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More at OHEA.org The 2026 election is over.

A rundown of results and reactions this weekend.

The state of Ohio.

Welcome to a special post-election edition of the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

A national blue wave hit Ohio on Tuesday, delivering the governor's office to a Democrat for the first time in 20 years and sending a longtime U.S.

senator back to that chamber.

Amy Acton is the first democratically elected governor since 2006, and the first woman ever elected governor of Ohio.

She'll be the state's first Jewish governor and the first person in more than 100 years to become governor, having never been elected to public office before.

this win is for every Ohioan who has longed, who has long for public servants again.

Who who solve problems instead of making them, and who do not mistake kindness for weakness.

Because of your hard work.

Ohio has chosen unity and decency over division and hate.

The healing begins today.

We must never give up on one another.

This was a tough race, but the campaign is over.

And.

And I want to make something very clear to the people of Ohio.

I will be a governor for all Ohioans.

I am in this fight for all of us.

My promise to Ohio, to those who voted for me and those who did not, is that I will work with anyone and everyone, as I always have to make life better for Ohioans.

Both candidates spent the final weekend before the election campaigning.

Rama Swamy with the Ohio Republican Party, statewide tour bus crisscrossing the state and Acton campaigning with Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, a state that overwhelmingly voted for President Trump in 2024.

Ramos and Acton both voted on election day on different sides of Columbus.

Then Ramaswami quickly traveled to polling places in Cleveland, Toledo and Cincinnati before heading back to Columbus for the watch party.

Acton came out of early voting with a strong lead, and she never lost it.

Ramos closed the gap a bit, but in the end act and defeated him by just under eight percentage points.

Getting over 364,000 more votes than Ramos.

The national network's call that Acton had won the governor's office deflated the crowd at the Ohio Republican Party's election night event.

Ramaswami offered his concession speech.

Then We left her a message to congratulate her on her victory in this race, and I wish her well to lead this state to hopefully greater heights in the future.

It was a tough race.

It was bitter at times in both directions.

But the time tomorrow is to hopefully have, through her leadership, bring this state together.

And I have hope and confidence that she will do what is required to bring Ohio together, to bring our voters and our citizens together, to lead Ohio to the best place possible.

We are rooting for the success of this state.

We're rooting for your success.

And that means that all of us in this room should be rooting for the success of her administration.

And we're hopeful for Ohio to achieve great things, regardless of what happened tonight in this election.

So join me in, please, congratulating our opponents in in their journey, in this in this tough campaign.

We wish them well and that's who we are and what we stand for.

Acton has started setting up her transition team with John Hazily leading edge.

He was a senior advisor on her campaign and was chief of staff for former Governor Ted Strickland.

Voters also made another historic choice in sending former U.S.

Senator Sherrod Brown back to that chamber, defeating Republican incumbent Senator John Huston.

Brown is only the seventh ex-Senator since 1946 to be elected again to the Senate after losing reelection.

sent you sent an undeniable message.

Tonight.

Ohio is not for sale.

Ohio.

Ohio is not giving up on the dream of this country, that we're a place where anyone who works hard can get ahead, that what matters.

It's not your wealth.

It's not your connection.

It's not your last name.

It's not the circumstances of your birth.

It's your ingenuity.

It's your talent.

It's your.

Yes, it's your work ethic.

Our.

Our government.

Our government should work for you, for Ohio, for the American people.

Not just the wealthy, not just the well connected.

That is what we voted for today.

Houston conceded not long after Ramaswami and got choked up in thanking his team and his parents, who adopted him when he was an infant.

Promised I wasn't going to do that, but I did.

So I love you, Mom and Dad.

Look, I know many of you feel disappointment, and it's hard when you invest so much time and energy in something, and it doesn't turn out how you'd like it to.

I will share with you the wisdom of a of a Scripture passage that I, I live my life by.

And it's Romans five three.

Rejoice in your suffering.

Suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character and character.

Hope.

Sometimes it doesn't go how you want, but you learn from it.

Democrats won all down the ballot, though the races were close, and it took longer for those winds to emerge.

Former House Minority Leader Representative Allison Russo beat Treasurer Robert Sprague for Secretary of State Columbus, attorney John beat auditor Keith Faber for attorney general, and Cincinnati City Council member Seth Walsh beat former state Representative Jay Edwards for treasurer.

The only Republican to win an executive office was Secretary of State Frank Larose, who defeated Maple Heights Mayor Annette Blackwell for auditor.

The two Ohio Supreme Court seats on the ballot also went to Democrats.

