COLUMBIANA, Ohio — The day Rep. Bill Johnson announced he was resigning from his congressional seat that skims along the Pennsylvania and West Virginia state lines to become president of Youngstown State University, Tammy Tsai came home from filming local residents’ stories about how the massive local train derailment had changed their lives, looked at her husband, Dr. Rick Tsai, and said flatly, “You need to run for Bill Johnson’s seat.”
Without skipping a beat or asking her what she was even talking about, Rick Tsai recalls telling her, “You know what, I will,” adding he had no idea at the time Johnson wasn’t still seeking reelection for the seat he had held for 14 years.
Rick Tsai explains it was a sort of “Shawshank Redemption moment” for him similar to when Andy Dufresne carved his initials in the wall and the chunk of concrete fell out, showing him a possible way to escape.
“That is how I felt in that split second, and I believe if I win this, there is a way out for this region,” he said.
“I had gotten to the point, like many East Palestine residents, that there are no ramifications for incompetence in government and corporations [or for] their disassociation with the people who lack the political power to persuade them to do the right thing,” he said.
Before Feb. 3, 2023, Rick Tsai would have never even considered a toe dip into American politics. He said he had a pretty apolitical worldview that began with a youth voting for Democrats “because they were like the Republicans of today in that they were for the working class.” He didn’t vote for president at all from 2000 until 2016 because he said “both parties kept skipping over the working class.”
“I had never voted Republican until Trump rode down that escalator and gave a speech that spoke to the working class about the importance of the dignity of work,” he explained.
“And I certainly never thought of running for political office,” said the chiropractor, who runs his own private practice across the state line in Pennsylvania and has spent the last year documenting his testing of the water and sediment in East Palestine creeks after the train derailment.
Rick Tsai is a first-generation American whose father fled China just as communism began to sweep the country.
“My father came here as [a] student. Once here, things began to change rapidly in China so much so that my grandfather just disappeared,” he said.
His mother is of Polish and Hungarian descent.
“Our family settled here when I was 3, and I came back here in the ’80s after college and beginning my career to live in a place that I love and call home,” he said.
Overlay a map of the bioregion and political unit of Appalachian Ohio with a map of the 17 counties that make up the 6th Congressional District: Belmont, Carroll, Columbiana, Gallia, Guernsey, Jackson, Jefferson, Lawrence, Meigs, Monroe, Noble, Washington, Athens, Mahoning, Muskingum, Scioto, and Tuscarawas. A generous amount of them adjoin or include the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and Appalachian Plateau that make up this region.
Voters in these places for generations were the working-class union voters and the very heart of the New Deal coalition, and they were evenly split in 2008 between Barack Obama and John McCain.
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However, just two years later, the crack in that coalition was beginning to show when Johnson surprised even Republican strategists by defeating incumbent Charlie Wilson (not the movie one) in that wave election year. By 2016, one of the widest swings from Democrat to Republican in presidential contests in the country happened here when Trump won handily in this district.
The two other Republicans vying for his seat are Reggie Stoltzfus of Paris Township and state Sen. Michael Rulli of Salem. Democrats in the race are Michael L. Kripchak of Youngstown and Rylan Z. Finzer of Bedford Heights. The primary election is March 19 and is likely a safe seat for the Republicans — something 20 years ago would have never happened.