Democrats claimed rural Ohio Republicans were too racist to back Vivek for governor. But Ramaswamy won 82.5% of the primary vote and every county. Their delusion will end up biting them. Ohioans care about issues over identity politics. Here's my op-ed in today's Dispatch:

This is why some people feel like AI-induced worker displacement talks are fear mongering and why others feel that it will cause a massive unemployment crisis AI is impacting sectors unequally and workforce infrastructure is the equalizer. We have to find effective ways at moving those displaced workers into other arenas.

When the Speaker attends your launch… you've got the room. The Ohio Nuclear Alliance launched this week, and Speaker Huffman @matthuffman1 showed up and told the room he thinks 100 years from now, most energy will be nuclear. That's quite the signal. Ohio has been building toward this for a while now with Centrus Energy in Piketon, Meta's nuclear commitments and federal deployment dollars finding their way to state-level projects. What's been missing is a unified industry voice that can sit across from legislators and make a coherent ask. That's what ONA is. I've spent enough time in the building to know what Huffman's presence actually means. A trade association standing up with the Speaker's blessing signals that the relationship infrastructure is being built. The coalition work, the appropriations conversations, the lobbying capacity all have to exist before a bill ever gets written. When the Speaker shows up to your launch, he's telling everyone in the room how to read the legislative calendar. The policy window on nuclear just got a lot cleaner.

There's a massive disconnect between how Silicon Valley talks about AI and how the rest of the country experiences it. The tech world frames AI as liberation and productivity unlocked. Drudgery eliminated. A rising tide. For a lot of working Americans, it looks like something else. Communities have already lost manufacturing jobs to globalization. Then they got hit by the opioid crisis. Those communities are not hearing the AI liberation narrative and nodding along. They're watching another wave of displacement accelerate while the people building the technology give speeches about abundance. Very few voices are seriously sitting at the intersection of acknowledging the genuine technological transformation happening while also taking seriously the real human cost landing on specific communities. Workforce displacement from AI isn't a problem to prepare for in the future. For a lot of people it's a current problem. The policy infrastructure to address it is nowhere near keeping pace with the change. The disconnect between Silicon Valley's messaging and the reality is a problem that will soon be impossible to ignore.

Portsmouth, Ohio wasn't a random casualty of the opioid crisis. It was a target. Purdue Pharma and companies like them didn't stumble into Appalachian Ohio by accident. They marketed directly into communities that were already bleeding with displaced coal workers and people hit hard by the Great Recession. They were towns that had watched their economic foundation collapse and hadn't found anything to replace it. The perfect storm wasn't accidental. Coal mine closures created the desperation while the recession deepened it. Then pharmaceutical companies showed up with an aggressively marketed product and a patient population with limited options and limited political power. Portsmouth became ground zero. The Ohio Valley more broadly became a case study in what happens when corporate profit motive meets economic devastation with no meaningful regulatory check. JD Vance wrote about this in Hillbilly Elegy. He humanized the people living inside that crisis in a way that the national media largely hadn't. But the story underneath the story is the deliberate corporate strategy that created the conditions. It deserves as much attention as the human cost it produced.

Most people think of Cleveland as one thing. It's actually several completely different cities stitched together. I’m going to generalize a bit here, but bear with me. The east side has large, established communities that are typically more white collar, more historically connected to professional and academic institutions. The west side traditionally has working-class neighborhoods that have been there for generations, with distinct economic realities, cultural priorities, and political instincts. Those two populations live in the same city, vote in the same elections, and want fundamentally different things from their elected officials. That's not unique to Cleveland, but Cleveland is a good example of why city-level political analysis that treats urban voters as a monolith gets everything wrong. "Urban voters" isn't a bloc, it's a collection of distinct communities with distinct histories that happen to share a zip code. The candidates and campaigns that figure out how to speak to each of those communities specifically and not just to "the city" in aggregate are the ones that find votes everyone else missed.

Who would’ve thought that this very serious looking group wouldn’t be able to pull this off?

Over 250,000 people have lost their jobs to AI. We're tracking right now at jobslost.ai We’re tracking things like no. of companies, people per layoff event and locations hit hardest. Can see every bubble on the map Check it out here: jobslost.ai

Even if it doesn’t replace, it will most definitely displace. Either way it’s a crisis worth preparing for.

Regardless of what you think of JobsOhio.. @mdkmoto 100% right about this: "A skilled workforce is not a side issue in economic development – it is central to it. States that are winning today are investing aggressively in talent pipelines, especially in sectors like advanced manufacturing and defense.”

Reconstruction era politics. Sure to be wildly successful for Democrats! Thanks for underscoring the point of my op-ed: Dems have their heads in the gutter

Congressman Fine's bill is a start. What it doesn't address is the 40-something in a GM IT role who finds out this week that their job is gone. Starting early matters. The missing infrastructure is for people who needed the onramp yesterday.

What happens when someone gets displaced at 42 with no career exploration infrastructure at all? This is an almost entirely unaddressed question. We build on ramps for students, yet we almost never build them for adults who need them just as much.