Candidates on right and left lining up to challenge Boehner The race for Ohio’s 8th district seat — now held by House Speaker John Boehner — is getting downright crowded. So far, three candidates have declared they will challenge the West Chester Republican and 12-term congressman.
First came Eric Gurr, a Liberty Township Republican and CEO of a computer consulting company, who said he decided to run after Boehner endorsed a U.S. military strike against Syria.
Then came another GOP contender, J.D. Winteregg, who lives in Troy and is a high school teacher, who said he’s been laying the groundwork for his campaign for a year now.
Voters in the 8th District are “finished with their representative standing up for the special interests of the D.C. Establishment,” Winteregg said in a statement earlier this month announcing his candidacy. “After allowing Speaker Boehner to represent our district for two decades, we need a new voice and bold reforms. As a 31-year-old, conservative millennial, I will strive to ensure that the values of accountability and liberty prevail in Congress.”
If that three-way GOP contest wasn’t enough, there’s also a Democrat in the race, Thomas Poetter, a 50-year-old professor at Miami University where he serves as the director of graduate studies. He said he has been thinking about a challenge for a while and became more eager during the government shutdown, sparked by GOP efforts to tie funding for the government to dismantling of the federal health care reform law.
“We’d like to put Speaker Boehner out of work before Republicans do,” Poetter said. He conceded that he has an uphill battle, given that the 8th District is solidly Republican. But he noted that Democrats didn’t even mount a challenge in the last election and said his party needed to step up.
“Nobody should have a free pass to Congress,” Poetter said. Citizen candidates have to be able to run in the United States, even if they have no money (and) no political organization behind them.”
Poetter, who is still working to launch his website and campaign organization, said his main theme will be leadership. But he’s also a supporter of Obamacare, and he said lawmakers should be focused on fixing the law, not repealing it.
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