On November 18th, 2024, one of the few glimmers of hope for Ohio Democrats was snuffed out when Ohio Speaker of the House Jason Stephens announced he was not seeking the post in 2025, thereby setting the stage for a conservative takeover of the Ohio legislature.
The culprit is not the 2024 election results. In fact, the 2024 election results in Ohio seemed to guarantee the opposite.
On November 5th, Democrats gained two seats in the Ohio House of Representatives. On its face, this is unimpressive. Democrats went from being a 67-32 superminority to being a 65-34 superminority in the State House. Republicans still had enough seats to do virtually anything they want, including overriding the governor’s veto.
But to those who have followed Ohio’s last legislative session (including those who read the April, 2024 edition of The Gavel), this should be quite significant.
A quick recap: for several years, Ohio’s State House has been controlled by a coalition of Democrats and (somewhat) moderate Republicans. This coalition recently elected Jason Stephens Speaker of the House in 2023 over the opposition of a majority of the Republican caucus. The 2024 primary elections played out as a proxy war between Stephens supporters and their conservative foes, led by State Senate President Matt Huffman (who was just elected to the State House after being term-limited out of the Senate) and financed, in part, by out-of-state Super PACs funded by the Koch brothers. This is rather ironic, given that the conservatives’ main argument in favor of Issue One last August was that it would protect our state from “out of state special interests”; but I digress. Stephens supporters, known to their Republican enemies as the “Blue 22”, lost enough of these primary elections that Stephens’ control of the Speakership depended on one vote. If Democrats lost a single seat in the 2024 general election, the moderate bloc would lose its majority and be defeated in 2025.
Ohio Democrats breathed a sigh of relief when that did not happen, making it likely that Stephens would keep the gavel and the moderate bloc would remain in control. In fact, in the first draft of the Gavel article I wrote about the Ohio election results, the headline was “Ohio Results: GOP Sweep, but Moderates Likely to Retain Control of State House”.
Then, things went sideways. On Monday, November 18th, just two days before the Republican caucus was scheduled to make its pick for the next Speaker, Stephens called a press conference to announce that he would not be a candidate.
“As far as I’m concerned, this really resets the entire race,” he added. “It’s really a new speaker race over the next 48 hours.”
He was right. While Matt Huffman was the undisputed leader of the anti-Stephens conservative faction before Stephens dropped out, his support was premised on him being the only alternative to Stephens and the Blue 22. Now, there was an opportunity for another conservative to steal the spotlight. State Representative Ron Ferguson made a soft announcement and State Representative Tim Barhorst began openly campaigning against Huffman.
But amid the frenzy, no one emerged as a moderate successor to Stephens. This was largely Stephens’ own fault—he waited to announce he was dropping out until two days before the caucus vote, and it does not appear that he warned either the Democrats or the Blue 22 ahead of time. He also refused to endorse a successor or even say how he would be voting.
Thus, all of the major candidates for the Speakership were arch conservatives. Huffman, of course, had long been Stephens’ most visible enemy. Ferguson had been one of the conservatives’ chief attack dogs against Stephens for the past two years. And while Barhorst attempted to frame himself as a “unity candidate”, he had voted against Stephens in 2023 and was a favorite of anti-vaccine group Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom. None were members of the Blue 22.
The result was anticlimactic. Ferguson dropped out and endorsed Barhorst. But at the caucus meeting, Barhorst was not nominated as a candidate. It is unclear whether Barhorst consciously dropped out, or if his supporters were just confused at the nomination procedure (as some have claimed). Either way, Huffman won unanimously.
Huffman has not yet been officially elected Speaker—that happens at the beginning of January, 2025. Theoretically, a challenger could emerge to try to piece together the Stephens coalition. But as of this writing (in late November), no one has done so. It also appears exceedingly unlikely that, even if someone did, they would be able to recruit the sixteen Republican votes they would need to win.
Thus, Huffman is on a glide path to be elected Speaker and preside over a newly-unified Republican supermajority in 2025.
The consequences could be drastic.
One could argue that, for all the Republican infighting of the last two years, things have not been all that different than if Derek Merrin had been elected Speaker in 2023. After all, Stephens has described himself as “extremely conservative”, and the last legislative session passed, among other things, the August special election; House Bill 68, which drastically restricted gender-affirming care; Senate Bill 17, which mandated that schools teach “free market capitalism content”; and Senate Bill 104, Ohio’s own “bathroom bill” that would require students to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender they were assigned at birth.
However, conservatives were angry at Stephens for a reason. While he threw a few bones to the right on culture war issues, he helped block critical conservative priorities on taxes, labor, and education. The mere fact of Republican infighting also helped to stymie the conservatives, and this recent legislative session was the least productive in Ohio since the 1950s.
Now, unshackled by the moderates, the conservatives have laid out a radical agenda for the 2025–26 session. Huffman has promised to abolish the state income tax, to revive last year’s failed attempt to make it harder to amend the Ohio constitution, and to vastly increase funding for private school vouchers at the expense of Ohio’s public school system. He plans to curb “liberal influence” at Ohio’s universities, including by reintroducing Senate Bill 83 (a failed bill which would have attacked, among other things, diversity programs, cross-cultural competency education, and academic freedom). He plans to crack down on labor unions and, while he has been less specific on this point, the spectre of 2011’s Senate Bill 5 and even so-called Right To Work may again haunt Ohio.
Unless something drastically changes in the next couple of weeks, to paraphrase US Attorney General John Mitchell in 1970, this state’s going so far to the right you won’t recognize it.
Sources:
Comentarios