Ohio Is America's No. 1 State for Business. The Real Question Is Who Pays for It.

This month CNBC named Ohio the number one state for business in America, the first time the state has finished first since the rankings began in 2007. Ohio climbed from thirtieth in 2007 to fifth last year to first today. As an Ohioan, I think that is worth being proud of. But every ranking comes with a receipt, and this one is worth reading closely.

The category that carried Ohio was infrastructure, which CNBC weighted most heavily for the first time, along with a new measure for ease of permitting. In plain terms, Ohio won on cheap power, shovel-ready land, and speed. That is also, almost word for word, the recipe for the data center buildout now reshaping the state's economy and its politics. CNBC said it directly: data center development is controversial. So let us talk about who benefits and who pays.

The money moving the governor's race

The clearest signal this month came from campaign finance filings. Elon Musk gave five million dollars to V PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the super PAC backing Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. That group has now raised nearly forty two million dollars, and the bulk of it comes from a small circle of billionaires, led by Jeff Yass at twenty million. Ramaswamy, himself a billionaire, has loaned his own campaign twenty five million dollars, roughly eighty three percent of what the campaign raised this year.

Here is the part I want to handle carefully, because it is documented rather than alleged. One of those major donors has said publicly that he wants to make Ohio an AI hub, an industry built on the same data centers Ramaswamy has campaigned to expand, and Ramaswamy holds investments across that sector. That is a documented financial interest, not a finding of wrongdoing. For contrast, Democrat Amy Acton has built her campaign on small-dollar donations. Voters can weigh what that difference says about who each candidate will answer to.

The energy engine, up close

The abstract becomes concrete in places like Lima, in Allen County, where Google is building a five hundred million dollar data center and neighbors are raising alarms about water, dust, tax breaks, and noise. It shows up in the three hundred fourteen million dollars Ohio has earned leasing public land to fracking. And it runs through the Senate race, where Sherrod Brown is now campaigning against the data center tax break, a stance that puts him at odds with parts of organized labor. The through-line is simple: Ohio is generating enormous economic activity, and the open question is whether the people who live next to it share in the upside or mostly absorb the costs.

What is actually on your ballot

Beneath the statewide noise are the House races that decide real representation. In Ohio's 11th District, the Cleveland-based seat, incumbent Democrat Shontel Brown faces Republican Mike Kirchner, a first-time candidate and retired actuary, with independent Cortney Peterson also running. In the 12th District, covering central and eastern Ohio, incumbent Republican Troy Balderson, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and has voted with the Trump agenda on the 2025 reconciliation law, faces Democrat Jerrad Christian, a Navy veteran running a no-corporate-money grassroots campaign. Knowing these names, and their records, is the most direct power a voter has.

The bottom line

A No. 1 business ranking and a community fighting a data center in its backyard can both be true at the same time. That is not a contradiction. That is Ohio in 2026. The job of an informed voter is not to pick a team, but to ask who the incoming leaders will actually serve, and to vote accordingly. That is the entire point of local coverage, and it is why I keep doing it.

If you want the full breakdown, with every figure sourced, the episode is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ohio-2026-elon-musk-gives-vivek-ramaswamy-%245-million/id1626987640?i=1000777371302

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