“I believe we’re going to see some amazing surprises on Tuesday,” Republican candidate Cory Bowman — the first of his party to make it through a Cincinnati mayoral primary since 2009 — told his congregation at the West End’s River Church on Sunday, Nov. 2. “I believe that we’re going to see people shocked at what God can do in an election in this city.”
Two days later, voters delivered a second record-setting win and another four-year term for his opponent.
The Associated Press called the race less than 45 minutes after polls closed. The final tally came to a landslide of 78% for the incumbent mayor, Democrat Aftab Pureval. It was a standout result on a strong night for Democrats across the country.
Even supporters who attended Bowman’s election results party in the West End told CityBeat they came to demonstrate solidarity and had not anticipated a win.
Still, standing before parishioners again on Nov. 9, the pastor and coffee shop owner took a victory lap.
“God told us to do it,” he said of his candidacy, which he announced after attending the second Trump inauguration with his paternal half-brother, Vice President JD Vance. “He didn’t tell us to do it and then [say], ‘This is what’s going to happen at the end.’ He just said, ‘Will you do this?’ And he needed a yes or no from us, right? And we just said yes. … We fulfilled that.”
Because of their interactions with Cincinnatians on the campaign trail, added Bowman’s co-pastor and wife, Jordan Bowman, “there’s people who were going to Hell before that are not going there anymore.”
The River Church Cincinnati, where the Bowmans address a regular Sunday morning congregation of around 40, is one of 22 affiliated River Churches operating across the country. Each is ministered by students of conservative Floridian megapastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who runs the original River Church in Tampa Bay, Florida.
Howard-Browne’s teachings include condemnation of homosexuality, claims that the planet’s major institutions are run by Rockefeller-affiliated “Lucifarians” and insistence that Hollywood is rife with Satanist cannibals. Bowman has not espoused these beliefs, but he has hosted Howard-Browne in Cincinnati and echoed his teachings on faith healing, the belief that physical or mental healing can be achieved through the power of prayer.
Both of their churches resisted COVID-19 restrictions in 2020, encouraging members to attend in person despite stay-at-home orders and hundreds of thousands of new COVID cases each day.
In the River’s charismatic evangelical tradition, God offers “supernatural provision” of health, enlightenment and material comfort for the faithful and generous — an unlimited triumphal ascent.
Bowman claimed on Oct. 5 that his own experience of supernatural provision has seen God furnish him with cars, money, guitars, vehicles and audio equipment for the church. He told congregants on Nov. 2 that he’d seen people cured of life-threatening illnesses after campaign events.
“We’ve been able to pray for people to see a miraculous healing in the middle of a campaign event,” he said. “And they’ve been healed of stage four cancer.”
So how does a gospel of provision handle a 56-point rout?
It might claim another victory that’s harder to quantify. Bowman has, framing the campaign in terms of attention and awareness.
It might cast the unsuccessful run as the prelude to a future campaign. Bowman’s post-election comments suggest he’s considered it.
His loss underlines a century of waning Republican influence in the Queen City, once a stronghold for the GOP, and highlights the risks of running with ties to the increasingly unpopular Trump administration — no matter how hard the candidate tries to nudge national politics offstage.
Running on ‘red meat’ in a blue county
No set of odds ever put Bowman in range of victory.
Hamilton County has broken blue in every presidential election since 2008. The people of even-bluer Cincinnati have not elected a Republican mayor since Prohibition.
Closer to the candidate: Vance, a Cincinnati resident, would have lost his 2022 Senate bid to Democrat Tim Ryan if Hamilton County spoke for the state.
Bowman has never held public office. He had never voted in a city election or campaigned for any position before this year. He emerged from May’s nonpartisan mayoral primary with 12% of the vote to Pureval’s 82%, edging into the general as the stronger of Pureval’s two challengers. (The other, Republican Brian Frank, got 4.5% of the primary vote.)
Records show the Pureval campaign out-fundraised and outspent Bowman’s campaign 6-to-1 between the primary and the end of June, the most recent date for which online data is available. Bowman’s largest campaign contribution during that time came from a private citizen with a New Jersey address.
If Bowman had any path to unseating Pureval, Xavier University political science professor Mack Mariani told CityBeat, it would have come from discontent around the city’s handling of Downtown safety concerns through the summer and fall.
“The environment should have generated some level of traction,” he said.
Starting in the summer, a string of highly publicized violent-crime incidents — most prominently a July 26 street brawl that went viral after far-right influencer Libs of Tiktok posted a video clip on X — provided a locus for targeted criticism of Pureval’s leadership.
