Jerome Ross Sr., was pastor at Triedstone Missionary Baptist Church for 50 years.
"My roots in District 7 are extensive and I'm excited to be able to return back to District 7 to prioritize the needs of this community and work toward a more equitable Columbus," she said.
Ross has served in the City Attorney's Office for seven years. She is the deputy chief of the City Attorney's Property Action Team, which goes after problem properties that pose safety risks to tenants or others. She is also the general counsel for the city's Inspector General, an office created in 2022 along with the Columbus Civilian Police Review Board to investigate alleged police misconduct and excessive uses of force.
Ross will have to leave her job at the city attorney's office if she's elected, but she said she's ready for the next step in her career.
Ross moved to Downtown on May 5, 2024, a day before the cutoff to be eligible to run for this seat. Her last-minute move led a local political blogger to unsuccessfully challenge her residency and eligibility at a Franklin County Board of Elections hearing.
Her campaign faced controversy after her poor driving record came to light during that hearing. Records later revealed Ross was driving on a suspended licence for an unpaid speeding ticket. On top of that, she had nearly $3,8000 worth of unpaid Columbus parking tickets. Ross said she took "full responsibility for the situation," paid the speeding tickets and parking fines and got her license reinstated.
Still, Ross has racked up endorsements from a long list of powerful local Democrats, including all nine city council members, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, former mayor Michael B. Coleman, Prosecutor Shayla Favor and her boss, City Attorney Zach Klein. She also has endorsements from multiple Black church leaders in the city, like her grandfather, and the Columbus Building Trades Council and the Central Ohio Labor Council.
"I really want to be the candidate for the community, the community's candidate," Ross said. "I think that is a very different narrative, it's the real narrative, but a very different narrative than what has been painted of me. I think it is because of my work that I have the confidence of the folks that are already working with the city because they've seen my dedication first-hand."
Ross said her priorities as a candidate include advocating for neighborhood investments, safe and affordable housing, paved roads and sidewalks.
Vogel, a 32-year-old Olde Towne East resident, said he was motivated to run by his experience representing clients in eviction court and organizing efforts during the pandemic to help residents facing eviction.
In 2020, Vogel was a law student at Ohio State University during the pandemic when he saw vulnerable people facing eviction. He co-founded the Central Ohio Housing Action Network and recruited volunteers to distribute information about eviction court and their rights to residents facing eviction.
He said seeing neighbors come together to make an impact was a formative experience for him.
"That also taught me about the vulnerability of our housing market that's been populated with investors from other places and companies that are not accountable to local residents," Vogel said. "And it made my wheels start turning about how do wee keep on digging into this problem of housing stability?"
Vogel worked for Legal Aid of Southeast and Central Ohio, including on housing issues, for more than two years before leaving in January to work as an immigration attorney for Community Refugee & Immigration Services (CRIS).
Vogel is running on a platform that includes universal pre-K, making buses free to ride, and changing how Columbus spends affordable housing bond dollars already passed by voters. Instead of giving bond dollars to private developers to build housing, he wants the city to use the money in a revolving fund to build city-owned and operated affordable housing.
"I'm running this campaign because it's an opportunity to build something with others across the city, a vision for the future where life is more affordable and people have more opportunity in Columbus and have the opportunity to stay here and build the life they want," Vogel said.
Vogel has endorsements from the Ohio Working Families Party, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund (a national organization), Stonewall Democrats of Central Ohio and Columbus City Schools Board Member Sarah Ingles. He is a member of the LGBTQ+ and Jewish communities.
Curry-Da-Souza, 43, sat on the Near East Area Commission from 2019 to 2024 and chaired the commission from 2022 to 2024. Columbus area commissions advocate for their communities and also review some development projects in their neighborhoods and make recommendations to the city government.
Since 2022, Curry-Da-Souza has worked as network director with Success by Third Grade for United Way of Central Ohio.
"I've given a life of service to the community in different kinds of ways and I'm ready," Curry-Da-Souza said. "I feel like I have a different kind of vision, because (on the Near East Area commission) I've seen the struggle between community members and developers and city council, and I think that I can help. I can help bridge that because I understand it differently, because I've seen those struggles."
Curry-Da-Souza said her priorities include addressing food insecurity, including with food banks but also more urban agriculture; investing in Columbus Promise students; and creating more housing quickly. She has proposed imposing a fee on empty homes to encourage owners to bring them back online by selling or renting.
"Many times, it's only one thing that we hear about (in Columbus) and that's build, build. But build what? These giant units that take 30 acres and it's all this land and it's going to take two years to get off the ground. People don't have two years if they're living in a car," she said. "So what is a smaller project that will take a couple contractors?"
Curry-Da-Souza is endorsed by the Forward Party and Forward Ohio and former Columbus mayoral candidate Joe Motil.
As an independent, Curry-Da-Souza said she would bring something new to the city council, which is comprised of all Democrats.
"I'm ready to fill that spot and be accountable to Columbus," Curry-Da-Souza said. "People are ready for change and they want something different, and I'm here for it and I'm ready to give it."
