Regardless of the candidate, Democrats face long odds in Ohio governor race

Yahoo

28-05-2025

In a recent column in the Columbus Dispatch, Thomas Suddes puts a spotlight on the inability of state Democrats to line up behind a full slate of statewide candidates in 2026.
The key challenge, Suddes says, is that Democrats have been forced into a holding pattern as they wait for former Senator Sherrod Brown and former Congressman and Senate candidate Tim Ryan to decide whether to jump into the race for Governor or Senator.
From the perspective of the average voter, Amy Acton has been virtually non-existent as a candidate. Outside of a few non-eventful interviews and a decent first quarter of fundraising, she's made virtually no news on the campaign trail. A visit to her campaign website gives prospective voters nothing to go on with regard to where she stands on key policies or campaign events where potential supporters would have the chance to hear from her directly.
Acton is the only major candidate to announce for the Democratic nomination, but the way she's running the race suggests that she is not preparing to push back very hard should another more experienced politician like Brown or Ryan enter the race.
If Brown, Ryan, or another Democratic candidate decides to throw their hat into the ring for governor, it won't come as much of a surprise for Republicans. In his statement withdrawing from the race for governor, Ohio Attorney General David Yost takes a Sherrod Brown candidacy, in some form, as a given. Yost mentions Brown's "comeback attempt" and calls out "Sherrod Brown and the risky progressive ideas of his party."
He makes no mention of Acton.
Most political observers see Brown as the most competitive candidate that Democrats can put forward for statewide office. He has experience winning statewide, having won five statewide elections (going 3 for 4 in Senate races and 2 for 3 in Secretary of State races), before losing in the 2024 Senate race to Bernie Moreno.
At 72 years of age, Brown might decide to forgo further political office. But ending on a losing note might rankle the longtime politician. After nearly 50 years in office, Brown understandably may prefer to make his last race a successful one.
More: Sherrod Brown forms workers' group as he mulls 2026 bid for Ohio governor, Senate
Recent moves by Brown have only added fuel to the fire. In March, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Brown and his wife moved to the Columbus area. Brown also formed an organization called the Dignity of Work Institute, and the group's website doesn't do much to dispel the notion that Brown continues to hold political ambitions.
The case for Brown is relatively clear. For one, his political persona seems tailor-made for the Trump era. He's experienced and comfortable on the campaign trail, is more likely to be seen in a sweatshirt than a suit jacket, and has a long history of speaking to working-class and union-friendly issues.
Brown's timing might be right as well. His three elections for the Senate came during years that Democrats did well, including the Obama reelection year of 2012, and Democratic wave elections in 2006 and 2018. In some ways, Democrats seem well-positioned for success in 2026, given the history of midterm shifts against the party of the incumbent and the level of Democratic enthusiasm and turnout that's been seen in special elections.
Whether the Democrats put up Acton or Brown or someone else entirely for governor, a recent analysis by the New York Times makes it clear that the party's path to the Ohio governor's mansion is not an easy one to navigate. The long and the short of it is that Republicans have made huge gains in working-class communities and counties where fewer people have college degrees. Democrats, meanwhile, have seen small increases in support from high-income counties and counties with high percentages of college-educated populations.
Democrats indeed continue to do pretty well in urban settings like Cincinnati, where a high percentage of voters have college degrees. But in Ohio, most voters don't live in places like Cincinnati.
In the most recent presidential election, 56% of Ohio voters lived in one of the 76 counties where the percentage of adults with a college degree was below the national average. Just 44% of Ohio voters lived in one of the 12 counties that were above the national average.
And although Democrats continue to have the advantage in those highly educated counties, their advantage there has not expanded as much as the advantage that Republicans have in the counties with lower levels of college-educated voters.
In 2012, Obama pulled in 46% of Ohio voters in lower-education counties. In 2024, Harris pulled in just 35%. In contrast, Harris's share of voters in higher-education counties was one point lower than Obama's, 55% compared with 56%.
More: Ramaswamy rides the Trump wave in Ohio governor race while Yost gets swept aside | Opinion
While it is true that Democratic counties are bigger, on average, than the Republican ones, there are a heck of a lot of Republican counties in Ohio. In 2024, for example, 56% of presidential votes came from working-class counties. In addition, a lot of Ohio's counties are getting more Republican each election. Of the Ohio counties that shifted in one direction in each of the last three presidential elections − one of the key indicators identified in the New York Times analysis − 34 of them moved in the direction of Republicans, and just one (Delaware) moved towards Democrats.
Democrats are pinning their hopes on the idea that Brown is a different sort of Democrat and that he does well in some of the counties where Republicans have gained ground. But election results suggest that Brown has suffered from a similar erosion in support across Ohio as that experienced by the Democratic presidential candidates. Brown's support from counties with lower levels of college education fell from 47% in 2018 to 38% in 2024, and he ran ahead of Harris in those areas by just three points.
Of course, every election is different, and no trend in politics lasts forever. It's possible that Brown doesn't even run, and if he does, maybe he is able to recapture some of the working-class votes that Democrats have lost across the state in recent years. For her part, Amy Acton's background as a medical doctor and her public image as the face of the state's COVID-19 response make it unlikely that she will break through in Ohio's working-class communities.
Brown is better positioned than Acton to make a run, but either way, it's a long shot for Ohio Democrats.
Mack Mariani is a professor of political science at Xavier University who lives in Wyoming. Contact him on X: @mackmariani. The views and opinions expressed by the author are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer, his wife, this newspaper, the residents of Hyde Park, the pharmaceutical industry, or Dr. Amy Acton.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Winning governor's race a long shot for Ohio Democrats | Opinion