Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…Right off the highway, it was big. You drive by, it has a presence. Yeah, you can't miss it. It's just part of the city. My dad always used to say when we were little, he would point at the smokestacks and say as long as there's smoke coming out of there, everything's going to be okay in Northeast Ohio. Just don't worry about it because that means people are working. I think at the time it was like 20,000 people working there. It's not precisely correct, but directionally correct. Things changed hands multiple times, gone through multiple bankruptcies. I think it's fewer than 500 people working there today. That kind of transformation is what I felt the real takeaway of 2016 was and I wasn't seeing enough understanding of that or nuance on that. I ran on primarily an economic message and a unity message—in 2018, which is when I ran—around, hey, look, we've got to work together. We're from Northeast Ohio. We should know that the way you solve problems is together. We're actually like a purple part of the state, typically, so let's put all this chaos aside, let's start working together, and let's start building our economy in a way that works for all of us. That was essentially my message. Obviously there was sort of nuance in there and specifics, but that worked. The second part of it—so you get that message—the advice I was getting from people who've been in politics forever was you have to do two things. You have to build a great team and you have to raise money. If you can do those two things, you can probably have some success. I said I've run sales teams before and I know how to manage revenue. It's not rocket science, and I think I can build teams. My current chief of staff was campaign manager at the time. I went and found him. We sat at a bar together for about 3½ hours until I got him to say yes. I just want to warm him down, but he still hasn't left, so I think he's somewhat happy. My message then was, looks like I view this as a partnership. Sure, my name will be the one on the door, but we're partners in this, and that means a lot of things to me. We've had a good run together and a lot of fun. Like I said, on the revenue side, I built a custom salesforce dashboard, which I don't think is common for congressional members. And probably not the candidates themselves doing that.…

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