I have lived in Northeast Ohio my entire adult life except for the years the Army sent me somewhere else. I paramedic’d here. I got medically retired here after Iraq. I teach Anatomy and Physics here, in a Career Tech district where half my students have never had an adult tell them they could be something before I did it. I wrote my own textbooks because the ones the state approved were either outdated or, frankly, insulting to how capable these kids actually are. I am raising four children on that teacher’s salary, in this state, on an envelope budget, because that is what the job pays and I chose the job anyway.
So when I tell you I want Ohio to be the best state in this country, understand that I am not talking about a bumper sticker. I am talking about the difference between my former students staying here to build something and my former students packing a U-Haul for Nashville because Nashville pays the same and taxes them less. I have watched that happen. More than once. It is the single most depressing thing about teaching in this state, and it has nothing to do with the kids. It has everything to do with what Columbus has and hasn’t done to make staying here worth it.
This is a long one. Grab coffee. I am going to walk through where Ohio actually stands right now — not where the campaign mailers say we stand, actual numbers — and then I am going to make the case for why Vivek Ramaswamy is the guy who gets us from “a fine place to be from” to “a place people move to on purpose.” I am also going to be honest about where his plan has real questions attached to it, because I told you a long time ago that I would rather give you the defensible version of an argument than the exaggerated one. If I oversell this, you should not trust anything else I write, so I am not going to.
— WHERE OHIO ACTUALLY STANDS —
Let’s start with the good news, because there is real good news and nobody in Columbus seems to want to say it out loud: Ohio’s bleeding has slowed down. For years the story out of this state was the same story out of Illinois and California, just quieter — kids grow up here, get an education here, and leave the second they can. In 2021, Ohio lost more than 32,000 people to net domestic migration. People packed up and left, net, more than thirty-two thousand of them, in a single year. By 2025, that number flipped. Ohio actually posted a net domestic migration GAIN of just under 12,000 people. Overall population growth is still crawling along at half a percent a year, so nobody should be popping champagne, but the direction changed. Something worked.
What worked was jobs showing up. Anduril’s hyperscale manufacturing plant going into Columbus is being called the largest single job-creation project in this state’s history, and it is not the only one. Companies are choosing Ohio for manufacturing, logistics, and energy projects because of workforce, location, and infrastructure — CNBC ranked Ohio in the top five states for business in 2025, first in the nation for infrastructure, second in cost of doing business. Site Selection Magazine and Area Development both had us at number six overall. Those are real, independently compiled rankings, not campaign talking points.
Here’s the part nobody wants to sit with, though: at the exact same time Ohio is winning these site-selection fights, the Tax Foundation’s State Tax Competitiveness Index still has us sitting in the high 30s overall — 37th, most recently, dead last among our five neighboring states. Indiana is 9th. Michigan is 12th. Kentucky is 18th. Even West Virginia beats us at 20th. Our best category is property tax, where we rank a respectable 6th. Our worst is individual income tax, where we rank 41st, dragged down by a Commercial Activity Tax that stacks on top of everything else and a bracket structure that, according to the Tax Foundation’s own analysts, is still needlessly complicated even after recent flattening.
Translation, for anyone who does not want to read a tax report: Ohio is winning on infrastructure and location despite the tax code, not because of it. Imagine what happens when the tax code stops being the asterisk.
I know what some of you are already typing. “Ohio’s business climate is actually great, JobsOhio put out a whole rebuttal to the Tax Foundation.” Sure, and I read that rebuttal too — it argues the Tax Foundation’s weighting methodology overrates income and corporate tax variability relative to what businesses actually pay. Fine, that is a legitimate methodological argument, and I am not going to pretend it isn’t. But you cannot simultaneously tell families that property taxes doubled their bill in the last reappraisal AND tell businesses everything is rosy. Pick one. Quinn’s Law #5 applies here perfectly: when liberalism conflicts with reality, reality must give way — except reality does not actually give way, it just sends you a bigger property tax bill in March and dares you to notice.
