It’s a lonely existence, being a Republican politician in deep-blue Cuyahoga County. As one of only three Republicans on an 11-member County Council, Jack Schron knows the feeling. “If you want to draw our districts and look at the county from a distance, there’s just a big smile face,” he says, of the swath of districts that extend from Bay Village to North Royalton to Gates Mills. “We call it the Republican smile face.” But Schron wasn’t happy in 2014 when the Jergens CEO lost the race for county executive to Beachwood Democrat Armond Budish. Yet despite the defeat, Schron is still preaching his message of pragmatic, business-friendly conservatism.
Even in high school, I was a conservative business guy.
When I ran for County Council, we won 60-plus percent. And that’s running against a guy who outspent me 2-to-1, Rick Taft. If you look at Pepper Pike, it’s more Democrat than Republican. So I felt very good. People thought that my message was clear enough to introduce on a countywide basis.
I was really hoping that we could have made a big statement, which would be to have the first Republican elected countywide in a nonjudicial race for a long time. We gave it a lot. We had over 133,000 people vote for me. That’s the highest a Republican’s gotten in a long, long time in Cuyahoga County.
I’m in sales at Jergens. I know about selling. Our first Republican candidate [for county executive] was Matt Dolan. He got it started. Then I came in. I had four times as many votes within the African-American community. And I think that whoever runs next time will have more. In sales, it takes three to six times to get your message out there before you can actually be impactful and change the thinking of whoever is buying your product.
In this particular case, our product is the Republican Party in Cuyahoga County. We’re saying to the world, How has that worked out for you these last 40 or 50 years, being in a single-party philosophy? Has that really worked out to your benefit? What I believe, as a Republican in Cuyahoga County, the great equalizer is a job. Once you get a job, it will help rebuild our schools, our families, our communities and everything about them.
[County Republicans] are gathering folks you would have not thought of in our big tent. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I have a crystal ball and can tell you what impact that’s going to have with the presumptive candidate. But sometimes you take one step forward, then two steps back, then three steps forward. — as told to Sheehan Hannan