Ohio Is About to Elect a Governor Without a Single Debate

Ohio has two candidates for governor. Neither has ever held elected office. One of them has accepted two debate invitations. The other has declined. And unless something changes in the next eight weeks, roughly eleven million people are going to choose a governor without ever watching the two of them answer a hard question in the same room.

I cover Ohio politics for a living and I want to lay out what actually happened, because the coverage has been unusually one sided in both directions.

On September 2, Vivek Ramaswamy announced he had accepted debate invitations from WLWT in Cincinnati and from CNN. Amy Acton's campaign declined, saying her focus is on talking with Ohioans rather than platforming a candidate who has spread baseless attacks against her and her family.

Her grievance is documented and it is not trivial. There have been AI generated posts depicting her as an alcoholic. There is a campaign ad featuring a woman describing her mother dying in a nursing home during the shutdown, which a Columbus Dispatch fact check found took place in Kentucky, after Ohio had lifted its stay at home order. If you were on the receiving end of that, you would not want to share a stage with the person paying for it either.

Here is the problem with the position anyway.

In 2022, Republican Mike DeWine refused to debate Democrat Nan Whaley. The Ohio Democratic Party ran a nearly month long campaign called the DeWine Debate Watch, arguing that a debate is the equivalent of a job interview and that voters were entitled to one. Amy Acton's running mate, David Pepper, made the same argument about DeWine back in 2014, saying the refusal showed contempt for voters and civic groups. Ramaswamy's campaign is now circulating that 2022 press release, and it is difficult to argue with.

David Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Akron, added the distinction that matters. DeWine had been a fixture of Ohio politics for decades. Voters knew him. Acton and Ramaswamy have never held elected office in their lives. For a large share of Ohio voters, a debate would be the first unscripted look at either of them. Cohen called the refusal political malpractice.

Now let me apply the same standard in the other direction, because a piece that only holds one candidate accountable is not analysis.

Ramaswamy is running on the largest property tax rollback in Ohio history. He says it will not hurt local police, fire, or schools. He has declined to attach a dollar figure to it, and he has not said what happens to the levies voters themselves approved since 2021. When Innovation Ohio, a progressive think tank, tried to estimate the cost, they had to guess at what year he meant to roll back to, because he has never said. Their estimate was roughly 4 billion dollars a year in the first budget, growing to 6.6 billion in the second, which is around 60 percent of what Ohio's income tax collects. He also wants to eliminate the income tax. His stated answer for where the money comes from is downsizing government and growing Ohio's population to 15 million people, which would be a 36 percent increase, on a timeline he has not given.

You are allowed to think that estimate is unfair because it came from a progressive group using an assumed baseline. That is a legitimate objection. But the assumption exists because the candidate will not name a number. A candidate cannot decline to specify and then object to other people estimating.

This is what a debate is for.

The two issues most on the minds of Ohio voters right now are property taxes and data centers. On both, the candidates have released plans that sound different and are structurally similar. Both would impose conditions on new data centers. Both claim ratepayers will not absorb the cost. Analysts who have actually built gas plants have questioned whether that promise can hold, because regional gas demand raises prices whether or not any individual project pays its own way. Neither candidate has answered that. Nobody has made them.

There is still time. It is early September. Campaigns reverse positions on debates all the time, and Cohen said as much.

But if it does not happen, here is what Ohio will have done. It will have spent what is on track to be the most expensive governor's race in state history, more than 50 million dollars in attack advertising by one campaign's count, to elect a first time officeholder to run a state of eleven million people, without either candidate ever being cross examined in public by the other.

Now let me say the part most Ohio coverage will not.

Holding both candidates to the same standard does not mean concluding they are equally good. It means applying the same test and reporting what it returns. So here is what the test returned.

One of these campaigns ran an ad that failed a fact check. The woman in the Ramaswamy nursing home ad lived in Kentucky and died after Ohio had already reopened. One of these candidates is running on the largest property tax rollback in state history and will not attach a number to it, will not say what year he is rolling back to, and will not say what happens to the levies voters approved. One of these candidates told Ohioans they would get free residential electricity from data centers and then clarified, under questioning, that they would still receive an electric bill.

That is a pattern, and it is a pattern about what happens to his claims when somebody checks them. In a candidate for governor, that concerns me considerably more than a refusal to appear on a debate stage, which is a bad decision and a reversible one.

I want Amy Acton to debate. I have said the same thing about every Democrat who has ducked one and I am not going to make an exception now. But if you are asking me which of these two records worries me more about the next four years in Ohio, it is not close, and I am not going to perform a symmetry that the evidence does not support.

That is my read. The sourcing is in the episode and you are welcome to check it and reach a different one.

If you are in Ohio: Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Absentee applications are going out now and you do not need a reason to use one. Your congressional district may have changed under the new map. And Issue 3, the voter ID amendment, is on every ballot in the state.

Full breakdown, with sources: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-wont-amy-acton-debate-vivek-ramaswamy-ohio-issue/id1626987640?i=1000788010870