Yes, Tuesday’s Cincinnati mayoral primary was non-partisan, with no party labels on the ballot.
But low-turnout elections like this tend to attract high-information voters; and the electorate — those who bothered to show up — knew exactly who and what they were voting for when they made Democratic incumbent Aftab Pureval and Republican newcomer Cory Bowman the top two vote-getters in a three-person primary, where Pureval earned 83% of the vote, and Bowman 13%.
That means Bowman starts from a base of only 13% in a very low-turnout election. The question now becomes: How does he motivate the vast majority of Cincinnati voters who ignored Tuesday's election to care about him in November?
This is exactly what the city of Cincinnati is one-quarter of the way into 21st century — a deeply blue city that rejects MAGA Republicans from the top of the ticket to the very bottom.
The end result of Tuesday’s primary — which was necessary because a third candidate, Republican Brian Frank, was also on the ballot — will be a fall campaign between Pureval and Bowman in a city that hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1971. And that mayor, Eugene Ruehlmann, was not elected by the people; he was chosen by a GOP majority on City Council.
Cincinnati hasn’t even had a bona fide Republican candidate for mayor in the era of direct election of the mayor since Brad Wenstrup ran and lost to Mark Mallory in 2009.
Most Republicans know enough not to plunge into that rabbit hole.
So why is Bowman?
The 36-year-old half-brother of Vice President JD Vance will face Pureval in a city that is the brightest shade of Democratic blue in an increasingly blue county, inside a state that has voted for Donald Trump for president three times.
There’s no doubt there are a lot of MAGA people out there who will be thrilled to vote for the half-brother of Vice President Vance for Cincinnati mayor in Tuesday’s primary.
But should Bowman’s general election campaign fall short, there is every indication the young Butler County native, who moved to Cincinnati from the Tampa Bay area only five years ago, has plans to run for office again — perhaps in an Ohio subdivision that did not vote for Kamala Harris with 77% of the vote last fall.
Higher ground. Friendlier ground.
Ambitious young politicians — and Bowman certainly appears to be just that — leave markers wherever they go, hints as to their future plans.
The markers are not hard to follow.
He laid a very noticeable first marker in on the evening of April 15 when he played the role of “empty chair” at an NAACP mayoral candidates forum at the Community Action Agency in Bond Hill.
Pureval was there; he already had the support of nearly everyone in the room. Frank was there too, even though he had zero support in the NAACP.
Where was Bowman?
He was 1,100 miles away, in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, with his friend and supporter Fernando Cruz of Cruz Development LLC, posing for photos at an event with Patrick Bet-David, a right-wing podcaster and entrepreneur who has over 5 million followers on Instagram.
The point is, he wasn’t in that chair at the mayoral candidates forum.
During the course of the primary campaign, Ohio Republicans like state party chair Alex Triantafilou and Hamilton County GOP Chairman Russell Mock went way out of their way on social media to flood the zone with photos with Bowman, or exhorting Republicans to vote early for JD’s little brother.
Why bother? Both Triantafilou and Mock have no trouble with simple arithmetic. In fact, they are rather good at it.
Surely they don’t believe there are enough GOP votes in the city to know that turning a 13% showing in a low-turnout election into a majority win in the fall, even with a considerable increase in turnout, is the longest of long shots. Mission: Impossible.
So what is Cory Bowman up to? Is he being groomed by the GOP for a race higher up the food chain — one where a MAGA Republican might have a fighting chance at success?
We don’t know. Bowman’s not saying.
All we can do is turn to recent history as a guide.
Dial the clock back to 2009.
Cincinnati Republicans needed someone to take the hit and run against the incumbent mayor, Democrat Mallory.
The only Republican who would step forward was Wenstrup, a podiatric surgeon and Army Reserve officer who served in the Iraq War as a combat surgeon.
Wenstrup had never run for office before, but he worked hard at it and ended up with nearly 46% of the vote against Mallory.
Needless to say, the local GOP establishment was impressed.
Three years later, they recruited Wenstrup to challenge U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt in a 2nd Congressional District primary. Schmidt had created so much controversy as a member of Congress that the GOP establishment simply wanted her to disappear; and Wenstrup, they believed, was the one to do it.
Wenstrup defeated her in the 2012 primary and went on to hold the 2nd District seat until he decided to not run for re-election last fall.
Now, here’s a thought:
Ohio Republicans are looking at 2026 and eyeing the 1st Congressional District seat now held by Democrat Greg Landsman. They need a candidate who could peel away conservative voters in the Cincinnati suburbs and Warren County to help flip the seat from blue to red.
If that candidate were Cory Bowman, he would immediately be transformed into a national phenomenon.
It would by no means be a slam-dunk. Landsman would still be the favorite for re-election to a third term.
But, in the long run, it may make more sense than trying to convince Cincinnati Democrats that they should make JD’s kid brother their mayor.
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