Justice Jennifer Brunner stays on the bench after defeating former immigration Judge Colleen O'Donnell, and First District Court of Appeals Judge Marilyn Zayas.

Unseated Justice Dan Hawkins, elected just two years ago to fill out the rest of Joe Deters term after deters unseated his fellow justice Melody Stewart.

Democrats also made big gains in the legislature.

They needed six more seats in the Ohio House to break the Republican supermajority of 65 members.

Unofficial results show they picked up nine with three races still tight.

The closest is Representative Cindy Abrams 19 vote lead over Democratic challenger Jonathan Bradner.

In the Senate, Democrats needed three more seats to end the supermajority.

Incumbent Senator Michelle Reynolds lost to Reynoldsburg City Council member Stacey Baker, and Representative Steve Demetriou lost the seat held by term limited Republican Christina Romer to former Aurora City School Superintendent Mike Roberto.

The contest between Representatives Gail Manning and Joe Miller for the seat that had been held by Manning son Nathan, is neck and neck.

A constitutional amendment to require photo identification for in-person voting in Ohio passed easily.

Issue three, the only one on the statewide ballot passed by a 2 to 1 margin.

The voter photo ID requirement was already in state law.

Acton's win is especially impressive considering she won by nearly eight points in a state that President Trump won by 11 points just two years earlier.

Acton, who is from Youngstown one Mahoning County with 54% of the vote, while Ramaswami, who grew up in Cincinnati, lost Hamilton County with 34.5%.

Ramaswami also lost his home precinct in Upper Arlington to Acton, who got more than 57% of the vote there.

As I mentioned, Larose was the only Republican to win one of the five executive offices.

He got 270,000 more votes for auditor than Ramaswami got in his race.

Brunner and Zayas won their Ohio Supreme Court races in the first win for Democrats since party affiliation was listed in those races starting in 2022, and the unofficial results show Ohio has its first congressional delegation, led by Democrats since 2011, with eight and seven Republicans on a map approved by the Republican dominated Ohio Redistricting Commission last year.

Governor Mike DeWine was in an interesting spot with this election.

He had appointed Acton as his health director in 2019 and said her orders during Covid, which Republicans attacked, were his decisions.

He had endorsed Ramaswami but then joined the bipartisan outrage over the ad Ramaswami ran featuring Acton's estranged mother, who lost custody of Acton and her brother in 1978 when her husband was indicted for raping Acton, then 12 years old.

But DeWine didn't have much to say about the election at the Impact Ohio Conference on Thursday or to reporters afterward.

Look, I don't think any governor is going to approve anything, whether you're Democrat or Republican.

That would dramatically change the powers of the governor.

I just don't think that's appropriate.

But, look, I have no idea that they want to do that.

I've not heard that from them at all.

DeWine also said he hopes lawmakers will take up his proposal for a primary seatbelt law, which he says will save lives, as did the crackdown on texting.

He's hoping that'll happen during lame duck.

He also said if lawmakers make any moves to pull back on the governor's powers, he'd have a problem with that.

Well, I think people can interpret elections any way they want to.

I'll go back to what I said just a moment ago.

And that is this is a great wave that went across this country.

Big wind, whatever you want to call it.

You know, the issues that people are concerned about are very legitimate issues.

You know, cost, cost of gasoline, the cost of groceries.

You know, these are things that are very, very important now.

Ohio's not unique.

These are issues that are generally dealt with by the federal government.

So, you know, this is certainly a national trend.

No one can look at the results and think it's anything but a but a national trend.

the conservative Buckeye Institute has suggested that lawmakers do that to make sure only elected officials and not unelected bureaucrats are involved when big compliance costs or other costly government regulations are imposed on Ohio businesses and residents, the think tank says that's not a new idea, but the progressive policy matters.

Ohio says this would be an attempt to turn over authority that's supposed to belong to the governor, to the legislature, and the timing is suspicious.

The state House news bureau was all over the place on election night, including live on the Ohio Channel, going over results and analysis as the races for governor and U.S.

senator were called.

Veteran political journalist Jim Oddy, who covered the statehouse for 40 years before retiring from his longtime position at Dayton TV station, join me for that live show I spoke with 82 days later for his final thoughts on the unofficial results.

about.

You and I were together on election night doing the show.

We didn't know the final results.

Then.

Were you surprised by what you saw in the final results?

Not too many surprises, except for the closeness of so many of these races.

And I'm talking about the ones that now are going to be relying on the turnout of the provisional ballots and then also overseas military votes.

