Who’s Running for Ohio Governor?

Tim Fulton 00:00Welcome to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. We are a weekly Columbus-centric podcast focusing on the civics, lifestyle, entertainment, and people of our city. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. This week, with petitions filed and the 2026 statewide races officially underway, Ohio's political landscape is beginning to take shape. The governor's race is already drawing national attention, with former Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton emerging as the sole Democratic candidate, and Vivek Ramaswamy entering the Republican primary with endorsements from both Donald Trump and the Ohio Republican Party. But beyond the top-line names, there are deeper dynamics at play: primary challenges, party infrastructure, grassroots pushback, fundraising strategy, and the broader question of whether this election cycle presents a real opportunity for Ohio Democrats. To help us unpack it all, I sat down with David DeWitt, editor-in-chief of the Ohio Capital Journal. We walk through who's running, what the Republican primary could mean for the general election, why Democrats cleared the field for Acton, and how historical midterm patterns might shape the outcome. We also zoom out to look at the other statewide races — Attorney General, Secretary of State, auditor — and why those offices matter more than many voters realize, especially when it comes to redistricting, ballot access, and how Ohio's laws are defended in court. You can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theConfluenceCast.com. Enjoy the interview. Sitting down here with David DeWitt, the editor-in-chief of the Ohio Capital Journal. David, how are you? "I'm doing well. Thank you, Tim. Thanks for having me." Absolutely. We are here about a week and a half, two weeks maybe, since everybody filed their petitions to run for statewide offices. I don't think they're certified at this point, right? "That's correct. They're not certified yet." So, walking through basically who is running for governor this year, there is the top-line folks that we know about, right? There's Amy Acton and Vivek Ramaswamy. Amy is the former head — what was her title under the DeWine administration? The director of the Ohio Department of Health, right? She was best known for standing right beside DeWine, "wine with DeWine," every day during the pandemic. "Yeah, that's the early months, the first four or five months." Yeah. And then Vivek Ramaswamy is running as a Republican and endorsed by Donald Trump. Is that correct?

David DeWitt 02:55He's endorsed by both Donald Trump and, officially, the Ohio Republican Party, which happened in spring of last year.

Tim Fulton 03:02Got it. And then he has a couple of folks that are also running. He's going to be primaried. Can you tell us a little bit about those folks?

David DeWitt 03:11Yeah, sure. So yes, while Amy Acton is the sole Democratic candidate for governor, meaning she has a clear pathway to the general election, Vivek Ramaswamy will face primary competition. This may be from three different candidates. The first is Renee Turner, who was a write-in candidate against DeWine in 2018. She made some news for some pandemic-era behavior against DeWine, but otherwise hasn't had much of a presence in Ohio politics aside from online activity. Then you have Heather Hill, who's a businesswoman from Morgan County in Appalachian Ohio. It looks like she's been involved in the community there quite a bit. She's been on the school board. She has worked with Habitat for Humanity down there. She's done real estate down there, that type of stuff. So she has some presence down there in Morgan County — not very well known, obviously, outside of Morgan County. And then you have Casey Putsch, who's from up in Wood County, Northwest Ohio. He is a businessman and a car automobile designer and rehab revitalization person — like antique cars and old cars, that type of stuff, rehabbing them. He also has a prominent YouTube page. He's also very online.

Tim Fulton 04:40Yeah, okay. And then there's also a Libertarian candidate running, Don Kissick.

David DeWitt 04:46There's Don Kissick, who was in the 2024 US Senate race as the Libertarian candidate. He pulled — that was the Moreno versus Sherrod Brown race from 2024 — he pulled about 3.5% in that race, which is 200,000 votes or so, which is not nothing. Considering Moreno won that with 50.1 and Sherrod got 46 point whatever it was, 46.9 maybe, Kissick was the one who took up that other 3.5%.

Tim Fulton 05:20Got it. And there is a rule at this point, correct me if I'm wrong, that, like, the previous governor's race has to get a certain percentage of the vote for, for example, the Libertarian or the Green Party to be on the ballot. Is that right?

David DeWitt 05:34Yeah, that's correct, and they've made that threshold, so the Libertarian Party candidate will be on the ballot in 2026. There were a few years where that was not necessarily the case, and the Libertarian Party in Ohio had to work pretty hard to get enough people, to up their brand enough, to be able to make sure that they were on the ballot. Because it used to be that they would automatically be on the ballot. And then there's also another candidate with no party affiliation. His name is Tim Grady, and he ran as a write-in, I believe, in 2022. But he's essentially affiliated with the Forward Party, which is the Andrew Yang centrist kind of movement — universal basic income, that kind of thing. I wouldn't speak to Tim Grady specifically. I don't know whether he supports that or not, but I know that he is running again, basically as another third-party, no-affiliation candidate.

