THE MONIQUE MACHINE Monique Smith was the only candidate to flip an Ohio statehouse district red to blue in 2020. Now, she’s got a more complicated battle — against a Democrat. By Sam Allard STATE REP. MONIQUE SMITH moved to Northeast Ohio 20 years ago, the week before she and her husband, a North Olmsted native, got hitched. And like other young couples of a social and liberal bent, they gravitated toward Lakewood, the bar-hoppable first-ring suburb on Cleveland’s west side. Not only did they live there happily for 15 years, Smith cut her political teeth as a Lakewood councilwoman from 2010-2014. But when Smith first ran for Ohio State Rep. in 2020, her Democratic primary opponent, Joe Romano, tried to turn voters in the western suburbs against her for having lived there. On the campaign trail, Smith told Scene recently, she’d be in rooms talking to voters in Fairview Park or Rocky River, and Romano would cast her as “this crazy former Lakewood lady.” “I’d just tell voters, ‘Yes I lived in Lakewood, but how many of you here have ever lived there?’ And everyone would raise their hand!” Smith said. “Old people, young people, married people, single people, divorced people – it’s actually a big divorce depot. The joke is that everyone spends a year in Lakewood, right, that it’s the gateway to the western suburbs. [Romano] thought this was a shortcoming for me, but it was actually an asset. He was stuck standing there, and I was like, ‘If you know, you know.’” Smith is, at this moment, emerging from her Black Chevy Bolt in the parking lot of Bay Middle School, announcing herself with a self-deprecating smile as a “menace to society” and promptly firing up the MiniVAN mobile canvassing app. It’s an early evening in midJuly, and Ohio’s believe-it-or-not second primary election is less than three weeks away. For the next hour, Smith will be door-knocking
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State Rep. Monique Smith.
prime turf here in Bay Village, the northernmost suburb in the new House District 16, where she’s running to retain the seat she won in 2020. Face-to-face contact with constituents is Campaigning 101, but it’s critical during the home stretch of this particular primary, as even the most enlightened Northeast Ohio voters tend not to have a clue what’s going on. They are aware of the downstate Republican scourge in an abstract way, sure. They shake their heads at the “redistricting scandal” and the unjust and
| clevescene.com | July 27-August 9, 2022
Ohio Statehouse
increasingly depraved society that gerrymandering has wrought. But after the fourth or fifth or millionth map was declared unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court this year, with not a whisper of meaningful consequences for the villains drawing them up, the whole saga got a little heady. People stopped paying attention to details. And who can blame them? It was once memorably written that those wielding political power are keenly aware of the boredom and cynicism and disgust of the electorate, and they understand
well that it is in their interest to keep voters bored and cynical and disgusted to depress turnout on election day. That’s of course true in Ohio, where confusion and dismay over redistricting, to say nothing of the six-week abortion ban, have been the most recent on-ramps to said disgust. But statehouse Republicans have taken it one step further. The naked aim of gerrymandering is not to depress turnout — that’s just a convenient side effect — but to eliminate the power of voting altogether. Except don’t tell that to Monique Smith. After defeating Romano in the 2020 primary, Smith shocked incumbent Republican Dave Greenspan, defeating him by a razorthin 51-49 margin and becoming the only candidate to flip an Ohio statehouse district red to blue. Not that the Cuyahoga County or Ohio Democratic Party cared to inquire into her campaign strategy, but Smith was backed by a volunteer army of roughly 250 west-side suburban women, many of them mothers and grandmothers, who’d been mobilized in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency and who channeled their rage into local political action. By themselves, this team of volunteers crafted messaging, designed and distributed signs, wrote postcards, knocked on doors, phone banked and litdropped their way to Smith’s victory. Multiple women who volunteered for Smith told Scene that the energy around the campaign was infectious, precipitating other Democratic victories in the western suburbs, including in heated school board races where rightwing Critical Race Theory candidates looked to be gaining footholds. In Smith, women who for years had felt alienated or ignored by political leaders in Ohio suddenly had a candidate about whom they were passionate, and in