— TAXES: THE PLAN, THE HOLE, AND WHY BOTH MATTER —
Vivek’s headline promise is blunt: “I will make Ohio a zero income tax state on my watch.” He has laid out a phase-out over eight to ten years, starting in his first budget by eliminating the capital gains tax to pull investment capital into the state immediately, then winding down the rest of the income tax on a schedule. Alongside that, he wants to roll back property taxes to roughly where they sat before the end of the COVID pandemic — not eliminate them, roll them back — while explicitly protecting new construction from being penalized and honoring the debt obligations local governments already have on the books. His stated logic, in his own words: “Lower costs, bigger paychecks… produce more energy, that brings down those electric bills… cut the red tape that gets in the way of building more homes.”
Now let’s do the part his campaign press releases skip, because I promised you the honest version and not the greeting-card version.
Ohio currently pulls close to 45% of its non-Medicaid general revenue — roughly $21.3 billion worth — from the income tax. Innovation Ohio, a left-leaning policy shop that is not exactly rooting for Vivek, put out a report estimating the phase-out would eventually blow a $9.8 billion hole in the state budget. Their argument is that you cannot fill a hole that size without either gutting schools, Medicaid, and disability and senior services, or shifting the burden onto property and sales taxes — meaning, in their telling, the “average worker” nets maybe a hundred bucks a month in income tax relief while getting “hammered,” their word, on the other side of the ledger.
I want to be fair to that critique instead of strawmanning it, because strawmanning a real concern is exactly the kind of thing that makes people distrust everything else you say. It is true that Ramaswamy has not published a line-item plan showing precisely which agencies shrink and by how much. It is true that “eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse” is a phrase every single candidate for every single office has said since the Nixon administration, and it is fair to ask for specifics. Governor DeWine himself has said, on the record, that eliminating the income tax entirely “is just not an issue anymore” for him — and DeWine is a Republican who signed the last flat-tax bill because the legislature would have overridden his veto anyway.
Here’s my honest counter to Innovation Ohio’s honest concern, though, and it comes from having actually read what happened the last time this exact fight played out in a neighboring region: this is not a new experiment. Multiple no-income-tax states already exist, and they did not collapse into Mad Max scenarios of shuttered schools. Tennessee has zero income tax and posted a net domestic migration gain of 42,000 people. Florida has zero income tax. Texas has zero income tax and gained 67,000 people net. Meanwhile California — 13.3% top income tax rate — lost 229,000 people net. New York, at 10.9%, lost 138,000. People are not fleeing capitalism. They are fleeing the bill. The Tax Foundation’s own competitiveness rankings have Wyoming, South Dakota, Florida, and Texas at the top of the entire country, and California, New Jersey, and New York rounding out the bottom three. If eliminating income tax reliably destroyed state governments, the states that already did it would look like Detroit in 1975. They do not.
Does that settle every funding question Innovation Ohio raised? No, and I am not going to pretend it does, because pretending is how you end up sounding like the people I make fun of. What it does settle is the premise that zero-income-tax states are some kind of untested fantasy. They are the single most tested policy in state government right now, and the tested result is people moving toward them, not away.
Quinn’s Law #3 is relevant here, and it is not even really a joke: the amount of wealth in any given area tends to be inversely proportional to the number of Democrats running it. Look at the map. It is not subtle.
Then there’s the college consolidation mess, which I am also not going to pretend didn’t happen, because you’ll find the clip in about four seconds if I don’t address it. Early in the campaign, Ramaswamy floated shutting down what he called “subpar” universities and named Kent State, Cleveland State, Central State, and the University of Akron by name. That went about as well as you’d expect — bipartisan backlash, immediately, because those are real institutions with real alumni and real employees in real legislative districts. To his credit, he walked it back within days to talk about consolidating overlapping programs rather than shuttering entire campuses, which is a materially different and much more defensible position: Ohio has more public four-year institutions than a state our size arguably needs, with significant program overlap and, in several cases, declining enrollment that predates this campaign by a decade. Consolidating duplicate programs across a state system is not radical. It is what private industry does constantly when it has redundant divisions. But naming four specific universities by name, out loud, before doing the math in public, was not a great opening move, and I am not going to tell you it was strategy when it was clearly just Vivek thinking out loud in front of a microphone. Own the mistake, learn from it, move on — which, credit where due, is exactly what the campaign did.