The other big Columbus race: Meet 10 candidates running for Columbus school board in the May 6 primary
Government and Politics Reporter Jordan Laird can be reached at jlaird@dispatch.com. Follow her on X, Instagram and Bluesky at @LairdWrites.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Meet the three candidates running in the Columbus City Council primary
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An official with another major group plainly acknowledged, on the condition of anonymity, that it feared a loss of donations and was unlikely to publish a study showing poor results. A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee told me it is conducting its own extensive postelection audit, incorporating 'insights from inside the DNC and from external partners in the ecosystem' that the committee will make public in the coming months. Many progressive groups, including Planned Parenthood, do submit their findings to the Analyst Institute, an organization founded in 2007 that both runs and collects experiments on voter-contact programs. The institute serves as a database for Democratic-aligned groups to share research on campaign tactics—successes as well as failures. But some people told me the party's file-drawer problem extended there too. Christina Coloroso, the Analyst Institute's executive director, told me its officials coach Democratic organizations to not expect huge positive results in presidential-campaign years. She acknowledged that groups can be reluctant to share data even within the Democratic community 'when the results don't look great,' but she said the institute allows its members to submit research anonymously to allay fears. 'It's true that we may not see every single test that exists across the ecosystem, but all the work that we do is to try to get to a critical mass of studies,' Coloroso said. The search for the decisive edge in political campaigns has always been a hunt for novelty. Any new tactic that works doesn't work that well for long. Everybody starts doing it. Voters get tired of—and sometimes quite annoyed at—the calls, the texts, the emails. 'The first time that people got direct mail, it was like printing money,' recalled Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO who has been working on campaigns since the 1970s. 'Oh my God. I just got this letter from George McGovern or from Ronald Reagan. I'm going to read it, and I'm going to send a check here.' A generation ago, helped pioneer the use of email to raise money and drive engagement, Podhorzer said. 'Then it's quickly like, Who opens an email?' More recently, the new thing was text messages, which took off in 2020, when Democrats in particular relied more on digital communications—and old-fashioned letter writing. 'You just keep finding some way that people aren't expecting to hear about politics, and so they are actually open to it and listen to you. But then it gets completely swamped,' Podhorzer said. Conventional turnout methods—door knocking and phone calls, for example—can still have a big impact in low-turnout races, such as primaries, special elections, and campaigns for local office. But with the parties now spending more than $1 billion on the presidential campaign every four years, they've seen diminishing returns on each individual mobilization tactic. Vote Forward emerged out of a letter-writing experiment conducted during the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, a deep-red state where the Democrat Doug Jones narrowly defeated Roy Moore, a former judge who had been accused of sexual assault or misconduct by several women. The turnout rate for people who received handwritten messages was three points higher than for those who did not. 'That was the holy cow,' Radjy said. 'This is a tactic that can really, really move the needle.' The impact of the group's letter-writing program has decreased over time, Radjy told me. Vote Forward found that its letters had no effect on the initial group of 'surge voters,' people who had participated in at least one major election since 2016. But the organization was able to expand its program to additional groups, mainly newly registered voters. Among these groups, the campaign boosted turnout by 0.16 percentage points, enough for Radjy to consider that part of the effort a success, because it was similar to the average effect for all previous measured presidential-election turnout programs. Vote Forward estimates that it drove an additional 9,000 voters to the polls nationwide. As paltry as that number might seem, it's larger than the total margin of victory in the battle for control of the House during each of the past two elections. The letter-writing program is also relatively inexpensive, costing about $175,000. The group has concluded that although it will still use the tactic in small campaigns, it likely will not do so in the same way in 2028. Democrats can take some solace in the fact that the nation's rightward shift last year was much smaller in the states where they campaigned most aggressively. That suggests that the hundreds of millions of dollars they poured into advertising and voter-turnout efforts did make a difference. And even the best ground game cannot overcome a flawed candidate or message. But the party's defeat is accelerating a broader questioning of its organizing and ability to connect with the millions of voters who are up for grabs in presidential-election years. 'Democrats have much bigger problems on their hands than what they're doing on the doors at the end of the election,' said Billy Wimsatt, the founder of the progressive Movement Voter Project, a clearinghouse for donors to Democratic groups. He said the party needs to learn from the success of the well-funded MAGA movement, which he calls a 'vertically integrated meta church' that, 'feels like one big purpose-driven team,' even with all its faults. 'Their billionaires are savvier than our billionaires,' Wimsatt told me, 'and they're more interested in winning.' Wimsatt is one of many Democrats who believe that the party needs to invest in much deeper engagement with voters—outreach that must start long before an election. So does Radjy: 'We need to be talking to people earlier,' she said. 'We need to be talking to people in a more curious and reciprocal way.' But first comes honesty about what went wrong in 2024. Democrats will appreciate it. They might even demand it. 'Even candor that is not rosy,' Radjy told me, 'is more appealing than rosy bullshit.'
