Stupid Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) Tricks

Amy Acton is the Democratic Party nominee for Governor in Ohio.

She is also an anti-LGBTQ bigot, having referred to trans girls as boys and making a ban on TG athletes central to her campaign. 

In an attempt at damage control, her campaign scheduled a meeting with LGBTQ advocates.

Sounds like a good move, only Acton did not attend the meeting and excluded trans people from the meeting.

She sounds like a perfect candidate for the consultants busy sucking the marrow out of the Democratic Party. 

Amy Acton, Ohio Democratic Candidate for Governor, has seen her relationship with the state’s LGBTQ+ community go from bad to catastrophic. Weeks after Acton endorsed a transgender sports ban and called transgender girls “boys,” the fallout has been intense: the Ohio Democratic Party forced its own Progressive and Pride caucuses to delete their criticism and a meeting the campaign promised would begin repairing the damage instead further inflamed tensions. Inside sources who have gone public now say the “listening session” was a debacle. Acton did not show up, her campaign manager barred Arienne Childrey—Vice Chair of the party’s Pride Caucus, a transgender candidate for the Ohio House, and Ohio’s first openly trans city council member—from even entering the Zoom call. When another advocate demanded to know why Childrey was barred, she was ejected. The Chair of the Progressive Caucus, Kim McCarthy, was locked in the waiting room during the entire “listening session.” And in the end, the campaign ultimately refused to apologize for calling trans girls “boys,” refused to retract Acton’s support for a transgender sports ban, and ended the meeting with no plans for what come next.

………

According to notes obtained from a source who attended the meeting, the session opened with a blow: Dwayne Steward of Equality Ohio, reading what appeared to be a prepared statement, announced the organization was rescinding Acton’s “A” rating on its LGBTQ+ candidate scorecard. “This is not about punishment, but partnership,” Steward said. “Harm has been done. Attacking trans people isn’t just wrong, it is a losing strategy.” From there, the meeting devolved. Multiple attendees demanded to know why Childrey had been barred from an event about the LGBTQ+ community. Campaign manager Philip Stein responded only that the meeting was “mostly a space we want to listen to the folks that we picked here.” When pressed on why the event had been titled a “conversation” rather than a one-way listening session, Stein conceded that running this kind of meeting was “not his area of expertise” and that he could “only apologize for the way that the event was titled.” 

………

The political math of Acton's position doesn't add up. Republicans aren't going to reward her for baseline levels of transphobia—Ramaswamy will run ads against her on any number of transgender issues regardless. What Acton’s anti-trans turn does is depress turnout among Ohio’s LGBTQ+ voters and allies in a race separated by less than a single percentage point. And the campaign's response to that reality has been, at every turn, to punish the people telling her so. The demand of LGBTQ+ Ohioans still stands unanswered. Until it is met, Acton has given Ohio's LGBTQ+ community every reason to believe she would govern exactly the way her campaign has conducted itself—with the people she claims to represent locked in the waiting room. 

To quote (not) Tallyrand, this is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.