Cleveland investment banker Mike Gibbons, who shot from virtual unknown to frontrunner when The Hill-Emerson College poll of 410 Republican voters, conducted February 25 and February 26, put the banker in the lead, told The Ohio Star his political program is more Tea Party than Republican Party. “I’ve got Tea Party at my roots, in my core,” said Gibbons, the Ohio finance chairman for Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. “I believe we need to take this country back to the American values that made it great. We have a Left that wants to destroy it.” Gibbons said the Ohio Republican Party’s establishment was not ready to hear that from him. “When I first went to the first central committee meeting I ever went to, I had a screening committee,” he said. “I walked in, and they said: ‘Mike, we’ve seen you giving a lot of money to Republican candidates over the years.’ I said: ‘I said, “Yeah, they closely reflected my ideology, and I look for people that believe what I believe.”’” Gibbons said there was an uneasiness already present in the room. “They said: ‘Well,’ and I said: ‘But if I have to tell you the truth, I’m…
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