Bowman seized on it, centering his campaign around support for increased, less-restrained policing and blaming the incidents on “trickle-down incompetence” from City Hall. The issue netted him an endorsement from the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police and multiple appearances on Fox News.
“Officers fear that they cannot do their job,” he told Fox News host Will Cain in August. “This is a deep issue coming from City Hall, that we don’t need to respect our cops, we don’t need to support our cops, we don’t need to support law and order.”
The crime angle was still a long shot for winning local support, according to Mariani.
Doubling down on it, rather than using it as a gateway to other issues, may even have damaged Bowman’s chances among voters who bristled at seeing Cincinnati become a negative talking point in the right-wing mediasphere.
“It’s red meat for Republicans,” Mariani said. “[But] urban voters see it as sort of a dog whistle for racial division and things like that. Democrats and independents are not going to be sold on voting Republican on this issue alone. And the crime issue became so overwhelming, and it took up so much space, that it actually crowded out other issues.”
And Pureval used the TV appearances to land hits of his own, accusing Bowman of running a vanity campaign that exposed his inexperience.
“He has not taken the campaign seriously, not showed up in the community,” Pureval said at the Oct. 9 mayoral debate. “He has spent more time on Fox News running down the city that he ultimately wants to lead. That is not how you lead the great city of Cincinnati. ”
The contest’s quick, decisive finish spoke to Bowman’s failure to win a local audience. About 70 people attended his election results party — among them students from the tiny God’s Bible College in Mount Auburn; Juan Coz, a self-described “Trump-publican”; Maurice Cobb, a local right-wing content creator who posts under the handle @realwolfhatfacts; and a West End community activist named Tree.
“My mind will be blown if Cory wins,” Tree admitted.
In a private post-results phone call referenced by both candidates, Bowman congratulated Pureval on his win, and Pureval invited him to City Hall for a future discussion about his ideas for Cincinnati government.
“[Bowman] was very classy to call me,” Pureval said in his victory speech. “He conceded the race, and I offered him the opportunity to work together to make Cincinnati even better.”
“The first thing that [Pureval] said was, ‘I want to get together for a scheduled meeting with you, and I want to hear your ideas and your opinions about what we can do to better the city,’” Bowman said.
Two days later, in an interview with progressive influencer Brian Tyler Cohen, Pureval’s tone was less conciliatory: “We’ve had some public safety challenges that my opponent tried to cynically take advantage of. MAGA kind of descended on my city trying to make us afraid of each other.”
The meeting had not been scheduled when CityBeat spoke to Bowman on Nov. 9. Pureval’s team had not responded to a CityBeat message about the meeting at publication time.
The MAGAphant in the booth
Although Bowman says he has no remaining plans for 2025 except to hunt deer and celebrate the holidays, he alluded to a possible future candidacy in his concession speech on Nov. 4 and his sermon on Nov. 9.
It was his “first” run for office, he repeated several times; more than once he mentioned that high-profile Republicans were trying to get in touch with him.
“You know, the night of the election, one of my two older boys said, ‘Dad, does this mean that you’re not going to be mayor?’” he told his parishioners. “I said, ‘Not right now.’”
A failed bid for office can certainly become a lilypad to a successful one, Mariani said, provided the candidate runs well on their way to losing. Former Rep. Brad Wenstrup, the 2009 Republican candidate for mayor, lost that election 54-45 to Democrat Mark Mallory. Wenstrup won an Ohio House seat in 2012 and kept it for 13 years.
However, Mariani predicted Bowman’s record-setting loss would cut against him in the eyes of potential future backers.
“There’s value in raising your name recognition,” he said. “There’s value in building a fundraising base so that you can run for something else, whether it’s state legislature or congress. The challenge for Bowman is the 80-20 loss. I think very few people would have thought that he would lose that badly.”
And if Bowman were to mount another campaign, he would still be running in his brother’s shadow.
Bowman has described Vance as a role model, posted photos of himself at MAGA rallies and referenced Trump with approval at the River Church. As a candidate, however, he skirted direct questions about Vance, Trump, immigration and the MAGA movement.
When Pureval pressed the association, as he did during their debate, Bowman’s usual response was to insist it was immaterial.
“We can’t copy and paste national politics when it comes to these city elections,” he repeated — in church, to the New York Times, at the debate and on the night of his loss — when probed on these topics.
Bowman also demurred at an Enquirer question about LGBTQ+ rights and protections, which have been condemned by his home church and curtailed by the Trump-Vance administration.
Vance, for his part, endorsed Bowman with a tweet in the primary but stayed silent on Election Day, did not donate to the campaign and did not vote in either May or November.
