Dem incumbent spars with GOP challenger in final debate for race that could decide House balance of power

CINCINNATI – The third and final debate in one of the most closely watched House races in the country took place in southwest Ohio on Tuesday night where Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman and his GOP challenger Orlando Sonza squared off on a variety of issues from immigration to the economy to a newly surfaced ethics complaint.

“As I walk around this district now, whether it’s the economy or followed very closely by the issue with the southern border immigration, those are at the forefront of voters minds,” Sonza told the crowd of mostly students at Xavier University in Cincinnati as he debated Landsman in the race for Ohio’s 1st Congressional District.

“My dad had to wait five years to be a naturalized citizen,” Sonza continued. “So what we’re seeing in this country right now flies in the face of not just my dad, but the millions of Americans that have come in here illegally. So how do we actually stop the over 15 million illegal immigrants that have come into our country, that are overburdening our economy, overburdening our housing market, and also bringing in fentanyl like endemic here in southwest Ohio, rising crime.”

“Well, you’ve got to immediately close that border and I know that, look, if I was in Congress in these last 20 months, I would have voted for the Secure Border Act unlike my opponent, that would have immediately secured the southern border, brought resources to our border Patrol, and also tightened up our asylum policies and actually sent resources to our immigration courts. So in both of those ways, you can bring in people here legally and welcome them in here, just like my family did to pursue the American dream. But we have to do it in a way that actually stops the bleeding at the southern border and actually tightens the policies and procedures that we have.”

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Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman and Republican challenger Orlando Sonza, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024, at the Schiff Family Conference Center at Cintas Center in Cincinnati. (Frank Bowen IV/The Enquirer / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)

Landsman responded to the immigration question by suggesting that he sees “eye to eye” with Sonza on many aspects of the problem.

“The fact is that you have to have a secure border, and for far too long, both parties have messed this up,” Landsman said, echoing the argument from many Democrats that the failed bipartisan border bill over the summer would have made a difference at the border.

“That was a good bill that will get 300 votes in the House, probably 80, 90 in the Senate,” Landsman said. “It was a bill put together by one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, and it would have come to us but for Trump. Trump did not want it to get in the way of his reelection campaign.”

On the economy, the issue that polling shows most Americans list as their top concern, Landsman took issue with billionaires receiving tax breaks while others struggle to make ends meet.

“I think more and more Americans, even though the economy has gotten better, more and more Americans are finding it harder and harder to pay all their bills, or if they pay all their bills, there’s almost nothing left for savings or vacation, and so the question becomes, who’s the economy built for?” Landsman said, taking aim at former President Trump’s tax policy.

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Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, in his Longworth Building office on Friday, November 3, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

“You can look at the results that those at the top, the 1%, the super wealthy, they’re doing great,” Landsman said. “This is the best it’s ever been for billionaires and big corporations. And that’s in part because the tax code is built for them. Eighty-three percent of the tax giveaways in the 2017 Trump tax plan went to the top 1%. But what if you flipped it? What if you said that 83 to 90 percent of all of that will go to the working folks and middle-class families you all like? You have a much better economy because you’d have more money in your pockets to buy goods and services here in our local communities. And that creates jobs as opposed to what happens when the one percent get more money.“

Landsman said that “fixing the tax code is number one” and “number two is that you’re going to have to deal with price gouging.”

Sonza discussed the economy by pointing out that his family of four is dealing with the high costs of goods. 

“So what’s the first problem?” Sonza said. “It is this hyperinflationary environment that we have. How do you fix prices that continue to increase due to this inflation? What you have to do is you have to stop this idea of spend, spend, spend in our federal government.”

Sonza, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, continued, “You can start with cutting the fraud, waste and abuse and the duplication and the redundancy in government. So stopping this over-bloated government spending fixes the inflation problem. But what do you then do with prices still high? Well, what you can’t do is make sure that we have a competitive environment that allows for prices to go down.”

“So we actually increase competition, whether it’s in health care or whether it’s in manufacturing or energy. If we increase competition here in America, we’re actually going to bring those prices down. I think that’s how you fix both of those problems.”

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Orlando Sonza is running against Dem. Rep. Greg Landsman in OH-01

On abortion, Sonza told the audience he does not “hide” the fact that he is pro-life but pledged that he would not support a federal abortion ban and believes in exceptions for life of the mother, rape and incest. Sonza said abortion is no longer a federal issue and acknowledged that Ohio voters recently chose to enshrine abortion access into the state Constitution. 

Sonza argued that Landman’s opposition to the Born Alive Act, which instructs doctors to attempt to save the life of a newborn who survives an abortion, shows that Democrats have adopted “extreme” positions on abortion that most Americans disagree with.

Landsman expressed his support for codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law.

“It’s not the role of politicians to be telling you what you can and can’t do with your healthcare and politicians, whether it’s at the federal level, at the state level, are getting in the middle of these very complicated medical decisions,” Landsman said. “It’s not only dangerous, but it has gotten people killed. There are women who have lost their lives because of these new laws. These bans are bad. They’re bad for women. They’re bad for doctors and bad for our daughters. They’re bad for our economies. They’re bad for the country, and this is a big difference. I will restore reproductive freedom.”

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Representative Greg Landsman, a Democrat from Ohio, speaks during a news conference to announce the Rail Act at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, on Thursday, March 30, 2023. ( Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

One of the more contentious exchanges occurred after Sonza brought up a recent ethics complaint against Landsman by a former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Commerce accusing him of breaking the law by waiting 20 months to disclose stock transactions, far outside the mandatory 45-day period.

“It was my opponent that violated Federal Stock Act in failing to disclose over 80 stock transactions within the 45-day timeline,” Sonza said. “How long did it take, Congressman Landsman, to disclose over 80 stock transactions? 20 months. That, to me is not a mistake. That’s a pattern of misconduct that I believe is a threat to democracy and I think we have the ability to hold our elected officials accountable.”

“It was a question of whether or not the stock trades were disclosed,” Landsman said. “They’ve all been disclosed. I have nothing to do with my trades. And so I didn’t know. Once I found out when we were putting our financial disclosure together, we disclosed them. It was late, and that was wrong. And I took responsibility. It happened to maybe 60, 70, 80 members of Congress in the last term, dozens this term. And we put in place a system to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Sonza pressed the issue again later in the debate.

“Those of you here, those of you at home are learning not 20 months prior, but 20 months later, that the sitting congressman who sits on the Small Business Committee in Congress fails to disclose over 80 stock transactions, some of them in the very corporations that he railed against his opponent in 2022, Big Pharma and Big Oil.”

“Forty-six days, a mistake, 48 days, a slip up, 20 months to fail to disclose that and the reasoning we get on this stage is because I don’t do my stock transactions?” Sonza added. “That’s not the way my wife and I train our kids on how to actually save the money. You are responsible for every dollar that goes into your piggy bank.”

The Cook Political Report ranks the 1st District race as “likely Democrat,” but Republicans have dedicated resources to the race as they look to protect their slim majority in the House. Landsman won by just over five points in 2022.

Ohio’s 1st District consists of the city of Cincinnati and all of Warren County and was represented by Republican Steve Chabot for over a decade before Landsman defeated him in 2022 following redistricting.