What Democrats Just Accomplished in Ohio Is Remarkable

If you’ve ever lived through a heat wave or drought, you know there’s a sound when the rain finally breaks. The atmospheric shifts as the first, fat drops fall, yes—but then as it all cuts loose, whoops from the streets. It is the sound of relief. This is the sound of America’s blue tsunami from a Southwest Ohio pizza parlor.First, a trickle of positive results: With a fraction of the vote in, gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton was way ahead, as was Sherrod Brown in Ohio’s Senate race. People cheer, then wait. Later in the night, a deluge: A group of Democrats, ostensibly gathered to support three candidates at a different Montgomery, Ohio, tavern, cheered over the Georgia governor’s race, called for Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms. Then Annie Andrews took South Carolina’s Senate seat. Dems secured control of the House—a wave of screams. Though MS NOW was still waiting, a voice across the tavern shouted that Bloomberg and NBC had called it: Amy Acton had won the governor’s seat. A state house rep in the room won reelection, so did a judge. Within a minute, another shouted message: Dems were on track to win multiple new seats in the Ohio House, breaking the supermajority. It started to be hard to hear why everyone was bursting into elated cheers. Talarico won in Texas! On the TVs in the tavern, Acton’s image filled the screen, final confirmation she had won. Thunder. Relief.Vivek Ramaswamy spent $79 million (including $41.3 million of his own money) to lose a governor’s race in which the billionaire showed himself to be so out of touch, he thought it would help his campaign to dig Acton’s estranged mother out of the cobwebs for an unconscionable attack ad that drew resounding disgust from across parties (with the notable exception of Donald Trump and JD Vance). The grossest campaign in America lost last night. Ohio, which hasn’t swung left in a governor’s race since 2006, just did.I suspect though, that the result, while certainly part of a national referendum on Trump and Republicans who’ve kowtowed to him at every level, is also a reflection of Democratic candidates who activated an impressive grassroots campaign. Every time Ramaswamy skipped across the state (or out of state) in his private jet or invested millions in cartoonishly evil attack ads, Acton was on a family farm, or on a union picket line, or at a diner, leaning in to talk to voters regardless of party. And down-ticket candidates did the same. Ohio was won by making the race not about party, but about Ohioans, writ large, winning. Ohio used to be a key swing state, but highly effective gerrymandering has carved us into right-locked districts that have produced increasingly extreme candidates and a Republican super-majority in the statehouse. Ohio has had a Republican trifecta (governor’s office and both chambers of the statehouse) for twenty-eight years since 1992, and in that time, Ohio’s schools have suffered (now 45th in the nation for our state share of public school funding). Ohio’s economy ranks 39th and we’re 34th for healthcare. Our infrastructure and water scores low too. The relative security of Republican seats surely contributed to our dark-money fueled FirstEnergy bribery scandal, which landed former Ohio Speaker of the House, Republican Larry Householder in prison for racketeering.Sizable sums wash in and out of the state, but not often to benefit the common good. Tens of millions in PAC money was donated from outside billionaires, such as Elon Musk and Jeffrey Yass, to sway votes for Ramaswamy. (Over 95 percent of Acton’s donations totaled $100 or less.) A projected $11.6 billion was spent on Ohio’s midterm election this year, with more than half a billion on the U.S. Senate race alone. Our gerrymandered maps and millions of dollars have been invested in chopping up Ohio to ensure Republican power. And in some parts of the state, the partisan divide still strains. In rural Shelby County, Democratic Party Chair Christopher R. Gibbs has been busy trying to help Democratic candidates understand rural voters who regularly feel ignored, sidelined and taken for granted. I met him on a family farm whistlestop for the Acton campaign. Gibbs, who used to be the county’s Republican chair, left the party in 2019. It “no longer shared my core values.” Anecdotally, Gibbs says in Shelby, one of the reddest counties in Ohio, there is a visceral hate for Democrats, based on locals’ perspective of national Dems. But data centers, a significant rural issue, isn’t yet partisan. Over 200 data center projects are planned or under construction and 21 initiatives were on the ballot yesterday (the most nationally). Both Acton and Ramaswamy campaigned on tighter rules around data centers after, in May, current