— THE OTHER SIDE’S MATH: AMY ACTON’S AFFORDABILITY FAIRY TALE —
Fair is fair, so let’s give the same treatment to the other side of this race. Dr. Amy Acton is the Democratic nominee, running with David Pepper as her second, and her entire campaign is built around one word: affordability. Her “ActOn Lowering Costs” agenda calls for a child tax credit between $500 and $1,000 a year, a refundable credit aimed at lower-income families, a state-run platform called Ohio Rx to try to bring down prescription costs, more transparency requirements on insurance and healthcare pricing, a crackdown on surprise billing, and — the headline item, the one she talks about at every single stop — a promise to have the state buy out and forgive Ohioans’ medical debt, following the lead of a handful of other Democrat-run states that have tried the same thing.
I’ll give her this much credit before I tear into the math: medical debt is a real problem, and she is not making it up. The Health Policy Institute of Ohio found that roughly one in seven Ohioans carried unpaid medical debt of ninety days or longer as of 2022. That is a genuine, measurable problem, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.
Here’s where it falls apart, though, and it is the exact same hole Innovation Ohio dug for Vivek’s tax plan, except reporters covering Acton have noticed it too: as of a rollout event this past spring, Acton “unveiled lots of affordability ideas but few specifics on funding them,” to quote the actual headline covering her own announcement. A child tax credit is not free. Ohio Rx is not free. A statewide medical debt buyout program — the specific mechanism other states have used runs through purchasing distressed medical debt at pennies on the dollar from collection agencies, which sounds clever until you ask who is actually eligible, how the state verifies it, and what stops it from becoming an annual line item that grows every single year the way every other “temporary” government health program in American history has grown — that is not free either.
So here is my question for Dr. Acton, and I would ask it to her face with the same tone I use grading a lab report that shows its conclusion but skipped the math: how do we pay for this? Not “we’ll find efficiencies,” not “we’ll ask the wealthy to pay their fair share” — actual numbers, actual funding mechanism, actual sunset clause if it doesn’t work. Because if the standard for a policy proposal is just “sounds compassionate,” I can hand you a stack of equally compassionate-sounding ideas that are equally unfunded. Should Ohio provide free ice cream every Monday at every public school, no questions asked, and the dairy co-ops just absorb the cost? It’s just common sense, right? Nobody’s against ice cream. Should every student enrolled in a public high school class get paid a living wage for attending, regardless of age, since showing up is technically labor? This is not a radical thing to ask for — I mean, why should learning be unpaid? You see how fast “sounds nice” stops being an argument once you have to write the check.
And look — while we’re on the subject of who pays for what, here’s an idea from the other direction, purely in the spirit of shared sacrifice: a mandatory socialized grading curve, where students with a higher GPA are required to transfer some of their points to classmates who are struggling, redistributed for equity. Just common sense. It’s not a radical thing. Somehow I don’t think that one’s going to poll well with the same people cheering for the medical debt buyout, and I’d love to know why the logic doesn’t travel.
Now let’s talk about the ACA angle directly, because it always comes up whenever a Democrat starts talking about “affordability” and healthcare in the same paragraph. If you are worried about your Obamacare premium going up, here is the actual, verifiable sequence of events: Democrats in Congress voted to let the COVID-era ACA subsidies expire. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies — Democrats did that, on their own, while simultaneously running ads blaming Republicans for the resulting premium hikes. That is not a talking point, that is the vote record. If your representative or senator voted for the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 or the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — the two bills that created and then extended those subsidies in the first place — and is now complaining that costs will rise when the subsidies lapse, they are complaining about a fire they set. It’s the equivalent of your boss giving you a thousand-dollar Christmas bonus one year, then cutting your salary by a thousand dollars the next year and acting shocked that you noticed the difference.
