Thread by @AndrewJTobias

Hello from the west side of Cincinnati. I’m across the street from where Vivek Ramaswamy will hold a town hall this evening on crime and public safety. It comes after a video of a downtown brawl went viral. Local Democrats are holding counter programming here.

I spent an hour chatting with people on both sides of the street. The protesters all agree the video was bad, but blown out of proportion for political reasons.

Celeste Reece compared it to the Springfield cats and dogs situation, around which Ramaswamy also held a town hall.

"I do believe that there is an incentive for people running in Ohio, just like we saw with the cats situation that you know, they were eating cats in different parts of Ohio. And I think that this is just one of those things that they're using once again," Reece said.

Attendees said the video shocked them. A couple people I spoke with don’t necessarily think Cincinnati is unsafe.

Gary Bryce said it’s trending in the wrong direction.

“It’s emblematic of the bad people running around town who haven’t been incarcerated like they should be.”

Inside the rally, they’re working through the speaker lineup. Cory Bowman, JD Vance’s half brother and Republican Cincinnati mayoral candidate is up.

“Many of us, for those people that are in the city, we knew that it was taking a turn on our streets to being unsafe.”

(Bowman came in second in the March primary and qualified for a runoff… although he finished 70 points behind Mayor Aftab Pureval.)

Bowman has a line that gets people going and speaks to what's animating his candidacy.

"Many of you know who my relative is... The difference between me and the person I'm running against is he's trying to use Cincinnati to get to DC. I'm trying to use DC to get to Cincinnati."

Ramaswamy explains why he’s here.

Before transitioning to audience questions, Ramaswamy has Sarah Herringer, whose husband was murdered in their home in Over the Rhine in June, take the stage.

“He was killed in his own home because of how this city is run,” she says.

This murder case was horrible - I remember reading about it - but it did not get a fraction of the attention as the viral video that prompted this rally.

cincinnati.com/story/news/cri…

The Q&A portion drops into the deep end of a race relations conversation.

"You can look on YouTube all around the country our people getting crucified," says an elderly Black man." Nobody says anything about it. But when something happens like this it’s a big uproar."

Another Black guy wearing a MAGA hat speaks up. He says Democrats are really the racist party. He gets some applause.

Ramaswamy seems to endorse creating a state database showing sentencing decisions by local judges. Democratic Ohio Supreme Court justices campaigned for such a thing in 2022 against opposition, more or less, from Republican Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy.

Ramaswamy says: "My view is, you may agree or disagree, but we have a right to at least know what decisions our judges are making."

Multiple times, Ramaswamy has referred to meeting earlier today with Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval and police leadership.

He said they were reluctant to do so, and only did so when he promised their conversation would remain private.