I did not anticipate that they were going to be that close.

Key among them in Montgomery County and several others around there, the US House race involving Mike Turner.

Now, Mike Turner is a congressman.

He's been there a very long time.

24 years.

I covered him for 20 of those 24 years, and I did not expect that he might go down in this race.

But but he lost by less than 5000 votes on election night.

Meanwhile, there are still about 9000 provisional ballots that still have to be counted.

Plus a military overseas votes.

So that could go either way.

He would have to get a large percentage of those outstanding votes to win.

The bottom line is this election is not over.

If you're tired of it, it's going to take a while for the final, final results, not just for Mike Turner, but several other candidates.

We had talked on election night about this being a historic election that we were going into, and it has turned out to be exactly that.

But there's a lot of history that's involved in not just the first woman elected governor of Ohio, but other things that make this whole era historic.

It is the, you know, somebody people had talked about a parallel between this election and then going back in history 20 years ago, in 2006, when we went from a Republican governor to a Democratic governor.

And in that race, three of the four statewide executive offices went from Republican to Democrat.

That's exactly what happened in this one, at least as long as we know that the numbers from election night are still going to hold.

So that is an odd parallel that I did not expect.

Yeah, it'll go down in history not only for the governor's race, but also for the Senate race and the way that the votes were cast statewide.

If you look at the numbers from counties across the state, yeah, we knew that the urban centers were going to be blue, bright blue for the three cases.

Columbus, Cleveland.

But what happened in this race that was different was so many of those suburban counties that had been conservative in the past turned blue.

Chief among them, Delaware County, just north of Columbus, had always historically been a conservative outpost and was never going to be anything but red.

That turned blue for the first time, at least in this election.

It could go back, but at least this time around it was blue.

Several others around Cuyahoga County, they turned blue.

That two years ago in the presid And this is an end of an era, in a sense, because of governor Mike DeWine ending a multi decades long career as an elected official.

DeWine says that governor elect Amy Acton and her husband came out to the residence this week, and he said he wants to be helpful and that it's in everyone's best interest for her to succeed.

You've seen transitions between governors.

This one's really unique because we're changing parties as well as the incoming governor has no legislative experience and runs right into the budget process.

You quickly find out how difficult this job is.

If you think running for governor is tough, just try doing it for once.

I've been through many, many transitions as a reporter.

From the outside looking in that's starting way back in the transition from Governor Jim Rhodes to Dick Celeste.

And boy, that sounds like H in history now.

And that was probably the roughest because they did not get along.

Their two administrations did not get along at all.

So Celeste started very much from scratch.

I call it not much to go on when it came to putting together the state budget this time around.

Very, very different.

Governor Mike DeWine and his administration months ago started to put the process of putting that next budget to gather, having agencies put together their proposed budget already this month so that when they power of the governor governor's race is handed over come mid-January, they will have budget numbers to look at when they get in there.

And remember the new governor, they have a lot to do right away.

It's not one thing at a time.

It's at multiple levels he's searching for.

She will be searching for a new cabinet, then their legislative office that's going to be dealing with the legislature.

At the same time putting together the most complicated bill they will ever deal with.

And that is the state budget.

It has to be done really quickly.

Acton has started setting up her transition team.

She's named John Hazel, former chief of staff for Governor Ted Strickland to lead that team.

I want to ask you, is she going to have trouble finding people who are going to join her administration, given that it's been so long since Democrats were in the governor's office?

Or do you think people would be coming out of the woodwork looking for opportunity?

A little bit of both and everything and all of the above.

So look at it now.

Governor Mike DeWine has 28 people in his cabinet.

The governor can pick and choose.

You want to have 20, 25, 28, 30, you know, okay, that that may not matter, but that's a lot of really important jobs to be filled.

I would predict at least 2 or 3, maybe more of the people who are in the administration will be coming to the acting ministration.

There's nothing that says you can't have a bipartisan, very experienced cabinet, so look for that.

Secondly, there might be some members who come from the legislature, either people who might have been voted out, who weren't successful in their election this week, or somebody who was successful and might be picked by the new governor to come in and say, okay, let's you're a specialist in this area, or you are a committee chairman on this particular issue or series of issues that's happened in the past as well.

One other issue that that comes up occasionally when the governor is putting together their new cabinet, they reach into the federal realm.

In other words, there might not be all that many people ready to go right here in Ohio, but they can reach out to people who are part of the Biden administration in the past, not so long ago, who can come in and begin operating right away, some particular department.

