For 40 years, Mike DeWine rose steadily if blandly up the ladder of Ohio politics, lastly touchdown his dream job as governor. He took workplace fi
For 40 years, Mike DeWine rose steadily if blandly up the ladder of Ohio politics, lastly touchdown his dream job as governor. He took workplace final 12 months as a well-known determine within the state, not due to any indelible political determine, however as a result of, at 72, he had been round perpetually.
However the coronavirus disaster has made Mr. DeWine one thing that a long time in elected places of work by no means did: a family identify. A Republican, he took early and daring actions to lock down his state, whilst the pinnacle of his social gathering, President Trump, dismissed the threat of the pandemic.
Mr. DeWine’s decisiveness — closing schools before any governor in the country, postponing the state’s March 17 primary election to protect voters — sent his popularity soaring. The folksy governor, previously best known for an annual ice cream social at his rural home, became something of a cult figure on social media. Ohioans tuned into his five-day-a-week briefings to celebrate “Wine With DeWine,” a ritual whose motto is “It’s 2 o’clock somewhere.”
Now, Mr. DeWine is charting a way out of the shutdown, taking cautious steps while facing pressure from business leaders, conservative activists and some Republican lawmakers who vociferously question the economic costs of a state in quarantine.
Seven weeks into the crisis, Mr. DeWine is being guided by health experts while avoiding partisan fissures over stay-at-home orders that have been encouraged by Mr. Trump, who hopes a rebounding economy will carry him to re-election. The Ohio governor is the rare Republican official who does not automatically fall in step with Mr. Trump, an independence he shares with two other Republican governors, Larry Hogan of Maryland and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, both of whom lead solidly Democratic states where bipartisanship is needed to survive. Unlike them, Mr. DeWine has gone his own way in a red-hued state.
He also split decidedly with Mr. Trump by encouraging a nearly all-mail primary election on Tuesday. While the president has spread the false claim that voting by mail entails “a lot” of fraud, Mr. DeWine pushed universal absentee ballots for voters’ safety. Ohio’s secretary of state on Monday called the effort a success, with nearly 1.5 million mail ballots cast.
Mr. DeWine also relaxed stay-at-home orders on Monday, announcing that some nonessential businesses could begin to reopen, even as he imposed new restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Beginning May 4, the governor said, manufacturers, offices and construction businesses can reopen, followed on May 12 by retail stores and service businesses. Masks will be required indoors in workplaces as well as six feet of separation. “No mask, no work, no service, no exceptions,” Mr. DeWine said.
Some enterprises that are not on the list to reopen: hair salons and restaurants. “People want to get a haircut, people want to go back to restaurants,” the governor said. “All those things we’re anxious to do as well, but we’ve got to see how we’re going with these numbers. We’ve got to watch it for a few weeks.”
Mr. DeWine has pledged that testing for the virus will ramp up sharply, to 20,000 per day by late May from about 7,000 per day now.
With the Democratic presidential race effectively over, the most watched races of Ohio’s rescheduled primary are two Democratic congressional contests: one near Cincinnati for a Republican-held seat that Democrats see as a pickup opportunity, and one in Columbus, where Representative Joyce Beatty faces a challenge from her left by Morgan Harper, who is backed by national progressive groups.
Before Mr. DeWine made his reopening announcement, more than 30 Republicans in the State Legislature called for an immediate end to the shuttering of all businesses, stating, “We believe it is time to trust Ohioans.”
Larry Householder, the Republican speaker of the House, said his caucus felt “disrespected” by the governor. He criticized Mr. DeWine for not letting small retailers open before May 12, while national chains have been designated essential and are open. “There is a tremendous amount of frustration from the majority members in the Ohio House,” Mr. Householder said in a statement.
The poll, by Baldwin Wallace University, also showed overwhelming support for the governor. Eighty-five percent of respondents approved of his handling of the coronavirus, 89 percent said they trusted him as a source of information about the outbreak, and three out of four said he was doing a better job than Mr. Trump.
Mr. DeWine’s data-driven response to the outbreak has won the support of top Democrats in the state. Many have praised his management style — honed over a lifetime of serving in all levels of government — as a departure from that of the president, who quixotically says to social distance one day and to ignore it the next.
