The morning newsletter of the Ohio Capital Journal
Reporting for the People
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By David DeWitt | Editor in Chief
Good morning Ohio!
Campaign finance reports filed last week give Ohio a final look at the governor’s race before Election Day. Outside groups will continue federal reporting, but Thursday’s report is the last pre-election window into Ohio campaigns’ direct fundraising and spending.
Democratic candidate for governor Dr. Amy Acton, left, and Republican candidate for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, right. (Photos/graphic by WEWS.)
By Nick Evans
The Republican candidate reported spending more than $51 million compared with Acton spending $26.2 million.
By Siddarth Sivaraman
Democrats outraised Republicans in five of the six competitive U.S. House races in Ohio as the midterm election season enters its final days.
By Morgan Trau, WEWS
As lawmakers continue to propose changes to abortion policy, the next Ohio governor will play a major role in blocking or allowing restrictions.
By Kathiann M. Kowalski, Canary Media
In Ohio, some groups are looking to step into that process to make sure FirstEnergy, whose utilities supply power to over 2 million customers in the state, uses some of the money it will receive from ratepayers to equitably enable the clean energy transition.
COMMENTARY
U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
By Marilou Johanek
When politicians stand with vile — smearing a child rape victim to try to win dirty — they reveal much about themselves.
By Arnold Oliver
Ohio voters, if your vote did not matter, they would not work to keep you away from the polls. With freedom comes responsibilities. Voting is one of them.
STATELINE
The big challenges and policy issues that cross state lines.
By Sofia Resnick
In the first three years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion in June 2022, more than 900 women faced criminal charges for conduct related to their pregnancies, according to a new report.
By Amanda Watford
As days grow shorter and darkness arrives earlier across much of the country, a new study suggests that brighter streetlights may help reduce nighttime violence — at least temporarily.
THE RUNDOWN
News from other states
By Jason Hancock, Missouri Independent
Missouri Republicans spent more than a year fighting to put a new congressional map into effect, including trying to prevent voters from having the final say. Now that voters have that say, the organized GOP campaign to defend the map has all but vanished.
NATIONAL NEWS
By Jonathan Shorman
The U.S. Department of Justice plans to send election monitors to every state ahead of Election Day, expanding a longstanding practice that’s spurred concern this year among Democrats and voting rights advocates because of President Donald Trump’s push to influence elections.
WEDNESDAY WISDOM
We are the moral inhabitants of the globe. And to deny it is to lie in prison. Oh yes, there’s cruelty, and cruelty, because it destroys the perpetuator as well as the victim, is a very mysterious thing. But if you look at the world as one long brutal game between “us” and “them,” then you bump into another mystery. And that’s the mystery of the tree-shaped scar, and the canary that might sing on the crown of a scar.
And unless all races and all ages of man have been totally deluded, there seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as harmony — all of which are wholly free, and available to us.
-Toni Morrison
CATCHING OUR EYE
Federal election monitors. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Karen Kasler reports, “Feds will send election monitors to three Ohio counties next week.”
The US Department of Justice has informed three Ohio county boards of elections that the federal government will be sending monitors to observe next week’s election. It's part of what is expected to be the DOJ's largest-ever election monitoring effort, with the agency planning to send monitors to all 50 states.
The Boards of Elections in Franklin, Medina and Cuyahoga Counties were emailed letters informing them the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ intends to send election monitors to those jurisdictions.Gerrymandering. The New York Times reports, “An Extremely Detailed Ranking of the Most Gerrymandered States in America.”
Which state has America’s worst gerrymander? After a year of redistricting battles, we have an answer.
We’ve ranked all 44 states with more than one district by the fairness of their congressional maps. Many of the most notorious gerrymanders are ranked near the top of the list. But there are also some oft-derided maps that we judge to be fundamentally fine. (Ohio ranks No. 7 most-gerrymandered.)Ohio Supreme Court. Signal Ohio’s Jake Zuckerman reports, “Is Ohio on the cusp of an all-Republican state Supreme Court?”
Since Statehouse Republicans passed a law in 2021 requiring Ohio Supreme Court candidates to run under party labels on the ballot, reversing a century-old nonpartisan approach, Republicans have gone six for six.
If their undefeated streak continues, they’ll achieve the historically rare feat of total one-party control, a first since 2010.
THE POD
THAT'S ALL FOR NOW, FOLKS.
Mahalo!
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