Gov. Mike DeWine ordered a pause on tax exemptions on the centers—which had already surpassed $2 billion in 2025. Across the state last night, a number of data center bans passed. Electoral maps and MAGA aside, Ohioans may have been united by practical realities. I passed a gas sign that read $4.17/gallon for regular unleaded, yesterday driving between polls. Big tech has planted data centers that slurp up our energy, land, and water. About one in eight Ohio families lives under the poverty line and, according to the United Way, another 23 percent live above the poverty line but can’t afford basic expenses.We are, collectively, done. And the billionaires could not buy this election.Acton often talks about how people in Youngstown who didn’t have much would share with those who had less. Desperation communicates across boundaries, if we can really see each other. Maybe the current state of the country and Ohio has finally made enough of us too tired to hate each other.At my own polling location, in Wyoming, Ohio, hometown of the Democrats’ incoming Lieutenant Governor, David Pepper, two middle-aged women stood side-by-side just off the lawn outside our community Civic Center. One held blue handouts of the Democrats’ slate; the other held the pink Republicans’. Voters swept in and out. It was nice to see the two chatting volunteers, holding opposing slates, getting along so well. I said so. The woman holding the Republican slate said of course they were friendly, they live in the same neighborhood.But the stakes were still obvious.I ran across voter Michael Robinson on my way to grab a bagel. His hair is dappled with grey, and his hoodie was adorned with an Ohio Voted sticker. The sticker is important. His mother-in-law insists upon photographic evidence, though Robinson wouldn’t miss a vote. His parents and grandparents lived in Washington, D.C., before the majority-Black city was allowed to vote in presidential elections. His paternal grandfather grew up in South Carolina as a sharecropper who could not afford the poll tax. Robinson, an Ohio resident for 26 years now, was born in the Nation’s Capital, and at 18, voted in the District’s first home rule election in 1974. He tells me his grandmother drilled into him that education and the vote were the two things no one could take away, “That’s how you have power… that’s what they wanna take away.” (A voter ID requirement passed today in Ohio too.)In the Cincy suburb of Montgomery, Ohio, two men, each holding slates of opposing parties, chatted in a friendly way at a church entryway, a polling site. A father and young daughter come out and the Republican asks, “Is it her first time voting?” It was indeed her first time tagging along. She got a sticker. Everyone cheered. At the other entrance though, from the Democrats, I hear the police were called earlier, because a man was berated by a volunteer for a Republican candidate after voting. A Republican volunteer tells me it’s been a beautiful day. She says, “it’s up to how God turns the hearts and minds of men. But I do hope they choose his values over their own desires.”I know it’s not what she meant, but I kind of suspect many would say they did.Outside Norwood Community Center, shortly before polls closed, I open my car door to Rihanna. There was no line, but the music was pumping. The DJ, Bizzy Bizz (Rodney Hayes), is part of DJ at the Polls, a good-vibes-only, nonpartisan get-out-the-vote effort. Under the thump of “This Is What You Came For,” Bizzy Bizz tells me that it has been an incredible day. After the past few years, the positivity he’s seen at the polls, people coming together to vote, “honestly, it’s restored my faith in humanity.” As the music plays, this, he says, “this is what this nation needs.”People who are stressed over how they are going to stock their kitchen cabinets have been subjected to a dizzying demonstration of disqualifying behavior from candidates who seem to have lost the plot on human decency. Congressman Max Miller, who represents a Northeast Ohio district, has been accused of domestic abuse. Despite a delay in speaking out, our other senator, Bernie Moreno, whose daughter happens to be Miller’s estranged wife, finally did pipe up, saying Miller needs “psychological help,” that he holds his breath whenever Miller has custody of his granddaughter, and called for Miller’s resignation from Congress. Miller’s opponent, Brian Poindexter, a union organizer and iron worker, was named the presumptive winner overnight.Longtime U.S. Senator, Sherrod Brown, lost his seat in 2024, after $251 million in attack ads that largely weaponized trans rights and lied about Brown’s positions. This time, as he ran against Jon Husted, a widely debunked attack ad claimed “Sherrod Brown supports sex change surgery for minors.” However, the woman in the