Ohio 7th District Just Got Competitive, and Two Supreme Court Seats Are on the November Ballot

There is a version of Ohio politics that gets covered nationally, and it is almost entirely the governor's race. Then there is the version that decides how much you pay in property taxes, whether your utility rates go up, and who redraws your district. That second version is where I spend my time, and this week it produced three things worth your attention.

A safe seat stopped being safe

Ohio's 7th Congressional District covers southern and western Cuyahoga County, Medina, Wayne, and a corner of Holmes. Donald Trump carried it by eleven points in 2024. The Cook Political Report had it as Solid Republican. It is now rated Likely Republican, and a June poll commissioned by Democratic aligned interests put Republican incumbent Max Miller ahead of Democrat Brian Poindexter by a single point, inside the margin of error.

Two things are driving that. The first is the challenger. Poindexter is a union ironworker and an at-large Brook Park council member who came up through an apprenticeship, organized for years, and now teaches apprentices at Ironworkers Local 17. In a district full of building trades households, that biography is not a talking point, it is a resume.

The second is that Miller is in the middle of a heavily covered custody and defamation dispute in which his former wife, the daughter of Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, has alleged domestic abuse. Miller denies the allegations and has sued for defamation. No charges were filed in the police investigation that produced the records. Those are allegations, not findings, and I have been careful to say so on air every time. What is not in dispute is the political effect: some members of Congress have called for an ethics inquiry, and Governor DeWine has said the question belongs to voters.

A caution for anyone tempted to overread this: Likely Republican is not Toss Up, no neutral public polling exists yet, and an eleven point district is still an eleven point district. This seat is more interesting than it was in May. It is not flipped.

The two billion dollar line nobody voted on

Ohio exempted data center operators from roughly $1.6 billion in state sales tax in 2025, plus about $446 million in local sales tax. Combined, that is close to $2 billion. The comparable number the year before was about $722 million.

A joint legislative committee spent more than eighteen hours in hearings on it. Then, on the night of June 10, lawmakers pulled the vote. Speaker Matt Huffman explained that Senate leaders pulled it because House Republicans wanted to eliminate the exemption entirely rather than reduce it. This was not a party line fight. Republicans disagreed with Republicans, and the exemption survived the disagreement.

Here is the part I think deserves more attention than it got. In the same window, Ohio counties sold record amounts of residents' delinquent property tax debt to private investors who can then collect at up to 18 percent interest. Cuyahoga sold $18 million in June, a county record. Franklin sold roughly double its normal volume last year. Lucas is running its first sale since 2008. The state does not track this county by county, and the County Treasurers Association has declined to provide the data to reporters and to legislators who asked for it.

I am not going to claim those two facts are causally connected, because I cannot show that. I will say that a state which extends a two billion dollar exemption to data center operators while its counties sell working people's tax debt at 18 percent has a public communications problem at minimum, and a priorities problem at maximum. To their credit, a Republican and a Democrat, Dave Thomas and Dan Troy, have jointly proposed ending the residential and agricultural sales. That is the rare bipartisan bill worth watching.

The races at the bottom of the ballot

Two of seven Ohio Supreme Court seats are up on November 3. Justice Jennifer Brunner, the court's only Democrat and the only Democrat holding statewide office in Ohio, faces Republican Colleen O'Donnell. Justice Dan Hawkins, a Republican, faces Democrat Marilyn Zayas of the Cincinnati-based First District Court of Appeals.

The court currently sits 6 to 1. Ohio added party labels to these races starting in 2022, and Republicans have unseated two incumbent Democrats since. O'Donnell campaigns on originalism, and the strongest version of that argument is worth stating plainly: a judge who reads text as written is predictable, and a judge who can bend the law toward you today can bend it away from you tomorrow. The strongest version of the counterargument is that this is the body deciding redistricting, utility rates, school funding, and how citizen-passed amendments actually get implemented, and a 6 to 1 court elected on partisan ballots starts to look like a political institution in a robe.

Whichever of those you find more persuasive, the practical point is the same. Every fight in this article ends up in front of that court eventually. Property tax reform will. Data center siting will. Utility rates already do.

Two seats. Four names. Brunner, O'Donnell, Hawkins, Zayas. Learn them before November, because almost nobody is going to spend advertising money teaching them to you.

Full episode, 57 minutes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ohio-7th-district-race-tightens-as-max-miller-faces/id1626987640?i=1000779478868