No $5,000 Checks, No Vivek: Ohio Gets Its First Woman Governor

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COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio voters were offered a billionaire with a national name, a president’s endorsement, and the man who once talked up $5,000 DOGE checks for every American. They picked the doctor from Youngstown instead, and it was not close.

In the final unofficial count, Dr. Amy Acton defeated Vivek Ramaswamy by about 364,000 votes, 2,404,178 to 2,039,730, or 52.3 percent to 44.4 percent. Acton becomes the first woman elected governor in Ohio history, and the first Democrat elected to the office in 20 years. She and her running mate, David Pepper, will be sworn in this January.

She did it without ever debating him. Ramaswamy spent the fall daring Acton to share a stage with him, and she never took the bait. She never gave him the one moment his campaign needed, and she beat him by a third of a million votes anyway. Ohio voters did not need to see them side by side to make up their minds.

On Tuesday night, Acton told supporters that Ohio had chosen “unity and decency over division and hate,” and she declared that “the healing begins today.”

Ohio’s other big winner is headed back to Washington. Sherrod Brown defeated Jon Husted for the U.S. Senate, 2,301,042 to 2,077,748, a margin of about 223,000 votes. Brown returns to the Senate, where he already served 18 years, and his win was one of the seats that handed control of the chamber to the Democrats.

Then there is the loser, and it is worth sitting with how complete this loss was. Ramaswamy had the president’s endorsement. He won his primary with more than 80 percent of the vote. He had more money than a campaign can spend and a name known in every household in America. He carried every county in our coverage area, most of them big. And he lost Ohio by 364,000 votes, in a state Donald Trump carried by double digits just two years ago.

His campaign’s signature moment was an advertisement built around Acton’s estranged mother, a woman Acton had not seen since she was 12 years old. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who had endorsed Ramaswamy, called the ad deeply troubling and wrong. Husted said he would not have run it. Ramaswamy kept it on the air. Ohio noticed.

He barnstormed the state by private jet, hopping between towns on flights shorter than the drive between them. It did not matter. Tuesday was the first time Ohio voters ever got an actual vote on Vivek Ramaswamy, after a presidential run that ended months before Ohio’s primary. They said no, by a third of a million votes. A man can be famous, rich, and backed by a president, and still be unelectable in Ohio. No jet changes that. No check changes that. Ohio has decided.

To his credit, Ramaswamy conceded like a grown-up. He called Acton on Tuesday night, reached her voicemail, and left a message saying he was “rooting for the success of her administration” and hoped she would bring Ohio together. It was the classiest moment of his campaign. It came after the votes were counted.

Acton and Pepper take office in January. Brown goes back to a Senate his party now controls. And Ohio wakes up today having elected the first woman governor in its history. Full results are on our election tracker.

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