And since we’re on healthcare: why is the party that spent a decade demonizing insurance executives now proposing a bigger, more permanent role for the exact same insurance and pharmacy-benefit infrastructure through “Ohio Rx” and price transparency mandates that leave the underlying industry fully intact? Where did the left’s brief, strange moment of sympathy for Luigi Mangione go — the twenty-six-year-old from a prominent family who investigators say targeted a healthcare executive specifically over anti-insurance-industry motives? A huge chunk of the online left cheered that on for weeks. Now the same online left wants Columbus to partner more closely with the insurance industry to run a debt-buyout program? Pick a lane. If you actually hate the insurance model, the answer is not more government contracts with it — the answer is Health Savings Accounts, direct primary care, and price transparency that lets a patient shop the way they shop for literally everything else they buy. HSAs put the money and the decision in the patient’s hands instead of a hospital billing department’s. That is the actual alternative to a system you claim to despise. A debt buyout is a Band-Aid on a wound you’re simultaneously arguing needs stitches.
Here’s my three-option test for anyone pushing an unfunded affordability platform without a financing mechanism, and I mean this sincerely, not as a gotcha: either you haven’t actually read your own proposal’s fiscal impact, or you don’t understand how state budgets work, or you understand it fine and you’re comfortable letting voters find out the real cost after the election. I genuinely don’t know which of the three it is for Dr. Acton, and I’d like to know, because right now it looks like door number three with extra steps.
— EDUCATION: PUT PARENTS BACK IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT —
I need to be careful here because I am, by trade, a public school teacher in a high-need Career Tech district, and I am about to say some things a lot of my colleagues will not love. I am saying them anyway because I wrote my own textbooks precisely because I got tired of watching curriculum decisions get made by people who have never once stood in front of thirty-two teenagers at 7:45 in the morning.
Vivek’s education pitch is simple: expand school choice, tie teacher pay more directly to actual performance instead of years-served-only step increases, and — his phrase, not mine — “put parents back in the driver’s seat.” His team describes it as the natural extension of Ohio’s existing EdChoice program, not the invention of something new.
Here’s what most people do not realize about EdChoice, because the coverage of it is almost always either cheerleading or fearmongering with no actual numbers attached: enrollment in the EdChoice Expansion voucher program went from 23,272 students in 2023 to 88,095 in 2024 — a 283.3% increase in a single year. This year the state has accepted just shy of 100,000 students into Expansion alone, and the Department of Education and Workforce projects another 7.5% growth heading into 2026-2027, with total state spending on private-school vouchers across all EdChoice programs projected to hit $1.2 billion. Traditional EdChoice scholarships currently run $6,166 for K-8 students and $8,408 for high schoolers. Every single Ohio K-12 student, regardless of income, is technically eligible for some tier of the program.
That is not a fringe policy anymore. That is a fifth of a million families, roughly, who have already voted with their feet in a way that makes the domestic migration numbers look small by comparison. Parents are not waiting for a legislative debate to conclude before deciding where their own kid goes to school. They already decided. The only question left is whether Columbus catches up to what parents have already done or keeps pretending the horse hasn’t left the barn.
Now, Communist Goal #17 from the list read into the Congressional Record back in 1963 by Representative A.S. Herlong Jr. — “control the schools, use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda” — is one of the few on that list still marked “pending” by most historical assessments rather than fully achieved, and I think that’s precisely because parents keep fighting back every time a district tries to centralize curriculum control away from families. Goal #41, “belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history,” pairs with it — you cannot control what a kid believes about their own country if the parent, not a distant administrator, still holds the exit option. School choice is the practical, functioning antidote to both goals, not because private schools are automatically superior — plenty aren’t — but because competition and exit rights are the only mechanism that has ever reliably forced any institution, public or private, to improve rather than coast.
