On Tuesday, voters across America handed Democrats control of both the U.S. House and the Senate.

Ohio was a big part of it. Two years ago, Donald Trump won this state by more than 11 points. On Wednesday, Ohioans woke up to a Democratic governor-elect and a Democratic senator-elect, the Ohio Capital Journal reported. Five of the 12 Republicans on this site who were on the ballot here lost. The seven who won, won by less.

Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: Ohio threw out its Republicans

Jon Husted lost his Senate seat to Sherrod Brown, the man Ohio voted out two years ago. Brown got 50.0% to Husted's 45.2%, according to NBC News. In 2024, Brown lost to Bernie Moreno, 50.1% to 46.5%. In 2022, JD Vance won this same seat with 53%.

Brown spent the campaign talking about corruption. "Corruption is woven into everything," he said at his final rally the night before the election. Husted was a hard man to defend on that. Asked what role he played in passing House Bill 6, the FirstEnergy bailout at the center of Ohio's biggest bribery scandal, he said "none" — but FirstEnergy's own texts said otherwise. In an AP survey of Ohio voters, the two issues that stood out far above the rest were the cost of living and government corruption, the Capital Journal's David DeWitt wrote.

Vivek Ramaswamy lost the race for governor to Amy Acton, a doctor who ran Ohio's health department early in the pandemic. She got 52.3% to his 44.4%, according to NBC. Four years ago, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine won with 62.4%. Acton will be the first woman elected governor of Ohio. More on how Ramaswamy ran that race below.

Democrats won almost the whole ballot:

• Secretary of state. Allison Russo beat state Treasurer Robert Sprague. That's the office that runs Ohio's elections, and Republicans had held it since 2011. "This was a national wave," Sprague said when he conceded, and his party has "some soul searching ahead of us."
• Attorney general. John Kulewicz beat state Auditor Keith Faber, 50.31% to 49.69%, and Faber conceded. Both men had promised to put the House Bill 6 bribery case back in front of a jury after the last trial ended without a verdict.
• Treasurer. Seth Walsh beat Republican state Rep. Jay Edwards, 50.55% to 49.45%, and Edwards conceded.
• Ohio Supreme Court. Justice Jennifer Brunner kept her seat, and Democrat Marilyn Zayas beat Republican Justice Dan Hawkins. The court goes from one Democrat to two, out of seven.

The supermajority in the Ohio House is gone

Republicans have held a supermajority in the Ohio House since 2013. It takes 60 of the 99 seats. With that many, they can override any governor's veto without a single Democratic vote.

Going in, they held 65. After Tuesday, unofficial results gave them 52, with Democrats at 42 and five races still too close to call, the Capital Journal reported Wednesday. Even if Republicans win all five, they top out at 57.

"We didn't just break the supermajority — we shattered it," said House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn.

Four Republican incumbents lost: Mike Dovilla of Berea to Megan Coy, Andrea White of Kettering to Rose Lounsbury, Brian Lorenz of Powell to Shelby Kimball, and Jim Thomas of Plain Township to Krista Allison. Democrats also won four open seats Republicans held. In the state Senate, Stacie Baker beat Republican Sen. Michele Reynolds.

Here's why it matters. On Jan. 1, the strict new Medicaid work rules in Trump's budget bill kick in. "Hundreds of thousands of Ohioans are going to be affected," Ohio State political scientist Paul Beck told the Capital Journal, along with the rural hospitals that treat them. We've laid out what that bill and the rest of the Republican agenda are costing Ohio. Acton says she'll push back. Without a supermajority, House Republicans can't simply override her when she does.

They drew 12 seats. They won 7.

Last year, Ohio's redistricting commission drew a new map for Congress. The version presented the day before the vote had 12 Republican-leaning districts and three Democratic-leaning ones, according to the commission's own data, up from the 10–5 split Republicans held. It went after two Democrats, Marcy Kaptur and Greg Landsman. The map wasn't posted until after 4 p.m. on Oct. 30, 18 hours before the commission approved it unanimously, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

It didn't work. All five Ohio Democrats in Congress won, including Kaptur in a new 9th District that leaned Republican 54.5% to 45.5% by the commission's own numbers, and Landsman in a new 1st District that leaned Republican too. And Democrats flipped three Republican seats. Ohio will send eight Democrats and seven Republicans to the House. The three Republicans who lost are all on this site:

• Max Miller lost the 7th District to Democrat Brian Poindexter, 54.9% to 45.1%, according to NBC. Miller is under House Ethics investigation over his ex-wife's domestic violence allegations, which he denies. His own ex-father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno, led the Republicans who called on him to quit. When Ohio Republicans got ready to push him off the ballot, Trump's political team told them to back off. Poindexter ran on lowering costs and banning stock trading by members of Congress.
• Mike Carey lost the 15th District to Democrat Don Leonard, who used to teach city planning at Ohio State, 51.9% to 45.3%, according to NBC. Before Congress, Carey was a registered lobbyist on House Bill 6, the same bribery-scandal law.
• Mike Turner, in Congress since 2003, lost the Dayton-area 10th District to Kristina Knickerbocker, an Air Force veteran and cancer nurse practitioner, 49.3% to 47.7%, according to NBC, which has called the race. Constituents have asked him for a public town hall since 2017. When his opponent asked him to debate, he changed the subject.

The bad: they won, by less

Seven Republicans on this site held their seats. Every one of them got a smaller share than two years ago. One thing to keep in mind: these districts were redrawn last year, so the 2024 numbers are on the old lines. All numbers are from NBC News, with about 98% of the vote counted.

