Crunch time: It's just one day before the midterm election. The polls, at least in everything besides the U.S. Senate race, are close. Are you ready?
Get ready: Kyle Kondik, the political analyst for the University of Virginia and Ohio native, is the guest on the latest episode of Ohio Matters, the cleveland.com politics podcast. If you don't subscribe yet, you should. You can sign up on iTunes or Google Play, just to name a couple of options.
Legendary: Musician John Legend on Sunday made campaign appearances in Cincinnati and Cleveland, where he shared the stage with Democratic governor candidate Richard Corday and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Legend closed the Cleveland rally by singing a song from his Grammy-award winning song, "Glory," writes cleveland.com's Hannah Drown. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez also was on hand for the Cincinnati and Dayton events.
Republican governor candidate Mike DeWine had a busy weekend of campaign stops, including appearances in Cleveland, Geauga County and Toledo. U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci, the Republican Senate candidate, campaigned Saturday with Rep. Bill Johnson in Columbiana County and then Sunday with Sen. Rob Portman in Bowling Green.
For your watchlist: Cleveland.com's Jeremy Pelzer ran down his 12 top Ohio state legislative races to watch. They include Ohio's Senate DIstrict 3 between Republican Anne Gonzales and Democrat Tina Maharath and Senate District 5 between Democrat Paul Bradley and Republican Stephen Huffman.
Deja vu: Former Vice President Joe Biden made his second trip to Northeast of the week when he headlined a Saturday get-out-the-vote rally for Democratic hopefuls. As cleveland.com's Seth Richardson reports, his speech was essentially the same as one in Youngstown earlier last week, but with a noted emphasis on pushing people to the polls.
Hitting pause: Zack Space, the Democratic state auditor candidate, canceled his scheduled appearance at the Biden event to visit his mother, who is in failing health, according to a statement issued by the Space campaign.
Trumped up stakes: Tuesday's midterm election is a referendum on Donald Trump's presidency, Eric Trump said during a campaign stop in Canton on Friday. "He's 100 percent on the ballot because if we don't hold the House, if we don't hold the Senate, it's going to be so much harder to get anything done," Trump said, according to cleveland.com's Andrew Tobias. "They will make his life miserable." Trump was there to boost Renacci's campaign for Senate and Rep. Bob Gibbs' re-election campaign.
As a reminder: President Donald Trump is appearing in Cleveland this afternoon. His campaign says the rally at the IX Center will start around 3 p.m.
Also today: Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will campaign in Cleveland Monday morning at the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party headquarters with Steve Dettelbach, the former Northern Ohio U.S. Attorney and current Ohio attorney general candidate.
Air raid: Bloomberg News analyzed more than 3 million 2018 election ads across the country and mapped the results of what types of commercials are playing where. Health care was unsurprisingly number one, but deeper trends were also explored, such as there being more ads critical of Trump from Republicans than Democrats and Democrats running more agricultural-related ads than Republicans.
Fitz sighting: Ed FitzGerald, the former Cuyahoga County executive and 2014 gubernatorial candidate, was among those who wrote a letter of support for a businessman convicted of embezzling from his company's employee pension fund, writes cleveland.com's Eric Heisig. C. David Snyder, 66, nonetheless was sentenced to two years in federal prison on Thursday.
Another rare sight: After largely making himself scarce in the race to replace him, Ohio Gov. John Kasich made a campaign appearance for Mike DeWine in Columbus on Friday. "He looks at politics like we're all part of his family," Kasich said, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer's Jessie Balmert and Jackie Borchardt.
Also on Kasich's schedule: The possible 2020 candidate has scheduled Monday appearances on CNN, MSNBC, The View and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, according to the Columbus Dispatch's Randy Ludlow.
RIP: Daniel Best, a pharmaceutical executive from Bay Village who was appointed in March to lead U.S. Department of Health and Human Services initiatives to lower prescription drug prices, has died, writes cleveland.com's Sabrina Eaton. HHS Secretary Alex Azar announced Best's death in a Thursday statement.
Yikes: Listeners of a Cincinnati radio station were subjected to ads spouting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory over the weekend. The Cincinnati Enquirer's Scott Wartman writes that WLW management said under federal law, they had no choice but to run the campaign ad purchased by Jim Condit, Jr., a Green Party candidate for Ohio's 2nd Congressional District. The local Green party and 2nd District candidate Jill Schiller, a Democrat, both denounced the ad on Twitter.
Yikes again: In a Friday article, Ludlow excerpted passages from State Sen. Kris Jordan and Delaware County Recorder Melissa Jordan's messy divorce trial. Mrs. Jordan described an incident in which she said her husband, a Republican now running for the Ohio House, broke a car window with a snow shovel and then fired a gun into the ground. The same testimony, which Kris Jordan denied, made its way into a recent campaign commercial from Cory Hoffman, Jordan's Democratic opponent.
Five things we learned from Rep. Timothy Schaffer's April 9 financial disclosure statement. Schaffer, a Lancaster Republican, is running for re-election in House District 77.
1. Schaffer is the executive director of the Ohio Society of Professional Engineers, earning $25,000 to $49,999. In the Ohio House, he earned $66,943.93 last year.
2. Schaffer also is the executive director of the Engineer Foundation of Ohio and the Ohio Society of Association Directors, although he didn't report compensation for those positions.
3. He is investing in a pension with the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, a 401(k) in Lincoln Financial and has an annuity with Great American Insurance Group.
4. The House reimbursed him $1,530.88 for mileage between home and Columbus. He received a $1,218.81 reimbursement for 2016 travel to a National Conference of State Legislatures event.
5. He received a $149 legislator of the year award from the International Interior Design Association.
"Thank God this is ending."
- Cincinnati Enquirer politics columnist Jason Williams on the nasty 1st Congressional District election between Republican Rep. Steve Chabot and Democrat Aftab Pureval.