Tim Fulton 06:34What do you think the — because, again, there is only a Republican primary this year — what do you think that's going to look like in terms of infighting within the party? Is there going to be — I think it's a foregone conclusion who's going to win, right, based on the endorsement, but will they have to spend a bunch of money in order to make that happen?

David DeWitt 07:01Yeah, and that's a great question, and that's the correct way to look at it, from my perspective here. Because you have the Ohio Republican Party doing something fairly unprecedented, endorsing somebody in 2025, so early. They came out with their endorsement for Vivek, and that basically cleared the field for him. So it was putting the entire institutional, establishment party apparatus behind Vivek at a very early stage in the campaign. It forced people like Dave Yost, the attorney general, to drop his aspirations for the time being for governor.

Tim Fulton 07:39And that means Husted is going to stay in the Senate, like, it's — correct, you know, it's —

David DeWitt 07:43It cleared the runway for him, to an extent. But what they're finding out is that the rank and file of Ohio Republicans might not see eye to eye with the establishment on this election and coronation of Vivek as the candidate. And he does enjoy both enormous personal wealth as well as the institutional money that comes with being the establishment Republican Party candidate and having the entire Republican Party in Ohio institution behind him. But you have this grassroots movement of people, and you see them very much online, but it reflects reality that you see in the communities as well — talking to people that don't trust Vivek as the establishment candidate. There's been a lot of pushback toward him, and you've seen a lot of these online communities on the right rallying behind the Casey Putsch candidacy. And he, as you mentioned earlier, is very online himself, so he's in the information zones that they're all in together. And I think that what that will end up doing is — yes, Vivek will have to spend resources fending off this primary challenger. Not because he's necessarily — I haven't seen a threat to Vivek in the actual polling so far. But he does weaken Vivek as a candidate for the general the more infighting there is in the Republican primary itself. And so Vivek will have to spend resources that he wouldn't otherwise have to spend, defending himself, defending against the primary base, and just trying to walk a political messaging line to not alienate the folks who would be supporting — who he needs for the general. And meanwhile, Casey can go out there and kind of attack at will, because he's going to be vastly outspent anyway, and he can push the baseline, as he sees it, as much as he wants. So it's really a resource allocation thing, as you alluded to in the question. And that is the big question: How much will Vivek be forced to spend on this primary? How much attention will it take away from the general? And what will Ohio Democrats do about that?

Tim Fulton 10:16Talk about the other side, then. It does feel like the Democratic side, they cleared the way for Amy as well.

David DeWitt 10:24They did, yeah. I believe there was — and you could see Tim Ryan, the former congressman from the Youngstown area who ran for US Senate in 2022 and lost to JD Vance. He put out floaters repeatedly in 2025. You know, you'd see the story drop, "Tim Ryan considering a run." That was basically him putting out stories to try to see what type of appetite there might be for a challenge to Amy Acton in the Democratic primary.

Tim Fulton 10:59And because Amy was already running, like, she had declared —

David DeWitt 11:02Very early, right. Which was especially important for somebody who has limited name recognition, as all Ohio Democrats do. None have great name recognition, except for Sherrod Brown. So it was important for her to get out early like that, from a political standpoint, to start building her political brand, as it were — her name recognition and identifiability throughout the state and everything. So she came out very early, was able to rally a good amount of support among the rank and file in the Democratic Party. And so I think Tim was trying to put out these feelers occasionally to see if he had a path, or whether he would create more division by going up against Amy, who had already kind of started to establish herself. And I think that the answer eventually came to him that this is not the year for him to try to do that. It was better for the Ohio Democrats, and probably for himself personally too, if he does have future ambitions, to allow Dr. Acton to go forward with this one without a primary challenge, so that it doesn't use up her resources for the general election. Because this is — just taking it almost on a purely analytical mode — this is an opportunity election, theoretically, for Ohio Democrats. Because it's a midterm election for the presidential party in power, which always favors the opposition party. But also it's a midterm lame duck, which hasn't happened, because Donald Trump can't run again in 2028, right? It makes him a lame duck too. So the last time there was a midterm lame duck of a Republican president, for instance, in Ohio, was 2006. And in that year, Ted Strickland, Democratic congressman, won governor. He was the last Democrat to be elected governor in Ohio. But also that year, Rich Cordray was elected treasurer, Jennifer Brunner was elected Secretary of State, Marc Dann was elected Attorney General. So Democrats won — this is the last time Ohio Democrats won any of these statewide elected offices. Now, there are a whole lot of things politically that are very different between 2026 and 2006, but just on the sheer fundamental election cycle —

Tim Fulton 13:32Here, right — 2026 —

David DeWitt 13:36— is the most comparable election to 2006. So that's why Democrats, even in Ohio, see it as a big opportunity for them.

