David Joyce has represented Ohio's 14th District — Ashtabula, Geauga, Lake, Trumbull and most of Portage counties — since 2013. That's 13 years, long enough that nobody can call any of this a rookie mistake. We've written about him before. Here are three more things Northeast Ohio should know.

1. He's the "Great Lakes guy" with a 6% environmental score

Joyce likes this part of his brand. He co-chairs the House Great Lakes Task Force and in January 2025 he introduced a bill to reauthorize the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, the program that fights algal blooms, invasive species and pollution in Lake Erie. Good bill. Real problem. Genuinely bipartisan — Democrats signed on with him.

Now look at the rest of the ledger. The League of Conservation Voters scores every member of Congress on how they actually vote on clean air, clean water and climate. Joyce's score is 6% for 2025, and 12% for his entire career.

You can't square those two things by accident. One press release about Lake Erie does not offset thirteen years of voting with the polluters roughly nine times out of ten.

And he backed the big one. Joyce voted for Trump's budget bill on July 3, 2025 — the law that slashed through the country's climate programs. It came alongside an EPA that has moved to stop counting the lives saved when it writes air pollution rules and to erase the government's power to fight climate change — rollbacks that analysts say will increase cancer-causing pollution.

Lake Erie doesn't care which press release you sent. It cares how you voted.

2. He voted for a bill that could keep millions of citizens from voting

On April 10, 2025, the House passed the SAVE Act. Joyce voted yes.

Here's what that bill does. It would require every American to prove citizenship in person to register to vote or to update a registration — after a move, after a name change. For most people that means digging out a passport or a birth certificate and carrying it to an election office.

The problem is who doesn't have those documents handy. Roughly 146 million Americans don't have a passport, and about 69 million married women have a birth certificate that no longer matches their legal name. Working people who can't take a weekday off to visit an election office get hit hardest. The Ohio Capital Journal walked through what it would mean for Ohio voters: a lot more paperwork, for a lot of people who already vote legally.

And the thing it's supposed to fix barely exists. Noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare — election fraud in the U.S. is not widespread, and a review of the actual claim about migrants voting found no evidence of it.

So the bill doesn't stop much fraud. It stops voters. Joyce voted for it anyway.

3. His constituents held a town hall. He wouldn't come.

In spring 2025, people in Geauga County got tired of waiting. After weeks of not hearing back from Joyce's office, they organized their own town hall and invited him.

He didn't show. A staffer told the organizer he would not attend an event affiliated with the Democratic Party. The organizers pointed out that the people in the room were Republicans and independents too — they were constituents, which is the only credential that should matter.

What he did instead was a telephone town hall. It ran about 30 minutes. The takeaway from people on the call, per the county party chair who listened in, was that his answers "were parsed in such a way that Congressman Joyce was sort of playing both sides of the issues."

That's the whole trick. A phone call you control, with questions you screen, for half an hour, and you can tell everyone you held a town hall. Meanwhile the neighbors who wanted to look you in the eye and ask about Medicaid — an estimated 356,000 Ohioans are projected to lose health coverage under the bill he voted for — got an empty chair.

What kind of representative is this?

A Great Lakes champion who votes green 6% of the time. A yes vote on a bill that solves a problem we don't have by making it harder to do the thing we all should. An empty chair where your congressman was supposed to be.

Different issues, same instinct: take the credit in public, take the vote in private, and don't be in the room when anyone asks about it. Thirteen years in, that's not a habit he's going to break on his own. Northeast Ohio has one reliable way to bring it up — and it comes around in November.