Amy Acton flips Ohio governor's office, ending 16 years of GOP control

Ohio just elected its first woman governor — and handed Democrats a win in a state Donald Trump has carried three times. Amy Acton, 60, beat biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on Tuesday, ending 16 years of Republican control of the office and making her the first Democrat to win it since Ted Strickland in 2006.

The race to replace term-limited Republican Mike DeWine was one of the most expensive and bitter in the country. Ramaswamy locked in Trump's endorsement the day he launched and pitched voters on making Ohio income-tax free within a decade, cutting energy bills and restoring "law and order" to the state's cities. Acton ran on costs instead: an earned income tax credit, a child tax credit of up to $1,000, a public prescription drug platform and property tax relief for seniors and middle-income homeowners. She sold herself as a pragmatist who had already served in a Republican administration under DeWine.

The closing weeks turned nasty. Ramaswamy's campaign aired an ad featuring Acton's estranged mother calling her a liar — a spot that surfaced the fact her mother lost custody after her husband, Acton's stepfather, was indicted for raping Acton when she was 12. Politicians in both parties demanded he pull it and apologize. Trump and Vice-President JD Vance stood behind the minute-long ad, which the campaign said it would spend $4m on airing, according to the Guardian. It was discontinued last week.

Acton was a first-time candidate who, like Ramaswamy, had never held elected office. Early polling had her down by double digits, with roughly a quarter of voters saying they'd never heard of her, and Democrats spent months wondering whether bigger names like former senator Sherrod Brown or former congressman Tim Ryan would jump in. By mid-October, Ramaswamy and his allies had spent more than $100m on ads against her — roughly triple her campaign's spending — hammering her handling of the state's pandemic shutdowns.

It wasn't enough. Trump branded her "a radical left lunatic" at an October rally in Youngstown, but polling kept sliding her way, and a run of October surveys put her ahead straight through to election night.

Now the hard part. Acton inherits a state Trump won by 11 points in 2024 and will govern alongside a Republican-controlled legislature — a setup that points to fights over tax reform, school funding and datacenters.