Republican Rob Portman is Ohio’s junior senator, elected in 2010 to succeed the retiring George Voinovich, also a Republican. Portman grew up in Cincinnati, where his father in 1960 started a forklift company that eventually employed 300 people. His mother’s family owns the Golden Lamb, the oldest inn in Ohio, and his ancestors were Quaker abolitionists active in the Underground Railroad. Portman worked summers at the forklift company, sweeping floors and grinding old paint off trucks. That experience helped convince him that government should provide leeway for the private sector to prosper and create jobs. While at Dartmouth College, Portman took a semester off to work for Cincinnati area Rep. Willis Gradison, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. After graduating, he worked for Republican George H.W. Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign as part of the advance team setting up events—the beginning of a long association with the Bush family. He earned a law degree at the University of Michigan, and then worked for law firms in Washington and Cincinnati. Read More

Republican Rob Portman is Ohio’s junior senator, elected in 2010 to succeed the retiring George Voinovich, also a Republican. Portman grew up in Cincinnati, where his father in 1960 started a forklift company that eventually employed 300 people. His mother’s family owns the Golden Lamb, the oldest inn in Ohio, and his ancestors were Quaker abolitionists active in the Underground Railroad. Portman worked summers at the forklift company, sweeping floors and grinding old paint off trucks. That experience helped convince him that government should provide leeway for the private sector to prosper and create jobs. While at Dartmouth College, Portman took a semester off to work for Cincinnati area Rep. Willis Gradison, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. After graduating, he worked for Republican George H.W. Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign as part of the advance team setting up events—the beginning of a long association with the Bush family. He earned a law degree at the University of Michigan, and then worked for law firms in Washington and Cincinnati.

After Bush was elected president in 1988, Portman went to the White House as a presidential counsel and then was promoted to head the Office of Legislative Affairs. He returned to Cincinnati in 1991, and in January 1993, when Gradison resigned his 2nd District House seat, Portman ran to fill the vacancy. He had help from former first lady Barbara Bush, who made a radio ad for him, and he won the seven-candidate primary with 36% of the vote to 30% for former Rep. Bob McEwen. The special election was anticlimactic; Portman won with 70% of the vote and was easily re-elected from 1994 to 2004.

In the House, he got on the Ways and Means and Budget committees and became known for his fiscal conservatism and his ability to work across the aisle. He co-chaired the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service and won broad support for his repeal of the 3% excise tax on telephone service. He worked with Democrats, notably his current Senate colleague, Ben Cardin of Maryland (then a House member), on issues including pensions, welfare reform, land conservation and drug prevention. He helped revise 401(k) rules to make it easier for small businesses to offer pension plans, but he got nowhere with a 2002 bill to repeal the alternative minimum tax. He also sponsored the bill to create a National Underground Railroad Museum in Cincinnati.

In 2005, President George W. Bush appointed Portman as the U.S. trade representative, in charge of negotiating free trade agreements and representing U.S. interests in global talks on reducing trade barriers. A year later, Bush appointed him director of the Office of Management and Budget, a position that requires immersion in the arcana of federal spending. Portman succeeded in pushing the budget more toward balance and left the agency in 2007. He returned to the Cincinnati area, where he joined a law firm, taught a class at Ohio State University’s John Glenn School of Public Affairs, and coached his daughter’s soccer team.

Just after Voinovich announced in January 2009 that he would not run for a third term, Portman got into the contest for the seat, saying his focus would be on job creation. The timing of his candidacy did not seem propitious. He had virtually no name recognition beyond the Cincinnati media market. Democratic President Barack Obama had just come to office having carried Ohio and was then widely popular. And soon two Democratic officials with statewide name ID joined the race, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. Polls showed Portman trailing both of them. Unfazed, Portman campaigned around the state in blue jeans and a windbreaker, put out a six-point jobs program and cheerfully opposed the Democrats’ $787 billion stimulus bill and their health care overhaul. Portman raised serious money, $16.5 million, and he also profited from the fractious Democratic primary in May 2010, which Fisher won, 56%-44%.

Fisher derided Portman’s long friendship with the Bush family, telling The Columbus Dispatch, “Rob Portman had his hands on the steering wheel as George W. Bush drove us off the cliff and into the deepest economic ditch in most of our lives.” But Fisher had little money—much of the $6.4 million he raised was spent on the primary—and his position as Gov. Ted Strickland’s “jobs czar” in 2007 and 2008 proved a liability rather than an asset. Portman asserted that Ohio lost 400,000 jobs while he held the post. Portman called for a one-year suspension of the payroll tax, and he fended off criticism of his work as trade representative by saying he would make enforcement of trade laws a high priority and added it to his six-point economic plan. Portman was not a particular favorite of tea party activists, but they didn’t campaign against him either.

By October, this race was off everyone’s list of competitive contests. Fisher was far behind in the polls and out of money. On Election Day, Portman won 57%-39%. He carried 82 of 88 counties and ran even in usually Democratic northeast Ohio.