Amy Acton Beats Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio Governor's Race
A very normie Democrat beats an idiosyncratic MAGA candidate.
Amy Acton has been elected as the next governor of Ohio. A doctor who led Ohio's Department of Health at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she faced off against entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who gained national attention as a candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries before dropping out of the race and endorsing Donald Trump.
The Associated Press has called the race for Acton, with 50.7 percent of the vote.
Acton is, by all indications, a fairly normie Democrat. She's been heavily criticized for her lockdown policies during the pandemic, which were not among the nation's most stringent but were still "impermissibly arbitrary, unreasonable, and oppressive," per one Ohio judge.
Going forward, she's likely to be good and bad in all the ways that normie Democrats of 2026 usually are.
Among Acton's campaign promises were a child tax credit, some sort of age verification requirement for app stores, and a moratorium on new data centers in Ohio until they "exclusively build with union labor" and meet other conditions. She also criticizes Ohio's school voucher system and offers some warmed-over Biden-era pledges, such as an end to "surprise markups" on sporting and concert tickets, a crackdown on employers that the state thinks have wrongly categorized workers as independent contractors, and an attack on price gouging (by whom it doesn't say, suggesting this has become a sort of all-purpose boogieman).
On the plus side, she promises to help protect reproductive freedom and legal mairjuana. She reportedly voted to legalize marijuana when that was on the ballot here in 2023, while Ramaswamy opposed that initiative.
In case you need one more reminder that we're far from 2020, her website accuses Ramaswamy of wanting to "defund police" (by eliminating property taxes) while promising to "fully fund our local law enforcement." And she has said "I do not support boys playing in girls sports" when asked about the Supreme Court's ruling on transgender athletes.
The contest between Acton and Ramaswamy got pretty ugly in the final stretch, with Ramaswamy's campaign running an ad featuring Acton's mother—from whom Acton has been estranged since her stepfather was charged with raping her when she was 12—calling the candidate a liar. The ad was applauded by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance but largely condemned by other prominent Republicans.
That ad might seem ancillary to how Ramaswamy would govern, but it's not entirely irrelevant. The choice to run the ad and to double down on that decision when challenged served as a reminder that Ramaswamy has long been a Trump guy, and Trump has been a Ramaswamy guy. A win for Ramaswamy would have been a win for Trumpian politics—to a degree.
The son of immigrant parents, Ramaswamy espoused somewhat more moderate views on immigration than those espoused by the president and many of his supporters. Ramaswamy also argued against identitarian politics on both the left and the right. And those aren't the only points in his favor from a libertarian perspective. In the past, he's criticized economic protectionism and rejected the idea of a "right-wing nanny state." He's pro-cryptocurrency and pro-housing. And he campaigned on eliminating property taxes, phasing out income taxes, and promoting school choice.
But he also promoted, in his gubernatorial campaign, a moratorium on data center construction "until they're legally required to subsidize their neighbors with free electricity and other community benefits," as Reason's Christian Britschgi explained. He has called for a "libertarian-nationalist alliance." During the 2024 election, "there were times when Ramaswamy seemed like the only person in the field willing to speak some impolitic truth," as Jesse Walker wrote in Reason back then. "It's just that he mixed those truths with some of the most godawful positions you could imagine."
Does Ramaswamy's loss signal a turn away from MAGA in Ohio? Possibly—although we can't discount the fact that Ramaswamy had two big liabilities in Ohio, one of his own making and one not. The choice to run that ad with Acton's mom may have turned off moderate swing voters, especially women. Meanwhile, the color of his skin, his parents being Indian immigrants, and his Hindu religion may have turned off some far-right types who would otherwise leap at a pro-Trump candidate.
As an Ohioan, I was tempted to vote for Ramaswamy and also tempted to vote against Ramaswamy. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Acton, despite liking the cheap feminist thrill of a potential first female governor of Ohio and despite believing that there are several issues where she'll be better than Ramaswamy would have. But nor could I bring myself to vote for a man who seems so intent on courting Trump's favor and emulating Trump's worse instincts.
Ultimately, I chose neither, voting for Libertarian candidate Don Kissick instead. Kissick wound up with 3.4 percent of the vote, according to AP.
