Why I'm running for Ohio Democratic Party Chair (Part I: My Story)
Ohio Dems need a bigger tent united by pro-democracy values to liberate Ohioans from corruption and extremism
Fellow Ohioans,
I grew up in Stow and have lived most of my life in Ohio. I was raised to study hard, work hard, and love all my neighbors. I believe the values uniting Ohioans are stronger than the forces trying to divide us and exploit us. I am running for ODP Chair to help the pro-democracy wing of the Democratic Party attract a bigger tent based on shared values that respond to the needs and concerns of the People of Ohio.
Corruption has only gotten worse despite Democrats’ attempts to stop it since David Pepper published “Laboratories of Autocracy” in 2021 to warn how states like Ohio were being captured by wealthy special interests. The one-party supermajority in our gerrymandered Statehouse has abused its power to suppress competition and shield politicians from accountability. Democrats should be leading a broad coalition to liberate Ohio from corruption and autocracy – instead of colluding with Republicans to subvert the Ohio Constitution and restrict voters’ choices. The Ohio Democratic Party (ODP) must earn the trust and votes of Ohioans by proving that we are Ohio’s only major party that puts Ohio before party.
I never thought I’d run for a party leadership position like ODP Chair because I’m skeptical of the two-party system, and that’s both my greatest weakness and strength as a candidate: I've been fiercely loyal to Democratic values even though I'm outside the party establishment. I’ve campaigned hard for Democrats every cycle, even when they fall short of our values, because they’re exponentially better than the Republicans serving billionaires at our expense, but I can’t blame voters for being skeptical of parties and candidates that too often seem to put private interests ahead of the common good. The ODP needs an independent-minded leader with the vision and credibility to grow the Democratic coalition by building trust with skeptical voters.
I know I have a lot to learn as an outsider to party leadership, but I feel like life has led me to this moment without my knowing it, and the more party insiders I talk with, the more I feel called to serve and the more confident I feel that ODP’s staff and leadership will succeed. I admire current Chair Liz Walters for her heroic leadership building a strong foundation for ODP against impossible odds while Republicans have abused their power to weaponize the State against our Party. I’ve talked with County Chairs working with Liz on a long-term strategy to grow the Party from the ground up with help from local organizers year-round instead of the old way of flying in outsiders in the final months before an election. Plans like these deserve to be implemented so Democrats can prove we care about serving our communities more than just when we’re looking for votes. While talking with Liz this week, she emphasized that serving as Chair is more than just a job, it’s a lifestyle of 24/7 public service. My story below may be long, but it shows I have devoted my life to democracy, and the experiences that shaped me as a Democrat and as a democrat make me uniquely qualified to serve as ODP’s next Chair in this moment:
☆ 2008: As a first-time voter, I was inspired to volunteer for Barack Obama’s primary campaign because of his appeal to Red America and Blue America to work together as the United States of America. I was recruited to serve on the Board for Ohio College Democrats (which changed its name to College Democrats of Ohio because CDO is a better acronym that OCD). Even though I led Students for Barack Obama at Ohio Wesleyan, I facilitated Chelsea Clinton’s visit to our campus as a surrogate for Hillary and introduced her to our student body. I spent the summer of 2008 interning for the Summit County Democratic Party under the leadership of Russ Balthis. Obama’s win in Ohio was one of the most fulfilling moments of my life.
☆ 2011-13: Aiming for a career in the U.S. Foreign Service to support democracy abroad, I moved to Beirut, Lebanon to teach modern world history and civics at an English-immersion school founded by British Evangelicals in the mid-1800s. I implemented the high school’s first college-credit A-Level curriculum (British equivalent of AP) and taught advanced courses on Germany from WWI-WWII, the Modern Middle East, and the Indian Independence Movement. The Democratic Party and civil society more broadly need to learn lessons from history and other countries to counter democratic backsliding at home.
☆ 2013-15: While earning my Master’s in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, I developed skills and relationships with other leaders, many of whom I saw at my 10-year reunion this month, who offered their assistance if I am elected Chair. Some of these friends work directly with Professor Marshall Ganz to help implement his “People, Power, Change” model for making organizations more authentically responsive to the grassroots instead of chasing money for the sake of money. Some of these friends work with other state parties to implement voter turnout strategies informed by behavioral science. Some of these friends and fellow members of the Truman National Security Project have worked on civic engagement and party-building programs in other countries on behalf of USAID, NED, NDI, IRI, etc. and have told me they would come help democratize Ohio if I am elected Chair. Ten years ago, we never thought that we would have to apply our skills countering violent extremism to the United States, but after Republicans got away with radicalizing their supporters to violence on January 6, 2021, and as Republicans in Ohio threaten to militarize against Democrats in 2025, we feel urgency for the Democratic Party to assist an all-of-civil-society approach to reducing polarization and extremism.