So it comes from all different angles.

And there may have been promises made by the governor to other people along the way that we don't know about saying, hey, if I get in, I'm going to consider you for this cabinet post or sub cabinet post.

That's another thing.

It's not just the cabinet members, but their sub cabinet posts who can be very, very important.

Remember, you're putting together a very large structure to run state government almost immediately.

I mean, January sounds like a long time off for a lot of people, but that's almost the day after tomorrow in political terms.

And it's really, really tough.

Back to the budget.

They have to have it in by within a month or so after they hit the hit the door at the at the governor's office, and then it goes to the house and on to the Senate and passed by July.

That seems like a long way off, man.

It is going to go really quick for everybody in the process.

And the legislature, that's kind of a question about how well she will get along with them.

It's going to be really important for the new governor to set up those legislative aides who are going to be helping her deal with both the House and the Senate.

I was just going to ask you about the legislature.

I mean, the results that we're seeing from Tuesday suggest that the House there won't be a supermajority there.

So there would be no way for the House to potentially override a Acton veto unless there's bipartisan support to do that.

But state lawmakers, Republican leadership, could do some things that could get in her way, in a sense.

Right?

I mean, they could definitely start ripping apart or budget on day one when the edit it has happened in the past.

But they said, thank you very much for that budget, and we'll put that in the round file in the back here somewhere.

And they started from scratch.

Okay.

So the house and what happens is the governor says their budget proposal, the House says thank you very much.

Sometimes they start with that.

Sometimes they start with their own budget.

They pass their version of the budget.

The Senate then does the same thing.

They go, thank you very much.

But we have our own ideas and they pass their separate budget.

You get around to the end of May, let's say.

So you have a month to deal between the House, the Senate and the governor.

That's when the conference committee comes together and says, okay, let's see what middle ground we can find.

And that's really the magic in this, is that a good administration will be able, regardless of party, a good administration will be able to talk to people across the aisle in any form to meet them, maybe in the middle, maybe somewhere a little bit along the way, but to be able to get things done.

And that is the real true.

I say measure of a good administration is can you get things done?

Can you get bills passed?

Can you think, can you get your message across in a way that really resonates with people?

And this is one of the first real true, I say real true tests of their ability to get things done on time.

Remember, it has to be done by the end of June.

That's it.

The Constitution has to be a balanced state budget, not like Congress, where they just seemingly come up with money anytime they feel like it.

This one has to be a balanced budget.

The lame duck session is going to start next week, and one of the recommendations has come from the conservative Buckeye Institute that state lawmakers should kind of pull back on some of the power that the governor has in terms of appointing people to rule making positions.

And I know that sounds like we're getting in the weeds a little bit here, but it suggests to some people that maybe the legislature and the Buckeye Institute want the power of the governor to be kind of constrained, because here we have a Democratic governor elect.

But I can't imagine that governor Mike DeWine would sign anything that would potentially pull back on the power of the governor's office.

Nothing dramatic.

I would agree with you on that.

Sure, they can change a few things around the edges.

I doubt if it'll be anything dramatic.

The governor I seriously doubt if this governor would go along with that.

And the reason being is sets a precedent for what if the tables are turned, if the legislature was Democratic and now you're going to go into a Republican administration, would you really want one legislature then telling the next governor, hey, you can't do these certain things that had been in your power, but we'll have to wait and see.

Anything is possible.

They have the ability to do it and then take it to the governor and say, hey, we would like you to to sign this or let it become law without your signature.

I doubt if Mike DeWine would go along with anything dramatic.

It might be a couple of changes here and there.

And I should note, the Buckeye Institute says these are ideas that have been talked about before, but there are others who are concerned about this throwing up roadblocks for a future governor.

But let me ask you, just finally, any reflections, recollections, anything that you share, want to share as you look back on what happened this week and what happened in the months before that, this week really showed that people were engaged.

People did actually pay attention to the candidates and the message and their role in making this happen.

The turnout was really pretty good statewide, and that's a I say, a surprise.

And that is a positive sign for the state of Ohio.

There were 4,658,250 ballots counted from election night, which is a turnout of 58%.

That is the highest turnout since 1990, and it beat the previous midterm record of almost 56% in 2018.

There are still more than 102,000 provisional and other outstanding ballots that need to be counted before there could be recounts, if required or requested.

And that is it for this week, my colleagues at the state House News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

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Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

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inspired every day.

And from the Ohio education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools every child deserves.

More at OHEA.org