A young Indian-American law student defeated 3 other aspirants recently to win the Republican nomination for an Ohio state House seat following the death of the incumbent.
Niraj Antani, 23, who won the GOP nomination for the 42nd State House District July 17, has his volunteers out knocking on doors and hopes to raise the estimated $50,000 he thinks he needs to win the Nov. 4 election.
The first-time candidate won 31 of the 58 votes cast at the Montgomery County Republican Party meeting in Dayton. The County leadership wants to put a new face on the GOP which is often accused of not being multicultural enough. This is their chance to do so with the least risk of losing the seat. The 42nd District seat has long been held by Republicans, and Presidential candidate Mitt Romney won 58 percent of the vote here in 2012. The seat opened up when State Rep. Terry Blair died in June.
Antani, whose parents came to the U.S. in 1978, was born in Miamisburg, south of Dayton. His father Jaimini Antani worked at Hewlett-Packard for 35 years and died in 2010. His mother, Kokila, a homemaker, is thrilled with her son’s victory. “Wow, Proud feeling great. wishing you all success,” she says on her son’s Facebook page after the July 17 party vote. His brother Shilp is a chemical engineer who works at Cargill. His mother is a homemaker. “This is my community, my home. I have friends and neighbors here I’ve known for my lifetime and I want to help them,” Antani told News India Times. He has 2 years of law school left which he said he would complete attending night classes.
Blair was expected to be a shoo-in at re-election, and the Montgomery County Republican Committee expects Antani to sail in. This is especially so because even though Democrats see Antani as weaker than Blair, they have yet to find a candidate suitable to counter the law student’s youth and “inexperience,” as the Montgomery County Democratic Party Chairman Mark Owens told Dayton Daily News. But right now, the “experienced” Democrat in the race is 67-year old Leonard Johnson, who has apparently said he is keeping the seat “temporarily” warm until the party finds someone more suitable.
Republicans say the times they are a changin’ and Antani represents that much-needed change in their party, the Daily News quoted Republican Committee members saying. And Antani is not that inexperienced. He was chair of Ohio’s Young Americans for Romney in 2012, and worked on other state campaigns. Besides, Republicans would be treading the footsteps of Democrats in Ohio who have not shied from electing youthful candidates. United States Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, was elected to the Ohio state House when he was just 21 back in 1975, the Daily News noted, and former Democratic State Rep. Derrick Seaver was elected when he was just 18 in 2001.
Regardless of his age, Antani sounds personable on the phone. He says he wants to reform education to produce skilled workers and attract manufacturing companies to the district, which despite being in Republican hands for a long time, has some 18,000 skilled jobs going a-begging, according to him. But he credits Republican Gov. John Kasich with creating “hundreds of thousands of private sector jobs,” yet obviously, not in the 42nd District. “We can do better,” Antani says.
He is also concerned about the widespread drug use. “Sixty percent of all deaths in Montgomery County are due to heroin, the 2nd highest of all counties in Ohio,” he said.
To create a skilled workforce, Antani says, the obsession with a four-year liberal arts degree has to be destroyed. “I don’t believe that every kid needs to go to a four-year liberal arts college. Welders, electricians are good jobs,” he says and contends that high schools push graduates towards liberal arts when they should be channeling youth to technical jobs. “The Dayton area has a good history of manufacturing and I want to bring that back.” His plan is to work toward providing a family tax and regulatory structure that will attract companies and at the same time create a skilled work force. He says several technical schools have closed in the Dayton area in the last few years because not enough students were enrolling. He hopes to redirect state money away from four-year colleges to technical schools and community colleges.
A fundraiser is scheduled this month, where relatives, friends, the Indian-American community, and well-wishers are expected to chip in to meet a significant portion of the amount needed, Antani hopes.