☆ 2015-2017: I moved to DC for an internship with the House Foreign Affairs Committee and saw from the inside how dysfunctional Congress was, but I became inspired by Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig’s campaign to “Fix Democracy First” because none of the issues we care about are going to get solved unless we make our political system more responsive to voters with systemic reforms like campaign finance, voting rights, fair districts, and ranked choice voting.
In the fall of 2015, I was hired by President Obama’s White House Correspondence Office, where I served until the end of his term in January 2017 as his ghostwriter for mass responses to letters and emails on more than 200 policy issues. Reading the mail and channeling President Obama’s responses taught me the value of constituent services and addressing the needs and concerns of The People, but it pained me because the obstructionist Republican Congress and our political system held Democrats back from implementing policies that could have significantly improved Americans’ lives. I wrote about my experience at the White House here.
☆ 2017-2018: My first job after being fired by Donald Trump was as an editor for one of the major DC consulting firms that sends spammy fundraising emails and texts, and I quickly became disillusioned by how Dems’ campaign apparatus burned through email lists to raise money for the sake of raising money instead of turning out voters to win elections. A Harvard behavioral scientist, now Executive Director of Vote Rev, offered pro bono help with relational organizing tactics to motivate low-propensity voters, but the firm I worked for didn’t offer his ideas to clients because they were motivated by profit instead of principles. I ended up getting hired by the Mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, as her only assistant, and I spent a year learning the importance of local government to tangibly improve lives.
During that time, I became a leader for DC Unite for Progress (DC UP), a grassroots group formed with friends to mobilize young professionals to campaign for Dems in key competitive districts. Because we felt we couldn’t rely on the party, we took it upon ourselves to adopt and surge support for pro-democracy candidates, including in Virginia’s important “off-cycle” elections where we helped flip districts that were crucial to ending gerrymandering.
☆ 2018-2022: Having been waitlisted for a Foreign Service position during Trump’s hiring freeze, I landed a job managing democracy programs in Iraq and Lebanon for the National Democratic Institute (NDI). My competitive grant applications raised millions of dollars for programs such as capacity-building for parties and civil society, trainings for candidates and public officials, transparency and anti-corruption watchdog initiatives, polling and public opinion analysis, election observation missions, and civic education and empowerment for women, youth, and minorities. My colleagues and I felt a kinship with the pro-democracy activists in Iraq and Lebanon as we spent our free time trying to defend against the democratic backsliding and corruption in states like Ohio. During the summer of 2020, we joined the Black Lives Matter protests in DC, during which I made a personal appeal to Governor Mike DeWine to stop letting Trump use the Ohio National Guard to threaten to shoot peaceful protesters.
Later that summer, I moved back home to Ohio to wait out the pandemic and to campaign for Dems in the 2020 election. I also co-founded Rank the Vote Ohio with other volunteers from across the political spectrum as a nonpartisan nonprofit to educate Ohioans about the benefits of Instant Runoffs with Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) to give voters more choice, more voice, and more confidence their votes matter. While working remotely for NDI, I was active in my personal capacity in Ohio to raise awareness about corruption and support for fair districts in the face of the constitutional crisis caused by Republicans’ repeated violations of Ohio Supreme Court orders. I organized other poll workers across Ohio to object to our Secretary of State rigging elections with unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering (which even he admitted was “asinine”).
Within NDI, my colleagues nominated and elected me to serve as a Shop Steward (Union Leader) for OPEIU Local 2 after negotiating our first collective bargaining agreement (CBA). As democracy professionals, we saw the CBA as an opportunity to democratize NDI. My regional director, who served on the Labor-Management Committee, admitted to our team that NDI’s staff were systemically underpaid because NDI’s previous president had set payscales below market rate and below similar organizations (like IRI) because he expected staff to be motivated by NDI’s mission and reputation instead of money. This resulted in high turnover and burnout among junior staff because they were easily poached by other organizations, and those who remained were loaded with higher responsibilities without recognition or compensation. After my supervisor left and I covered for her for more than three months, I petitioned for a promotion in accordance with the newly-enacted CBA, but Management resisted because they didn’t want to set a precedent that would allow other Union members to benefit. Instead, my regional director retaliated by putting me on a performance improvement plan (the first step toward a layoff) that he attempted to justify by blaming me for his own mistakes. I persisted to hold Management accountable to the CBA even though they continued to mislead donors by compensating junior staff at far lower rates than budgeted. This experience strengthened my support for Unions and the need to more authentically democratize “democratic” institutions.
