Commentary: Acton win heralds new policy era for Ohio

After last week’s election results, Ohio will be returning to divided government for the first time in half a generation.

Less than three hours after polls closed in Ohio, the Ohio Capital Journal called the race for governor. At the time I wrote this commentary, former state health director Amy Acton leads Vivek Ramaswamy by nearly 8 percentage points with 99 percent of the total votes counted.

Acton has put forth a platform of policy priorities that look to reorient state policy, and successes in the Ohio House of Representatives give her a bloc that can back up her veto pen. As Candidate Acton moves to Governor Acton, there are a number of policy issues where we could see changes that would impact people’s lives in a concrete way.

Education and Property Taxes

Ohio has been grappling with this tradeoff over the past few years. Record increases in housing valuations have led to a backlash against property taxes at the same time that the state has been working to equalize its school funding. Acton has prioritized fair school funding but will have to contend with headwinds with school finance’s most important tool in Ohio: property taxes.

Acton will face this challenges in the first few months of her governorship, with school funding questions being central to state budget negotiations.

Poverty Reduction

The Acton campaign has emphasized anti-poverty tax credits as a “day one” priority for the administration. These are changes that will have to happen in collaboration with a potentially hostile General Assembly. While Governor DeWine was successful in negotiating an expansion to the Earned Income Tax Credit early in his first term, he introduced a Child Tax Credit last year that was immediately removed from the budget by House leaders.

This is a potential place for collaboration between Acton and legislative leaders. Leaders are interested in tax relief, and if that can be brought about through support for low-income households, this could be an opportunity for compromise during budget negotiations.

Health Care

Governor Kasich famously bucked his party a decade ago by engineering a quiet approval for Medicaid expansion in the state, bringing around $8 billion of federal dollars for healthcare services into the state per year and providing health insurance coverage to 670,000 Ohio residents. Since then, legislators have worked to reduce the state’s investment in Medicaid, including passing a budget clause last year that will immediately remove coverage for those residents if the federal government changes policy to provide a dollar less than it provides for Medicaid today. I’m 

Acton has proposed medical debt relief, reducing administrative barriers to Medicaid enrollment, and using state purchasing power to reduce prescription drug costs. While some of this could be focuses for the state budget, many health care strategies may be possible through executive action. The options could grow in the second half of her term if Democrats take the White House in 2028, opening options for new waivers with the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Energy

Acton has proposed a moratorium on data center development and requiring developers to cover their own energy costs. She has also said she wants to appoint people to the public utilities commission that focus on ratepayer protection. This is likely to be an ongoing discussion as the question of data center development is not going away in Ohio any time soon. With the widespread backlash against data center development, there are opportunities for the new administration to work together with legislative leaders to ensure the benefits of new development outweigh their costs.

The first test of Ohio’s new divided government will come during next year’s budget negotiations. Acton will have opportunities to shape education, taxation, health care and energy policy, but each step she takes will come with fiscal and political tradeoffs. How those tradeoffs are resolved will determine how much this election concretely changes the lives of Ohio residents.