In a fundraising shot across the bow of any would-be Republican challengers, Gov. Mike DeWine has $3.6 million in campaign cash on hand ahead of his 2022 re-election bid.
The Ohio Republican Party paid $78,271 in campaign bills for DeWine, who received the maximum or near-maximum $13,200-plus donations from 25 people, including from two of Ohio's wealthiest families — Les and Abigail Wexner of New Albany and Albert and Audrey Ratner of Lyndhurst.
FirstEnergy’s largely employee-funded political action committee gave $25,202 to the 2018 DeWine campaign and $10,000 to his inaugural committee. Its CEO, Chuck Jones, also provided $12,700 in food and beverages for a DeWine fund-raiser.
Last fall, DeWine's campaign gave $19,755 in prior political contributions from three of the men indicted for racketeering — Matt Borges, Juan Cespedes and Jeff Longstreth — to the Ohio Association of Foodbanks.
Here's how Ohio's other Republican statewide executive officeholders fared in raising campaign cash in the last half of 2020: Attorney General Dave Yost brought in slightly more than $1 million — including a few dollars shy of $750,000 from the Ohio Republican Party, which also picked up $101,406 in expenses — and reported a balance of $1.4 million.
Potential challengers include former Congressman Jim Renacci of Wadsworth, a multi-millionaire who could pour his own money into a race.
Although the wealthy DeWine has said he plans to pay himself back , his campaign made no payments toward $4 million in outstanding personal loans he made to his winning campaign in 2018. DeWine spent a record $35.6 million on his race in beating Democrat Richard Cordray by 3.7 percentage points.
Wayne Michael Boich, Jr., the CEO of the Boich Companies, donated $10,000 to the Cordray campaign in May. The Boich Companies and FirstEnergy Ventures are partners in a coal mining operation called Signal Peak Energy, a subsidiary of the Global Mining Holding Company, LLC.
Republican Mike DeWine continues to raise the most money from fossil fuel and utility interests in Ohio’s race for governor, but Democrat Richard Cordray has also received campaign contributions from the coal industry and lobbyists for FirstEnergy.
The DeWine campaign also received an in-kind contribution of “Campaign Meeting Food & Beverage” in May from Brooke Cheney, a lobbyist for the Government Policy Group who represents the Ohio Coal Association and Duke Energy. Cheney’s in-kind contribution was valued at $173.21.
The Cordray and Dewine campaigns recently declined to take positions on the slated closure of FirstEnergy’s Davis-Besse nuclear power plant, according to the Sandusky Register. Ohio’s current Governor John Kasich, a Republican, voiced opposition to proposals to bail out FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants last year.
DeWine made headlines last year when it was revealed that he had personally invested in Energy Transfer Partners, one of the companies behind the Rover Pipeline project. At the time, DeWine was under pressure to sue the Rover Pipeline for $2.3 million in unpaid fines developers owed to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency for illegal discharges and spills. DeWine claimed that he had sold his stock in Energy Transfer Partners earlier in the year, and he soon announced a lawsuit to recover the unpaid fine from the Rover Pipeline.