The teacher-merit-pay piece is where I have actual professional skin in the game, so let me be straight with you instead of cheerleading blindly. Step-and-lane pay scales — you get raises for years served and degrees earned, full stop, regardless of whether your students are actually learning anything — protect bad teachers and chronically underpay great ones. I know phenomenal teachers in my own building who could double their income in six months in the private sector and stay anyway, out of pure stubborn love for these kids, while getting paid on the exact same scale as someone phoning it in until retirement. Merit pay done honestly — measured growth, not just raw test scores, which unfairly punish teachers working with the toughest populations — is not an attack on teachers. It is the first system in a generation that might actually reward the ones doing the hardest work with the hardest kids, instead of treating a master’s degree from an online diploma mill as equivalent to a decade of proven classroom results.
Is there a version of merit pay that gets implemented badly, punishes teachers for factors outside their control, and turns into a political football? Absolutely, and I’d be the first one at the statehouse pushing back if that’s the version that shows up. But “it could be done badly” is an argument for doing it carefully, not an argument for the status quo, which is already failing plenty of kids in plenty of buildings across this state, including some of mine.
— JOBS, ENERGY, AND THE ELECTRIC BILL EVERYONE’S ACTUALLY ANGRY ABOUT —
Every candidate says “jobs.” It means nothing on its own — it’s the political equivalent of a restaurant claiming its food is “fresh.” So let’s talk about what specifically is happening in Ohio right now, separate from what either candidate is promising for the future.
Anduril’s planned hyperscale manufacturing facility outside Columbus is being described, by people who track this stuff for a living, as the largest single job-creation project in Ohio’s history. That is not a Vivek Ramaswamy talking point — that deal was in motion under the current administration, before this race was even decided. Ohio ranked in CNBC’s top five states for business in 2025, first in the country for infrastructure, second for cost of doing business. None of that happened by accident, and none of it happened because of the state income tax — it happened despite it, the same way I mentioned earlier.
Here’s Vivek’s actual argument, in his own words again because I’d rather quote him directly than paraphrase him into a strawman: “Produce more energy, that brings down those electric bills.” Ohio sits on some of the richest natural gas reserves in the country thanks to the Utica and Marcellus shale formations, plus an aging nuclear fleet that, properly maintained and possibly expanded, could provide the kind of stable baseload power that data centers and advanced manufacturing actually need — and Anduril, along with every AI-adjacent data center now getting sited across this country, needs enormous, reliable, near-constant electricity. States that make energy production harder through permitting delays and regulatory friction are going to lose those projects to states that don’t, full stop. This isn’t ideology, it’s math a data center site-selection consultant runs in an afternoon.
The uncomfortable truth for anyone rooting against energy expansion on principle: you cannot simultaneously demand more high-paying manufacturing and tech jobs while opposing the power generation those jobs require to physically exist. A server farm does not run on good intentions. It runs on megawatts, and somebody has to generate them.
On regulation more broadly — cutting the red tape that slows down permitting, construction, and business formation — this is one of the few areas where I’d encourage everybody, regardless of party, to actually look at outcomes instead of vibes. Ohio’s permitting timelines for new manufacturing facilities have historically lagged states like Texas and Tennessee not because Ohio inspectors are lazier, but because the process itself has more steps, more agencies with overlapping jurisdiction, and more opportunities for a project to get tied up for months over paperwork that doesn’t actually improve safety or environmental outcomes — it just improves the number of people who get to put their signature on a form. Streamlining that is not deregulation in the scary sense people picture when they hear the word. It’s the difference between a permit taking fourteen months and a permit taking four, while the actual safety and environmental standards stay exactly where they are.
— HOUSING: WHY YOUR RENT WENT UP AND WHOSE FAULT IT ACTUALLY IS —
Every time housing costs come up, somebody blames “greedy landlords” or “corporate investors buying up starter homes,” and I understand the instinct, but it does not survive contact with the actual history of how American housing got this expensive. This is a hundred years of GOVERNMENT policy, not a free-market failure, and Ohio is not exempt from the pattern just because our median home prices are lower than California’s.