ad who claimed she got surgery without her parents’ consent as a minor is actually from Texas (not Ohio) and was 19 when she had her double mastectomy. This time, many Democrats, including Brown, have strategically pivoted from getting bogged down in a culture war over trans rights, either pointing out the inaccuracies in such ads or redirecting away from the vanishingly small handful of trans youth in Ohio school sports. (It’s debatable whether it’s better to have your identity either weaponized or ignored, both for political ends.) Instead, Democrats’ energy has largely focused on pocketbook issues, which affect almost all of us (yes, including trans Ohioans).At 11 p.m., CNN called it for Ohio’s Senate race: Mr. Brown is going back to Washington. The tavern where I was watching results erupted. The local TV news happened to cut away and fill the screen with an image of Amy Acton. More cheers. A chant of O-H, I-O. Acton took the stage in Columbus behind a Governor-Elect Acton sign, saying the state had chosen “unity and decency over division and hate. The healing begins today.” As Acton took the stage for her acceptance speech, for a moment, I had the heart-pounding sensation of witnessing a local girl done good. I grew up a couple miles down a long cross-county road from where Acton grew up, once she and her brother settled in with their father. This was after she spent time hungry and homeless, living in a tent over winter in Youngstown, after escaping her sexually abusive stepfather and a mother who skipped town with him after his indictment for Acton’s abuse. We come from this place, where steel still runs in people’s veins, generations since the mills closed, decades since opportunity was anything people could count on. A place where those who could, were often coached to go away to school, get out. Acton, with Brown, held her last campaign stop in her old high school. “I’m a scrappy kid from Youngstown,” she said before hundreds as the high school gym erupted in applause.Her reprise, this entire campaign, has been a stubborn fixation on the issues “99 percent of Ohioans can agree on.” She talks, not like she was aiming for a Blue Wave, but enough to drink for everyone.As we were each growing up, our corner of the state was a Democratic stronghold, but give a place a couple generations of broken promises of change, grown kids moving away and those who stayed staking a sad, fierce loyalty to a place of want, the region was ready for a new promise-peddler when Donald Trump ran in 2016. Youngstown’s Mahoning County switched from reliably blue to red. But Acton and Brown both won there last night.When people vote, they choose a person to represent them in government, but they also approve the person who publicly represents their interests, their values. They represent us as a people.When Acton started campaigning, she was bothered that on the internet, young people used phrases like “that’s so Ohio” as a catchphrase for things that were bad or cringe. Acton suffered as a child in Ohio, but her ambition and effort was also rewarded in Ohio. She learned in the great public schools that have been quietly underfunded and now are being siphoned of over $1 billion per year for private school vouchers. She served the state over COVID, and even after enduring the brunt of blowback, she put her hand up for more service as governor. She had the cruel indignity of campaigning to serve this state and getting sideswiped by her mother, a woman who has failed her over and again. As the nation has looked to Ramaswamy with a collective WTF, Acton told me recently that since the attack ad she has been stopped at event after event by survivors whose worst moments were dredged up by Ramaswamy’s disgusting campaign ploy. The swipe could have derailed most people. Others might have become overwhelmed by the disclosures of abuse, but what Acton took from it was that there are more survivors of sexual assault in the state than most people realize. Ramaswamy’s campaign tried to destroy her; Acton’s empathetic heart found an additional policy front.When I was young, people called Ohio purple, a reliable mix of red and blue. As went Ohio, so went the nation. For a long time, we’ve been painted red by state and Congressional maps, and a lot of us got used to officials who extracted their power and influence from the state but failed to see us, on rural farms now in the shadow of data centers or striving for more in the three C’s (Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati) or for kids growing up in towns where almost everyone struggles. If they saw our dreams, it was just to exploit them. A lot of pundits may tell the story of 2026 as a blue wave, but from here in Ohio, it looks more like the first gulp of an enormous storm, skies cracking open after a long, hard drought.