Meet Elliot
Elliot served in 2020 as a field organizer for President Biden’s presidential campaign. All he wanted was to beat Trump. We succeeded in 2020. And we are going to do it again this year, 2024.
After the 2020 presidential campaign, Elliot spent the holidays in Georgia knocking doors for the Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the U.S. Senate runoff elections. He helped us win the Georgia runoffs and take control of the U.S. Senate. We enacted the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the PACT Act, the CHIPS Act, the first gun-control bill in 30 years and codifying marriage equality. Under President Biden and the Democratic Senate, we appointed to the federal judiciary of more Black women than all previous presidential administrations combined, including the first Black woman as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.
And Elliot drove in December 2022, as he did in 2020, from Cleveland to Greater Atlanta and knocked doors again in support of Senator Warnock’s second runoff campaign. (We won that one, too.)
As a state rep
Elliot represents in the Ohio House of Representatives a district that includes several beautiful communities in the northeast corner of Cuyahoga County. As a state rep, he works hard to enact and enforce Democrats’ values.
Elliot got national attention on the misleading, biased “unborn child” ballot language of Issue 1 by fighting Secretary of State Frank LaRose on the Ballot Board. And he got national attention, again, when the House Speaker cut him off before the vote on the harmful anti-trans bill (H.B. 68) as he was reading into the record the list of names of the medical organizations that publicly support gender-affirming care.
Legislation – reproductive freedom
Elliot is working now on legislation that builds on Issue 1 and expands further our reproductive freedom. It’s called the Trust Women Act. It would guarantee access to abortion services throughout the duration of the period of gestation, not just before the viability moment. The government should never interfere with a pregnant person’s reproductive freedom.
2023 ballot issues
Elliot spoke publicly, rallied, gathered signatures, knocked doors and helped organize and launch group signature-gathering and canvasses in and around his district in opposition to the August-8 Issue 1 and in support of the November-7 Issues 1 and 2.
Legislation – overview
Elliot is also working to organize an Ohio ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to enact common-sense gun control. He is working with the proponents of the redistricting-reform and minimum-wage-raise ballot initiatives. And he is working on other items of legislation to enact and enforce our values, including promoting public education, supporting our seniors, lowering taxes on the middle class, building clean energy, improving health care, strengthening labor laws and helping with post-incarceration reentry.
Elliot is also proud to have introduced in the House two resolutions supporting Israel. He continues to distribute and post throughout the district the hostage flyers.
In the first speech Elliot delivered on the floor of the Ohio House chamber as a state rep he spoke in opposition to an anti-Black, racist bill (H.B. 100) that would privilege the “blue-lives matter” flag. As the ranking Democrat of the applicable House committee, Elliot organized the opposition to the bill. When the House had voted during a previous session on an identical blue-lives-matter-flag bill, all but one of the Democratic state reps voted in favor of the bill. This time, when Elliot was organizing the opposition to the bill, all but six of the Democrats voted against the bill.
He was one of two Democratic state representatives who voted against the initial House version of the state’s operating-budget bill, which contained huge tax cuts for the rich.
Supporting workers
A strong supporter of workers, Elliot drove during the first weekend after the start of the U.A.W. stand-up strike to join the picket line at the Stellantis Jeep factory in Toledo. He visited five times the picket line at the Chrysler parts distribution facility in Streetsboro and three times (so far) the picket line at Valley Ford Truck in Valley View. He sent to several union-busting employers in Greater Cleveland written demands to negotiate with their workers and stop union-busting.
Standing up for our values
Elliot is working to organize a rally in Cleveland in opposition to the anti-queer policy implemented recently by the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland. He was the only publicly elected official to support the residents of the Euclid Beach mobile-home park in their effort to resist the closure of their community.
Elliot called publicly for the removal of the head coach of a local high-school football team for anti-Semitism against the Beachwood team, and the coach was removed. He called publicly for and was working to organize the expulsion from the state legislature of a Republican state rep for assaulting a woman, and the GOP rep resigned.
After Elliot won his primary election in 2022, at the request of the leader of the House Democratic Caucus he knocked doors and helped to build and run a paid door-knocking operation in support of the Democrat in the most competitive House contest, in Western Lake County.
Beyond state-rep service
Before the 2020 presidential campaign Elliot worked as a lawyer in the Cleveland office of BakerHostetler and at law-firm offices in New York City. He graduated from Kenyon College in Central Ohio and obtained his law degree from Yale University.
The son of public-school teachers, Elliot has deep family ties to the communities of the area. His mother grew up in Lyndhurst, and his great-grandfather’s construction company built many of the houses on Edgefield Road and in other Hillcrest neighborhoods. He would love nothing more than to continue serving as the state representative of Hillcrest, Euclid and Collinwood.
Elliot maintains a law office and lives in South Euclid. He served during the fall semester in 2023 as an adjunct professor in the political-science department of Kent State University. He volunteers for the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland and serves as the general counsel of a patent-law nonprofit organization. He serves a member of the central and executive committees of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party.