In 2022, I traveled to Iraq to help U.S. Congressional Staff implement trainings for Iraq’s Parliament, and I expressed my concerns about Ohio’s corruption and autocratization to NDI’s Country Director, a former Representative from Cincinnati. Facing much steeper odds in Iraq, I was shocked when he told me that Ohio was a “lost cause.” But I wasn’t ready to give up on Ohio because Ohioans, like all people, deserve human dignity and equality as citizens.
A month before the 2022 election, I raised concerns to ODP’s leadership that while I was campaigning door-to-door for my Rep. Casey Weinstein and the Democratic slate, voters didn’t know about Republicans’ massive corruption scandals and attacks on democracy. ODP’s leadership responded that voters didn’t care about corruption or democracy, which confused me because Republicans direct so many resources toward accusing Dems of any bland hint of wrongdoing (“but her emails”, “Hunter’s laptop”, etc) while Republicans get away with actual blatant corruption. Republican consultants and former lawmakers have told me they could write ads in minutes that would be more devastating to Republicans than anything Ohio Democrats have aired.
During the 2022 cycle, Rank the Vote Ohio received a surge of support from Ohioans fed up with corruption who wanted more choices. I couldn’t keep up as a volunteer, so Rank the Vote hired me to make public education about Ranked Choice Voting my full-time job. This allowed me to stay in Ohio and buy a house in Stow instead of returning to NDI (also a blessing because earlier this year, Republicans defunded NDI along with USAID and the NED family of organizations that had supported democracy abroad since Reagan). I got more involved locally in 2022, joining Citizens for Nonpartisan Politics in Stow and writing public comments about how Stow could finally develop a walkable downtown at a natural pace if we followed a diagnostic report’s recommendations to rewrite our convoluted zoning codes. Mayor John Pribonic tried to appoint me to Stow’s Planning Commission, but the Council rejected me twice, so he ultimately asked me to run for Council as part of his team focused on local nonpartisan issues.
☆ 2023-2025: Stow’s elections are nonpartisan, and our purple suburb of Akron has an independent-minded populace that is about a quarter reliably blue, about a third reliably red, and nearly half who don’t identify with either of the two major parties. The vast majority of issues we face at the local level really are nonpartisan, so the Mayor’s Team bucked party orthodoxy by recruiting independent-minded Republicans and Independents to run with us as a sharp contrast to the partisan Republican slate. When knocking on doors, the most common question was “Which party?” so I explained, “I lean blue because I’m pro-democracy and anti-corruption, but I’m focused on local nonpartisan issues like public safety, economic development, and protecting our environment.” I became the first Forward Democrat to win an election in Ohio; I was endorsed by both the Democratic Party and the Forward Party because I pledged to prioritize my oath of office, democratic principles, and my constituents above partisan or personal interests. My win helped the Mayor’s Team win a 4-3 majority that flipped Council from a 5R-2D supermajority. You can learn more about my campaign and our Council’s many accomplishments at HermanForStow.com.
I ran for Stow City Council as a pro-democracy candidate and am running for re-election to continue fulfilling my oath of office on behalf of Stow’s 35,000 residents. If elected ODP Chair, I will continue to put Stow first – just as I expect any elected officials to put their constituents first, regardless of party. My formal responsibilities to Stow City Council are two Thursday nights per month, but ODP Chair would be my full-time job – and more of a lifestyle than a job because I would treat all Ohio Democrats as my constituents so we can work together as a team to save Ohio.
Win or lose, I want nothing more than to help ODP and Ohio’s entire pro-democracy network democratize Ohio to make our system more authentically responsive to The People. But in order to make progress possible, ODP’s Exec Committee must elect a Chair who can lead with integrity for democracy, and I am ready to be their champion.
LEARN MORE AND HELP:
☆ Attend Candidate Forums: The next public online forum I know of is the Pride Caucus call on June 5.
☆ Contact ODP Exec Committee Members: I will be reaching out directly to the 146 highest-ranking members of the Ohio Democratic Party who will conclave on June 10, but I would appreciate if people who know me could vouch for me if you know EC members or have connections? Please ask them to speak with me so I can understand what they are each looking for in a Chair?
☆ Give to Friends of Kyle Herman: I have some creative ideas to campaign both for Party Chair and for my re-election to Stow City Council on a pro-democracy message, and you can help reach more people by contributing here.
☆ Follow me and invite friends on Facebook, Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Subscribe to my Substack and visit HermanForStow.com.
Thank you,
Kyle
P.S. Read Part II where I expand on my plans as Chair…
Kyle we need a strong Chair. Let’s get it done!
I'm excited after reading this, Kyle! Ohio is so lucky to have you. Good luck.