With dirt under his fingernails and a faded Harley-Davidson tattoo on his upper left arm, Scott Rupert is the anti-politician in every possible way.
The truck-driving singer in a Christian band hauls cargo across Ohio in an 18-wheeler, which he parks close to small crowds so the underdog candidate for U.S. Senate can point out the modesty of his mobile campaign headquarters. When the tractor-trailer doesn’t fit on roadways, over bridges or in parking lots, the constitutional conservative leaves the rig on the outskirts of town and catches a ride to small rallies where he rails against big government, regulations and taxes.
A senatorial candidate in 2012, Rupert is running again this fall in an election ripe for outside candidates. Joining him, fellow independent candidate Thomas Connors — a political philosopher and Canton attorney — and Green Party leftist Joseph DeMare — a Toledo factory worker — hope to pull the rug out from under Republican incumbent Rob Portman and Democrat challenger Ted Strickland, a former governor with a household name.
Connors, DeMare and Rupert are long-shot candidates. Together, they’ll spend less than Portman or Strickland raise in a single night.
But what they lack in viability they more than compensate for in the ability to alter the outcome of the election.
To measure their collective impact on the race Ohioans need only to look back at 2012, when Rupert was the only ballot candidate without a D or R beside his name.
The man from Mechanicsburg, a tiny rural town in mid-Ohio, personally chipped in 10 percent of the meager $6,000 he spent, despite a longstanding and contested federal tax bill. His major-party opponents dropped $2.7 million a piece.
Still, Rupert took 250,000 votes, about 4.5 percent of the total. With polls separating Portman and Strickland by as little as a percentage point, that’s enough to sway the outcome of Ohio’s all-important Senate race, already the most expensive in the country.
Overlooked influence
Ohio will be integral this year to deciding the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Oft-overlooked third party and independent candidates will be key.
If better known and taken seriously, these two neocons and one radical lefty could steer mainstream candidates to the fringes of their parties’ platforms.
Consider how Sen. Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, has pushed Hillary Clinton, the Democratic establishment’s pick for president, to embrace a higher minimum wage or reject free trade deals signed by her husband. Or how Donald Trump’s nativist blockade on immigration forced moderates like Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor with a Hispanic wife, and Sen. Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, to waffle on supporting a pathway to citizenship only months after Trump entered the race.
But the major-party candidates for U.S. Senate have largely ignored their low-key rivals. Like gravity, though, their unseen influence may bring one candidate to the floor after disgruntled voters mobilized by Trump crowd the polls on Nov. 8.
Independents to right
Rupert — the truck-driving, limited-government constitutionalist who grew up along Lake Erie — said his anti-political party agenda should appeal to any Ohioan disenchanted with major-party rule.
Connors, a civil attorney whose political beliefs are guided by profound empiricism and the Bible, said he’s in the race to win, not simply make a splash.
“I want both of them to be defeated,” Connors said of Strickland, Portman and their parties. “That’s the bottom line … We’ve got to get around the grip that they’ve got on us.”
Both independent candidates admit their hardened conservatism will likely siphon votes from Portman.
Political outcasts
The conservative independents accuse both major parties of listening to wealthy donors instead of the public.
Rupert is reminding voters that the U.S. Constitution didn’t create the two-party system. That came later, a by-product of politics and the natural segmentation of society along ideological lines.
“What I’m doing really doesn’t have anything to do with my politics,” Rupert said, seated in the customer lounge at Great Lakes Honda in Cuyahoga Falls where he stopped to unload eight cars and chat with a reporter in early May.
“My objective is to make the political parties obsolete, not to create a new version of the same old problem,” said Rupert, whose business card carries his independent candidate logo “i!” — a yin-yang-ish symbol he’d like to see as widely recognized as red elephants and blue donkeys.
The T-shirt Rupert wore read: “Lower taxes + less government = more freedom.” The motto is owned by FreedomWorks, an influential right-wing group that favors free markets and individual liberties over federal overreach — just like Rupert.
But FreedomWorks endorsed Republican Josh Mandel instead when Rupert first ran in 2012. The group’s reasons have everything to do with why Rupert has refused to run for the Libertarian Party, tea party or any other.
“If a candidate is ideologically aligned with FreedomWorks but has no path to victory or fundraising ability, we do not endorse them,” FreedomWorks spokesman Jason Pye said of his organization’s three-part checklist.
DeMare on the left
And don’t insult DeMare with notions of running a quixotic campaign against a fellow liberal.
“First of all, I’m going to win this election,” DeMare said. “It’s not a question of me taking votes from Strickland. It’s Strickland taking votes from me.
“Second, I wouldn’t call the Greens liberal. I would call us more radical,” said the environmentalist, anti-capitalist and social justice advocate who wants to “tax multibillionaires out of existence.”
“We will not take money from corporations or PACs,” the factory worker said. “That means we don’t have money, but what we do have is people who volunteer and love democracy. That’s why our party exists: to promote democracy.”
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug.