Mandel visits Galion ammo factory during campaign for US Senate seat
Josh Mandel received much applause from a crowd of nearly 75 Wednesday afternoon when he visited an ammunition factory in Galion.
Mandel, the state’s former treasurer, visited Galion LLC as part of his campaign to earn the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat held by the retiring Sen. Rob Portman.
The Marine veteran is running against six other Republicans: venture capitalist and author J.D. Vance, investment banker Mike Gibbons, former Ohio Republican Party chair Jane Timken, state Sen. Matt Dolan, and businessmen Mark Pukita and Neil Patel.
“Now is not the time to send jelly-kneed Republicans to Washington,” Mandel said. “We need to send steel-spined fighters to Washington.”
Mandel calls Galion ‘the backbone of our country’
Galion LLC produces nearly 750,000 bullets each month, according to Stanley Will, the company’s vice president of operations.
The company has 135 employees and does about $25 million in military business every year.
“The fact that you’re doing this right here in Galion, Ohio, that’s the backbone of our country,” Mandel said. “The second thing, you’re supporting the American warfighters.”
He told the workers that American manufacturing and the nation’s military were both important, and that they were a key part of both.
China, India and Mexico play too large of a role in manufacturing, the candidate said, indicating those jobs should be in Ohio.
“That’s the fight in front of us,” Mandel said.
He clarified that although he’s a Republican, he considers himself to be more of a constitutional conservative.
“In Washington, I think the Republicans have been just as bad as the Democrats,” Mandel said. “They’re giving the store away to China and all these other countries. That’s why I say it’s time to fight. We’ve got to send fighters to Washington.”
Taking on ‘weak, establishment Republicans’
Mandel said that too often Republicans who are sent to Washington try too carefully to work with Democrats, but then get taken advantage of when the Democrat party has the majority.
He said he calls them “soup and sandwich Republicans.”
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“You know how you dip your sandwich in soup and gets kind of soggy?” Mandel asked. “No more soggy, squishy Republicans.”
He said the state’s next senator will need to challenge not only Democrats, but also “weak, establishment Republicans if they’re acting like Democrats.”
Pro-life, pro gun
The next most important agenda of his campaign, he said, was protecting life “from conception to natural death.”
“I think we need to be doing everything we can to stop the murder of innocent babies,” Mandel said.
He also vowed to protect Ohioans’ Second-Amendment rights.
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“Our rights to bear arms are given from God, not from government,” Mandel said. “While we have this great tradition of hunting in Ohio, at the end of the day the reason we are blessed with the Second Amendment was to combat tyranny from the government.”
He said the Second Amendment helps protect every other right in the Constitution.
Pandemic ‘about power and control’
The COVID pandemic was an integral point of Mandel’s speech, particularly the effect it had on nurses.
He said that at the onset of the pandemic, nurses were forced to report to duty to work long hours with little protection from the disease, and that they responded to the challenge.
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“Then when the COVID rates are low, they’re saying to those same nurses, ‘If you don’t get a vaccine, you’re fired,'” Mandel said. “Wait a second. How does that make sense?
“That thing was never about health or science, it was about power and control.”
‘Oil and gas here in Ohio’
Energy was another key talking point of his visit to Galion, especially with fuel pumps across the city registering at $4 or more per gallon.
“The number one thing we can do to bring down gas prices for families in Ohio is to drill for oil and gas in America,” Mandel said. “I think Biden is crazy and dead wrong for pushing America to rely on other countries when we have an abundance of oil and gas here in Ohio.”
He said that a combination of Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania as a region is the third largest producer of natural gas in the entire world.
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Bringing down the cost of fuel will also help control the cost of food prices at the grocery store.
“The big spenders in Washington have to stop wasting our tax money,” Mandel said. “We have to reverse this horrible Biden inflation.”
Pledges to ‘fight for the American farmer’
Farmers in North Central Ohio are facing a difficult year ahead, the former treasurer acknowledged during his stop in Galion.
“As a United States Senator, I will do everything I can to fight for the American farmer,” Mandel said.
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He said he is “sick and tired” of big corporations pushing for legislators to rely on agriculture input from foreign countries.
“I think we have the best farmers in the world,” Mandel said. “We need to have policy leaders who understand the importance of growing American agriculture and stopping our reliance on foreign farms.”
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