The slow walk to socialism: Undercover video lifts lid on Ohio Democrats’ plan for state
If the full-bore push to Democratic socialism seems more muted in Ohio, that’s all by design, an undercover video newly obtained by Ohio.News suggests.
While Ohio progressives may be working toward the type of politics that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pushes, they seem to recognize it won’t happen overnight. After all, as the old adage suggests, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!”
That shift, a field organizer with the Ohio Democratic Party said, will take time, and it starts with Democrat Amy Acton’s election as governor.
“If you want to move the needle, you have to start somewhere,” Ikera Ike, a field organizer with Ohio Wins, said in the video obtained by Ohio.News. “You can’t move the needle … and the needle has not moved in 10 years. The trans activists that I talk to, they know [that] if we want to have change, we’re gonna have to put her in office … to move more blue.”
A Democrat organizer argues in an undercover video obtained by Ohio News that in order to get a Zohran Mamdani-type in the state, Amy Acton first has to be elected: pic.twitter.com/WFHmqCJqt0
— Ohio.news (@RealOhioNews) October 15, 2026
Acton is hoping to knock off Republican Vivek Ramaswamy in next month’s general election. Polls show a tight race, which is somewhat surprising given Ohio’s status as a reliably Republican state in recent years.
“She’s not a lifelong politician, so … there’s going to be things that she doesn’t know how to avoid,” Ike said. “Two, she comes from it from a doctor’s perspective and not from a citizen’s perspective. And so, and in that way, it’s like you kind of need to put on your social cap instead of your doctor cap, and so with her, she’s going to have to learn to walk that line.”
That means the most progressive Ohioans might have to be patient, recognizing that politics in Ohio and New York City are drastically different.
“You have to merge. Like when you’re getting on the exit, you can’t just go all the way to the far fast lane; you’re gonna get in a car accident. You have to merge lane from lane,” Ike said.
“And so until we get to that point, we’re never gonna be New York,” Ike added. “We’re never gonna get [to] that point because like the the culture is just not there for it. It hasn’t been able to grow. You know, we’ve been growing just to fight Republicans every day. We haven’t been able to fight ourselves yet.”
The video is the latest in a series of undercover videos Ohio.News obtained. Previous videos stemmed from an Aug. 6 Ohio Wins training event, “Where Improv and Canvassing Collide,” in which volunteers participated in a role-playing session on interacting with voters about Flock cameras and “spitballing and improvising” when confronted with questions they don’t know how to answer.
Those videos also touched on the campaign of former Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, who hopes to return to Washington after his defeat two years ago. Polls show him in a tight race against Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted.
Brown has tried to paint himself as a moderate, but has targeted California for fundraising, and some of his past comments have made him sound more like a reliable liberal than a centrist.
“Here’s the thing: the reason why New York was able to vote for Mamdani is because they’ve been blue so long,” Ike said. “Since you’re able to have that, that status for so long, you’re able to get more and more progressive because that’s what the state is used to. That is what the city is used to.
“What is it that we have to change here in Ohio or here in Columbus? You have to get blue first,” Ike said.
