LIMA — Jeff Sites, a 1985 graduate of Bath High School, is making another bid for Ohio’s Fourth District congressional seat, announcing his campaign to unseat U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, weeks after Jordan voted to exclude Pennsylvania and Arizona’s electoral college votes from certification.
Sites references that vote and the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol as his motivation to take another shot to oust Jordan, who has represented the Fourth District since 2007 and remains one of former President Donald Trump’s top defenders in Congress.
“I knew that I had to run again because I could not let my country go on this way,” Sites told The Lima News on Monday. “Jim Jordan is part of that reason. When he stood up in Congress and questioned the election, I knew that I had to run against him again.”
Months after an unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign, Sites still describes himself as a moderate Democrat more concerned with “kitchen-table issues” like preserving Social Security benefits, making health care more affordable and ensuring the middle class is not left out of the post-pandemic economic recovery like it was after the Great Recession.
Sites, a warehouse manager in Lima and U.S. Army veteran, was unemployed for 22 months during the Great Recession, an experience which shook Sites “to the foundation” and which forms his understanding of the post-pandemic economic recovery.
Key to that effort, Sites said, is ensuring that workers have safe workplaces to return to and that small, local businesses are not left out of the recovery at the expense of large corporations.
“We see that time and again where we have someone who gets sick and they bring it back to the family and it’s devastating for families,” he said. :We need to make sure that workplaces are as free of COVID as we can so we have confidence that going back to work, we won’t catch that virus.”
As for Jordan, who handily won his re-election campaign against Democrat Shannon Freshour last November by 38 percentage points, the long-time Congressman has been rumored as a possible candidate to replace U.S. Sen. Rob Portman or to challenge Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in the 2022 Republican gubernatorial primary.