“Mike DeWine’s performance contrasted with Trump’s performance shows you what character and experience mean,” said Sherrod Brown, Ohio’s senior senator and a Democrat. “The mini-Trump governors in Georgia, Texas and Florida, they’re going to do whatever Trump wants. But DeWine’s not going to do that. He cares about his legacy. He cares about the next generation.”
A week earlier, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. DeWine seemed to go out of his way to flatter Mr. Trump, saying that Ohio’s May 1 date to begin reopening was “consistent — very, very consistent — with the plan, the very thoughtful plan that the president has laid out.”
Despite efforts not to antagonize fellow Republicans, Mr. DeWine has faced pressure from multiple quarters. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
A Republican-led task force on the shutdown in the state’s House of Representatives has been a forum for criticism of the governor. Among the accusations are that unemployment benefits keep workers from returning to jobs. Conspiracy theories have also circulated unchecked in the task force’s online hearings, including that the official death toll is inflated and that Mr. DeWine shut down the economy to hurt Mr. Trump’s re-election chances.
Such views are echoed by protesters outside the Capitol in Columbus, including a group whose zombielike faces, pressed against glass doors, were captured in a photograph that ricocheted around social media.
Last week, Mr. DeWine publicly condemned a Republican state senator who had likened the actions of the director of the Ohio Division of Well being, Dr. Amy Acton, who’s Jewish, to Nazis throughout World Warfare II.
Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist in Ohio, mentioned Mr. DeWine’s approval rankings have been excessive as a result of he was listening to medical consultants and ignoring political critics.
“I don’t suppose anybody can ever query Mike DeWine’s endurance or potential to face up to criticism,” mentioned Mr. Chabria, who was a senior adviser to Mr. DeWine’s predecessor, Gov. John Kasich, additionally a Republican. “He doesn’t get caught up within the Twitter video games that different politicos wish to play.”
Protesters and Republican lawmakers have apparently weighed much less closely on Mr. DeWine’s choice to reopen than Ohio enterprise organizations. Final week, six teams, together with the Ohio Producers’ Affiliation and the state’s Farm Bureau, known as the state of the economic system “dire” and mentioned it was going through “irreversible devastation.” Almost a million jobs have been misplaced. The teams pressed the governor to reopen the economic system in a “phased method,” which is what Monday’s orders entail.
Within the Kasich years, Mr. DeWine served as legal professional common, his sixth job in public workplace since 1976, after being elected a county prosecutor, a state senator, a congressman, lieutenant governor and U.S. senator.
He misplaced the Senate seat in 2006 to Mr. Brown, and within the succeeding years he tacked proper. He renounced earlier help for a ban on assault weapons. Within the 2012 presidential race, he withdrew an endorsement of Mitt Romney to as an alternative again Rick Santorum. As legal professional common, he represented the state in opposition to a homosexual resident of Cincinnati, Jim Obergefell, within the landmark Supreme Courtroom case that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015.
In Mr. DeWine’s first 12 months in workplace, he was usually overshadowed by conservative majorities within the Legislature. He signed a invoice in 2019 banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, a decade-long aim of lawmakers on the fitting that Mr. Kasich had thwarted. After a mass taking pictures in Dayton the identical 12 months, Mr. DeWine watered down a proposed background test for gun patrons after going through stress from pro-gun advocates.
“The dominant pressure within the final 12 months has not been Mike DeWine, it’s been the Statehouse,” mentioned David Pepper, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Get together. “Till coronavirus, DeWine was considerably within the again seat of Ohio governance.” Now, Mr. Pepper mentioned, the governor is on the wheel. “I’ve revered his method from the start as a result of he’s allowed the science and well being consultants to steer his response,” he added.
Each morning at 11:30, Mr. DeWine holds a convention name with the mayors of Ohio’s seven largest cities, all Democrats. Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, a kind of on the decision, mentioned there was in all probability no different state the place a Republican governor had labored as nicely with Democratic mayors. “It’s so refreshing — it’s how governing ought to work,” she mentioned. “That’s a testomony to DeWine, actually.”