On Tuesday, November 5, 2024, Ohio voters delivered a sweeping statewide victory for the Republican party.
The marquee election this year was, obviously, the presidential race. In Ohio, the result was not much of a surprise. Few expected Vice President Harris to have much of a chance of carrying Ohio, which voted for former President Trump by 8% in both 2016 and 2020. In 2024, Trump expanded this margin to 11%.
Particularly significant for Ohio is that Trump’s victory will open up one of Ohio’s Senate seats. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, will vacate his seat at the beginning of 2025 to assume office as Vice President. Governor Mike DeWine will appoint a replacement, who will hold the seat until a special election in 2026. Whoever wins that special election will serve through 2028 (the end of Vance’s term), at which point they will be up for reelection to a six-year term.
This 2026 special election may attract a great deal of national attention. In 2026, for Democrats to have any shot at flipping the Senate, they will likely need to win Ohio. While recent political trends are not particularly encouraging on that front, if history repeats and 2026 is a strong political environment for Democrats (as it was in 2018, the last midterm under President Trump), this race could be competitive.
In the immediate term, however, the news is much worse for Democrats. Ohio’s last statewide non-judicial elected Democrat, Senator Sherrod Brown, lost reelection. While he considerably outran Vice President Harris, he still lost 50% to 46% to Republican Bernie Moreno.
Brown did not go down without a fight. The 2024 Ohio Senate campaign was, by far, the most expensive in American history, with both sides spending close to half a billion dollars. As a result, any Ohioan who turned on a TV, radio, or YouTube video in the past six months can tell you all about the issues of this election—Moreno hammered Brown for being “out of touch” on wedge issues like immigration and trans rights, while Brown hit Moreno back for his history of wage theft and workplace discrimination while running to the right on immigration. Ultimately, Moreno won out. For the first time since 2007, Ohio will have two Republican Senators in 2025.
Another victory for Ohio Republicans was the state supreme court. Three of seven supreme court seats were up in 2024, and Republicans Joe Deters, Megan Shanahan, and Dan Hawkins swept all three by around 10% each. They unseated two Democratic justices (Michael Donnelly and Melody Stewart, both CSU|Law alumni), leaving just one, Jennifer Brunner.
This is a dramatic shift for Ohio’s highest court. Until 2022, Democrats had a considerable presence on the state supreme court, occasionally joining with Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor (a moderate Republican and another CSU|Law alumnus) to form a majority that could push back against the Republicans on issues like gerrymandering. In 2021, however, the General Assembly began requiring state supreme court candidates to list their party affiliation on the ballot. Since then, Democrats have lost every single statewide judicial election, and Chief Justice O’Connor (legally required to retire in 2022 due to her age) was replaced by conservative Republican Sharon Kennedy.
One of the consequences was to aid in the demise of Issue One in 2024. In another victory for Ohio Republicans, Ohioans rejected Issue One, a ballot initiative which would have created an independent redistricting commission to draw Ohio’s electoral districts (thereby ending partisan gerrymandering and giving the Democrats a major boost) by 8%. Unlike other statewide elections in 2024, this was genuinely surprising. Polls showed strong support for Issue One, and similar anti-gerrymandering measures in 2015 and 2018 passed overwhelmingly.
One of the primary culprits was the ballot language. Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose modified the ballot language proposed by Issue One supporters in a way that was ludicrously biased against Issue One—for instance, saying that the ballot initiative would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and that the redistricting commission would be “required to gerrymander” the state’s districts.
Issue One supporters filed legal challenges to this ballot language. If the Ohio Supreme Court of 2022 (which included three Democrats and Chief Justice O’Connor, an Issue One supporter) had heard these challenges, it almost certainly would have ruled against LaRose. In 2024, however, the court ruled in favor of LaRose, holding that the language did not “mislead, deceive, or defraud voters.” State ex rel. Citizens Not Politicians v. Ohio Ballot Bd., Slip Opinion No. 2024-Ohio-4547, ¶ 38.
Thus, thanks to the new alignment of the state supreme court, the language Ohioans voted on declared that Issue One would not ban, but require, gerrymandering. Ohio Republicans seized the opportunity, printing yard signs and literature imploring voters to reject Issue One to stop gerrymandering. The smokescreen worked and, after a decade of overwhelmingly supporting anti-gerrymandering measures, Ohio voters rejected Issue One. This is a massive win for the Republican party and a serious setback to efforts to reform Ohio’s electoral maps, which are some of the most badly gerrymandered in the country.
Other results in Ohio, however, are not so dramatic. The state’s congressional results appear to be the same as the 2022 election—Democrats Shontel Brown and Joyce Beatty easily kept their deep-blue districts, Emilia Sykes and Greg Landsman held the seats they flipped in 2022, and Marcy Kaptur narrowly kept her seat (albeit by less than 1%). In 2025, Democrats will hold five Congressional seats to Republicans’ nine—the same as before the election.
Democrats also gained a bit of ground in the General Assembly, flipping two seats in the State House (which will now be 65-34 Republican) and two in the State Senate (which will now be 24-9 Republican).
Nevertheless, in general, 2024 was a historic triumph for the Republican party. Republicans won every single statewide election, mostly by double-digits. Republicans hold a 6-1 majority on the state supreme court, and if Justice Brunner loses reelection in 2026 (which, given recent trends, appears likely), they will hold every single seat. Ohio’s electoral map will continue to be one of the most heavily gerrymandered in the country. If Ohio’s status as a swing state was wounded in 2016 and killed in 2020, it was buried in 2024.
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