CINCINNATI — Republicans who for years have represented some of the safest congressional seats in their party are suddenly under intense pressure in 2018, with Democratic challengers threatening to overwhelm them in suburban districts where President Donald Trump has struggled.

One of those districts belongs to Rep. Steve Chabot, an 11-term Republican who has gone years without a serious challenge in the southwestern corner of Ohio. He has been outraised — and, some Republicans say, outworked — by Democrat Aftab Pureval, the 35-year-old clerk of courts in Cincinnati-centered Hamilton County, who argues that the congressman has lost touch with a diversifying, suburbanizing district changing beneath his feet.


“The momentum is with us ... even though people can’t even pronounce my name,” Pureval said to laughter at a recent field office opening northeast of Cincinnati. (During Pureval’s race for clerk in 2016, he used an Aflac-style duck to poke fun at his name in his ads.)

And Chabot is not alone. A growing Republican fraternity that includes Reps. Dana Rohrabacher of California, Leonard Lance of New Jersey and John Culberson of Texas, who have served a combined 80 years in Congress in traditionally Republican areas, are dusting off their campaigns for the first time in a decade in a treacherous political environment. Chabot has faced tough races before — he lost his seat in 2008 and then won it back in 2010. But he has not been challenged since the Republican-controlled redistricting process redrew the district the next year.

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“It just took a little while to get him, you know, built back up and run a race because he hasn’t been targeted since 2010, and he won pretty comfortably then,” said National Republican Congressional Chairman Steve Stivers (R-Ohio). “But Steve never lost touch with his constituents and that’s why he’s in good shape.”

Stivers added that Chabot, whose campaign declined to make him available for an interview, “now has his organization up and humming the way he used to when he was in tough races.”

Another national Republican strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, had a harsher assessment: “The question is, can some of these incumbents, including Chabot, be defossilized?”

Pureval is pitching himself as an independent voice to voters in Chabot’s district. “As a Democrat, I reduced the size of government and saved the taxpayers nearly $1 million,” Pureval said in an interview with POLITICO, echoing his first round of TV ads.

He is running like a lot of red-district Democrats across the country. Pureval, who got his start in politics as student body president of Ohio State University, has vowed not to support Nancy Pelosi for speaker and rejected some proposals popular among liberals — like Medicare-for-all or abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Pureval also found some room for agreement on trade with Trump, with an eye toward the 51 percent of the district that voted for him in 2016.

“American workers have been getting a raw deal for a very long time,” Pureval said, while adding that he thought Trump’s approach to trade deals has been “ham-fisted.”

Those attitudes aren’t putting off Democratic voters hopeful of notching a win. “Being less partisan is a good thing around here,” said Keri Arinsmier, a 36-year-old voter who showed up to Pureval’s recent opening of a field office in Warren County. “This guy is a shooting star of a candidate because he’s practical,” said Valerie Naughton, another Warren County voter.

And Republicans acknowledge a close race is brewing. “Chabot is a name brand and Aftab is the new product on the market,” said Mark Weaver, a Republican consultant in the state. “It’ll come down to the west side of Cincinnati, who know Chabot well, but you also can’t deny the Democratic enthusiasm.”

Pureval’s positioning reflects Democrats’ knowledge that it won’t be easy to turn this seat blue. Former Hamilton County Democratic Party Chairman Tim Burke called Chabot “a very dangerous candidate who has surprised people with the races he’s won before.”

But Burke added that the district was “designed to ensure that Chabot be protected, [and] he’s not protected in the same way anymore.”

The 2016 election foreshadowed the district’s new competitiveness: While Trump romped to a 9-point victory in Ohio, he got a lower share of the vote in Chabot’s 1st District than Mitt Romney did in 2012, when Romney lost the state to then-President Barack Obama.

That happened in only one of Ohio’s 11 other GOP-held districts: the 12th District, a longtime Republican stronghold where the GOP flirted with a disastrous defeat in a recent special election before pulling out a narrow lead that is still awaiting certification, with provisional ballots being tallied in the Columbus-area district.

“That was a huge indicator of what’s to come in the suburbs,” said former Democratic Rep. Steve Driehaus. “The turnout you saw in Franklin and Delaware counties, and voters moving very strongly toward the Democratic candidates, tells you a lot about the mood out there.”

Chabot’s campaign panned talk of a Democratic surge in the suburbs, pointing to the raw vote total in the May primary, when 20,000 more Republicans voted in the primary than Democrats.

Pureval is seeking to emulate Driehaus, who unseated Chabot in the last Democratic wave election in 2008. “Those populations shifts, happening late in the decade, 2008 and 2018, the tremendous advantage Chabot once had isn’t there anymore,” Driehaus said.

But Chabot and his campaign see a key difference in the 2018 campaign, believing that Pureval is the “most liberal candidate I’ve ever had,” the Republican told The Cincinnati Enquirer in August, making him “so much more vulnerable.” Pureval, unlike Driehaus, is pro-abortion rights.

Chabot’s campaign spokesman Cody Rizzuto called Pureval a “far-left liberal,” adding that he’s “confident the voters will soundly reject his extremist views and associations.”

Chabot is also taking his argument to the airwaves, attacking Pureval for his tenure at the Hamilton County clerk’s office. The ad shows a clip of Pureval saying, “The era of political patronage — of ‘it’s more important who you know than what you know’ — is over.” Then, a narrator cuts in and says, “Aftab broke that promise on his very first day in office.

“He started firing longtime employees and used your tax dollars as hush money to buy their silence. Aftab replaced them with his own political cronies, including the son of the Democratic Party chairman.”

Pureval’s campaign responded with its own ad, calling the attacks “simply [not] true,” adding that “it’s not surprising that Chabot is running a negative campaign.”

“He’s a politician who’s been in Congress for 22 years and has little to show for it,” the narrator of Pureval’s ad continued.

