Dr. Amy Acton hopes to flip Ohio's governorship Democratic after decades of mostly uninterrupted Republican rule

A very fat pet cat circled around Amy Acton as the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate delivered her pitch at a Friday night Seattle fundraiser. It was emblematic of the $10 million paid media campaign that her rich opponent recently launched.

Action, the former director of Ohio’s Department of Health, is all about restoring the political health of the Buckeye State’s Democrats, who have lately fallen on hard times. She was center stage, with Republican Governor Mike DeWine, in daily briefings during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is term-limited. The party of Trump is running the con man Vivek Ramaswamy in a somewhat overlooked 2026 race.

Acton is not a culture warrior. Ramaswamy is, delivering feverish critiques of “woke” culture, affirmative action and promulgating conspiracy theories. He is an outspoken nationalist. Acton defines an underpinning of her campaign, saying: “Everyone is tired of the hatred and vitriol.” She analyzed her race, a statistical dead heat in public polling, as a struggle against “extreme wealth and power ideology.”

Ohio is indeed a presidential battleground, a state used to picking winning candidates who have often proven to be losers when it comes to governing.

https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2026/03/dr-amy-acton-hopes-to-flip-ohios-governorship-democratic-after-decades-of-mostly-uninterrupted-republican-rule.html