But the vice president’s name was still a focal point of the election. It attracted supporters, drew criticism and boosted the Cincinnati mayoral race to national attention. Right-wing broadcasters like Fox News and Newsmax invited Bowman on air several times; NBC’s Late Night host and frequent Trump critic Seth Meyers took a jab when he lost.
“I didn’t even know [Vance] had a half-brother,” Meyers said on Nov. 5. “This is like finding out Kristi Noem has a twin sister who ran for mayor of the Overlook Hotel.”
“[If Bowman runs again,] he’s going to generate a ton of turnout on the other side” because of the Vance connection, Mariani said. “And you don’t often want a candidate who is likely to generate that level of negative feedback from the opposing party. You want a candidate who’s going to kind of lull them to sleep.”
Cincinnati’s century of Republican decline
On Nov. 9, 1921, the Enquirer reported that Republican city auditor and minor league baseball player George Carrel had been “Swept Into Office” by a then-record-breaking majority of 53% — 25 points short of Pureval’s win on Nov. 4, 2025.
Queen City Republicans routed Democrats up and down the ballot that year. Their success was bolstered by the popularity of Ohio-native Republican President Warren G. Harding and an efficient, hard-handed local Republican apparatus.
The establishment of a new city charter in 1925 transformed the mayoralty, making it a rotating position shared by members of City Council until 1999. Under this system, council members would select ten Charterites, nine Republicans and nine Democrats for mayor.
And in the 73 years between Carrel and the next public mayoral election, cultural, ideological and demographic shifts honed and then entrenched a Democratic edge. Every Cincinnati mayor elected since the return of public elections has been a Democrat.
“As you start to lose, you don’t have any elected officials anymore,” Mariani said. “Organizationally, that gets hard, right? There’s nobody out there leading your banner. There’s no Republican organization to knock on doors to hand out sample ballots and to identify your voters. The advantages start to amplify. Success breeds success and failure breeds failure.”
A wide-ranging 2024 survey by Pew Research found that modern Democrats enjoy a distinct advantage among city dwellers, renters and Black voters — major overlapping portions of Cincinnati’s Venn diagram.
And when Pureval-Bowman ballots went out this year, local Republicans were in a position as unfavorable as their 20th century counterparts’ had been favorable.
The Republican president was Donald Trump, sporting a -18% approval rating and heading a shut-down government. Democratic voters had mobilized in pursuit of state- and city-level offices across the country. The Hamilton County Republican Party no longer enjoyed total dominion over its territory.
Bowman’s campaign was especially disadvantaged by the candidate’s inexperience and ties to Vance, but national currents can sweep even a more-trained, less-provocative candidate out of the race, Mariani added.
Liz Keating, a Republican Cincinnati City Council alum who outraised all 20 of her competitors, fell about 9,000 votes short of reclaiming her seat.
“She’s the ideal candidate, in many ways, for Republicans,” he said. “And even she wasn’t able to break through in a much lower-level, lower-stakes game [than the mayoralty].
“It may be that, in fact, any Republican would have been crushed because Democrats are very mobilized — in part by national elections, in part because the Democrats do a good job of organizing, and in part because this has become a much more Democratic city than we even realize, especially in an off-year election.”
CityBeat asked what would need to change for a Republican to become mayor of Cincinnati.
Mariani laughed.
“Probably a larger realignment of the electorate,” he said. “It would certainly require some larger sort of change in people’s thinking about what they want. I don’t see, in the short term, much hope for Republicans to reverse the trends that we’re seeing. ”
‘This isn’t the end’
Another of Bowman’s favored expressions, alongside the adages about copy-and-paste politics and “trickle-down corruption,” is this:
“Government isn’t meant to take care of you. Only God can take care of you.”
It’s an unusual sentiment for a would-be public servant. In the weekend before the election, he elaborated: “If the medical system fails you, God’s healing power will step up. If the world’s financial system fails you, God’s economy will step up.”
And if you lose your race for mayor?
Addressing his congregation after the loss, Bowman described the failed campaign as a territorial expansion, referencing the Book of Isaiah.
“[Isaiah] calls you to expand, and he says it’s time to expand and enlarge the area of your tents,” he said. “And that’s what we did.”
He and his wife selected their own successes from the seven-month run toward defeat — prayer meetings and conversations with neighbors; attention from national media; partnerships between the River Church and other faith organizations; and the aforementioned references to saved souls and cured cancer.
The Bowmans said they plan to capitalize on their new connections by participating in meal, toy and coat drives over the holiday season, which coincides with the church’s five-year anniversary.
Cory Bowman had scheduled a deer-hunting trip to “vent the aggression” left over from the campaign.
“We know that this isn’t the end,” he told his parishioners on Nov. 9. “This is just a start.”
In church, at least, his audience responded with enthusiasm.