• Warren Davidson won the 8th District with 52.1% against Democrat Vanessa Enoch. Two years ago he got 62.8%. This is the congressman who, asked about a pregnant 12-year-old rape victim, said "it's hard to conceive of somebody who doesn't know they were raped for two months." Four days later, a 10-year-old Ohio girl had to go to Indiana for an abortion.
• Bob Latta won the 5th District with 54.3%, down from 67.5%. The last in-person event on his own website's list was from 2015. When 300 constituents packed a Bowling Green church to talk to him in 2025, they talked to a cardboard cutout.
• David Joyce won the 14th District with 55.0%, down from 63.4%. A hospital in his district closed, reopened for 43 days and closed again. He called it "devastating," sent one letter, and then voted for the law taking $33 billion of Medicaid out of Ohio.
• Troy Balderson won the 12th District with 59.4%, down from 68.5%, in a rematch with Democrat Jerrad Christian. In 2025 he told Ohio business leaders that Congress decides whether the Education Department goes away: "Not the president, not Elon Musk." Four months later he voted, at Trump's request, to cancel $9.4 billion Congress had already approved.
• Michael Rulli won the 6th District with 60.4%, down from 66.7%. He represents East Palestine, and he hired the man Ohio's attorney general sued over a fake East Palestine charity as his communications director.
• Jim Jordan won the 4th District with 64.5%, down from 68.5%. Asked whether Max Miller should resign, Jordan called the abuse allegations "a family matter" and said he hoped Miller would win. Miller's voters disagreed.
• David Taylor won the 2nd District with 64.2%, down from 73.6%. In his first 14 months in Congress he made 132 stock trades, and when a reporter asked whether he'd support banning members from trading individual stocks, his office didn't respond.

The ugly: the ad

The race for governor was ugly because Vivek Ramaswamy made it ugly.

What the ad said

Two weeks before Election Day, Ramaswamy's campaign put out an ad starring Donna Arthur, Amy Acton's mother. Acton hadn't seen her in 48 years. In the ad, Arthur calls her daughter a liar about her childhood.

Acton has said for years that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child. Court records back her up. He was indicted for raping her when she was 12. He and Acton's mother then fled Ohio together, and he died without ever facing trial. We covered the ad and the court file the day it came out.

Ramaswamy's campaign first said it would spend $4 million to air it. It ended up spending about $1 million, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, before Ramaswamy took it off the air on Oct. 29.

Who told him to stop

Ohio governors past and present, and alumni of Ramaswamy's own Catholic high school in Cincinnati, all urged him to pull it, the AP reported. DeWine, who had endorsed him, called it "deeply, deeply troubling". "I would urge Ramaswamy's campaign to take this down," he said.

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance backed him. Trump said he told Ramaswamy to leave it on the air. "She's fair game," he said.

On Election Day, Acton told reporters Ramaswamy had "crossed a line." "Five living governors on both sides denounced what he did," she said. "I have felt all along that there's no low he won't go to."

What it cost on Tuesday

Acton won by nearly 8 points. University of Cincinnati political scientist David Niven doesn't think the ad is why. "Ramaswamy didn't lose because he ran the ad," he told the Capital Journal. "He ran the ad because he was losing."

But Niven said there's no question it hurt the rest of the Republican ticket. "It could have been the margin by which some of those statewide offices were lost," he said. Those were close. The attorney general's race came down to about 28,000 votes out of 4.5 million.

Sandy Theis, a longtime Ohio political observer and former Statehouse reporter, said the backlash was strongest among women, and showed up in races involving women. The Capital Journal noted that Allison Russo, running for secretary of state, and Marilyn Zayas, running for the Supreme Court, got bigger shares of the vote than Brown and Kulewicz did.

The rest of the ugly

A few more results from Tuesday:

• Voter ID went into the constitution. Issue 3, proposed by Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose and championed by Ramaswamy, passed with 65.3%. Ohio already required photo ID to vote. The amendment puts that in the state constitution and adds ID rules for people who vote by mail, the voters who may feel it most. Ramaswamy sold it as a guard against fraud. The fraud in his own record was dead voters' names forged on his 2024 presidential campaign's petitions.
• The ID law already cost voters. Voting rights groups monitoring the polls said the photo ID law's strict rules got more than 700 provisional ballots thrown out in Ohio's primary, the Capital Journal reported. On Election Day morning, about 100,000 absentee ballots were still out. Ohio changed the deadline so a mailed ballot has to arrive by Election Day, so any put in the mail that day likely won't count.
• The state Senate supermajority survived. Democrats won the governor's race, the U.S. Senate race and three more statewide offices. Republicans will still hold 22 of the Ohio Senate's 33 seats, according to unofficial results. That's more than the 20 they need for a supermajority there. Democrats made their Ohio House gains "despite extreme partisan gerrymandering," the Capital Journal wrote. In the state Senate, it wasn't enough.
• The lame-duck threat. Common Cause Ohio's Catherine Turcer expects Republican legislative leaders to try to cut the governor's power before Acton takes office in January. DeWine has said he won't sign anything that would "dramatically change the powers of the governor."

What the results show

Ohio Democrats beat Jon Husted 50.0% to 45.2% and Vivek Ramaswamy 52.3% to 44.4%, and won the secretary of state, attorney general and treasurer races and both Ohio Supreme Court races. They broke the Republicans' 13-year supermajority in the Ohio House, leaving Republicans at 52 seats with five uncalled, short of the 60 they need. On a congressional map with 12 Republican-leaning districts, they won 8 of Ohio's 15 House seats, beating Max Miller, Mike Carey and Mike Turner. The seven Republicans on this site who won all got smaller shares than in 2024, and Warren Davidson fell to 52.1%. The ugly was Ramaswamy's ad putting Acton's estranged mother on camera to call her a liar. Court records show the mother's husband was indicted for raping Acton when she was 12.

Source

Acton, Brown win in huge Democratic night in Ohio — Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal, November 5, 2026.