Tim Fulton 13:43And do you think — there's some commentary around Acton's fundraising not really getting going sooner than now, because people are sort of keeping their powder dry to see if somebody else was going to get into the race.

David DeWitt 13:59Sure, that makes sense to me. Because there's a lot of time left in this year for all of that still, and most of the spending isn't going to happen anyway until the second, third, fourth quarters of the year. So I'm not surprised that the — not just the big-time money people on the left, but you could see it in some of the unions not coming out to endorse until much more recently, and that type of thing, where people were taking a watchful, waiting approach.

Tim Fulton 14:35Got it. What other statewide races are interesting to you right now? Like Attorney General — what should people be watching?

David DeWitt 14:46Yeah, so what interests me is always the things that affect the people and the power of the people and how well they're being represented in government. And so all of these statewide offices are important, and it's important to mention: every statewide executive office is up for open election, because all of the incumbents are term-limited out. So not just governor, but governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, treasurer, auditor. Those are all the executive offices, and all of them are important, but some of them have different powers than other ones that could be considered even more important for broader issues. So just take gerrymandering, for instance. There are three of those seats that sit on the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which decides redistricting in Ohio. And while these people who win in 2026 might not last all the way to 2031 — because there's going to be another election — this will go a long way toward deciding who the incumbents will be the next cycle, and who may well sit on the Ohio Redistricting Commission come 2030, when we have another census and we do another round of redistricting, and the politicians have been left in charge. So this stuff matters. The governor, the Secretary of State, and the auditor are all seats that sit on that. So if you care about redistricting, if you care about gerrymandering, you can't just care about governor. You have to care about Secretary of State and auditor as well. Now, another office that has wide latitude and sway and influence over Ohioans' lives is the Attorney General's office. It is the top law enforcement seat, the top executive law enforcement seat, in the entire state. And this is the office that in court either defends or doesn't defend Ohio's laws and statutes. So, for instance — just take Ohio's perhaps most famous court case of the 21st century, Obergefell versus Hodges. This is the national case that legalized same-sex marriage rights. Our attorney general at the time was Mike DeWine. Mike DeWine was the one fighting against same-sex marriage rights in that case. So who your attorney general is does matter, especially when it comes to cases like that and case law. You also have things like, you know, the abortion amendment that the voters passed in 2023. Well, the current attorney general is arguing that some of those parts of the law that included the abortion ban should be allowed to stand, while the ban itself should be struck down. Now, a different attorney general might say, "No, I'm not going to argue that. The entire law should be struck down." Or a different attorney general might say, "No, we think that the ban is still constitutional, even though the voters said that it wasn't." So, again, your attorney general matters for these reasons — these court cases, this civil litigation — but also for things like, you know, the Attorney General runs the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which conducts human trafficking investigations, things like that. So it's an important law enforcement position as well.

Tim Fulton 18:11Have we had a split executive, like some Republicans, some Democrats, sitting in those seats? All I can recall is that they've always kind of been party-unified.

David DeWitt 18:24Yeah, I think the vast majority of the time they have been party-unified. The one that I can think of is in 2006 — wasn't Mary Taylor, like, I think she was the only Republican to win statewide that year, and then the Democrats swept the rest? But since then, since the 2010 election, all Republicans have won every office.

Tim Fulton 18:50Yeah. I end every interview — I want to give you the same opportunity, with the same two questions. What do you think Columbus is doing well, and what do you think Columbus is not doing so well?

David DeWitt 19:02The thing that I think Columbus is doing well is the food scene and growing the city in areas that aren't the traditional pockets. So we've seen the Short North growth, but I'm seeing a lot of really cool growth in other neighborhoods and areas right now that I really like to see. And not doing well — I'm just always going to keep hammering this — like, rail transit. Not having it. Public transit, yeah, that stuff. That's fair. Thanks again for your time. "Thank you, Tim."

Tim Fulton 19:47Thank you for listening to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. Again, you can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theConfluenceCast.com. Please rate, subscribe, share this episode of the Confluence Cast with your friends, family, contacts, enemies, your favorite candidate. If you're interested in sponsoring the Confluence Cast, get in touch with us. We can be reached by email at info@theConfluenceCast.com. Our theme music was composed by Benji Robinson. Our producer is Phil Cogley. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. Have a great week.