Single-family-only zoning — the rule that makes it flatly illegal to build a duplex, triplex, or small apartment building in most residential land across most American cities, including plenty of Ohio suburbs — was originally adopted in the mid-twentieth century in large part as a tool for economic and racial exclusion, and it survives today mostly as an accident of inertia, protecting property values for people who already own homes at the direct expense of people trying to buy their first one. Add minimum lot size requirements, mandatory parking minimums that can tack ten to fifty thousand dollars onto the cost of a single unit in an apartment complex, height restrictions, and environmental review processes that get weaponized by whoever showed up to the zoning meeting that particular Tuesday night, and you get exactly what we have nationally: median first-time homebuyer age of 40, up from 25 in 1950, and a national housing shortfall that topped 3.8 million units even before the pandemic made everything worse.
Vivek’s stated position — cut the red tape that gets in the way of building more homes — is, whatever you think of him personally, the actual correct diagnosis according to essentially every serious housing economist across the political spectrum, left included. The Biden administration itself offered five billion dollars in federal incentives for localities to remove exclusionary zoning, and even housing advocates called that gesture “very small in the face of this problem,” because the actual fix is not more federal subsidy stacked on top of an artificially constrained supply — that just bids up the price of the same limited number of homes, which is precisely the mechanism that turned a 1920s starter home into a $400,000 median-priced house today. The fix is letting builders build. Deregulation, in this one specific and well-documented case, is the progressive housing economist’s position too — they just don’t love saying it in those words because of who else is saying it.
None of this is uniquely an Ohio problem. But Ohio has the chance to get ahead of the crisis that already wrecked affordability in California and is well underway in half the country, by fixing zoning and permitting now instead of waiting until median home prices double the way they did on the coasts. That is a genuinely bipartisan opportunity if either candidate wants to actually take it, instead of treating housing policy as an applause line at a debate.
— VETERANS AND PUBLIC SAFETY: A STATE THAT ACTUALLY HAS OUR BACK —
I’m going to put my own uniform on for this section, because it’s the one part of this article I can’t write from a distance.
I am medically retired from the Army Reserve after roughly twenty-three years and a deployment to Iraq that included time on a Military Transition Team, embedded with Iraqi forces, far enough outside the wire that “safe” was a relative term. I am one of an estimated 54,000 combat-wounded veterans nationally who got medically retired short of twenty years of service and, because of a quirk in federal law called concurrent receipt offset, had our own retirement pay clawed back dollar-for-dollar by the same government we got hurt serving. That fight — the Major Richard Star Act, H.R. 2102 in the House, S. 1032 in the Senate, currently sitting behind a discharge petition, H.Res. 1247, that needs signatures to force a floor vote — is a federal fight, not a state one, and no governor of Ohio is going to personally sign that bill into law. I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to shoehorn my own issue into a governor’s race.
What a governor CAN do is make Ohio the kind of state that treats its veterans like an asset instead of a line item — property tax exemptions for one hundred percent disabled veterans, hiring preference that actually gets enforced instead of just printed on a poster in the break room, veteran-owned small business support that isn’t buried under the same red tape everyone else has to fight through, and genuine investment in mental health and substance abuse resources that meet veterans where they actually are instead of where a pamphlet assumes they are. Because nobody in either party says this part out loud often enough: when a veteran does something tragic, it is very rarely a character flaw and very often a system failure — a VA that moved too slow, a National Guard unit that got activated and deactivated with no real transition support, a country that trained someone to be hypervigilant in a warzone and then handed them back to civilian life with a pamphlet and a “thank you for your service.” That’s not a talking point. That’s what I watched happen to guys I served with. The answer is resourcing the systems that catch people before they fall, not writing another op-ed about “mental health awareness month” and calling it solved.
On law enforcement, I’ll give Dr. Acton her due here too, because fairness matters more to me than scoring points: she broke from a chunk of her own party’s rhetoric to publicly pledge cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and picked up the endorsement of the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association for it. That took some spine, and pretending otherwise just because she’s the Democrat in this race would make me exactly the kind of dishonest partisan hack I make fun of on the other side. Credit where it’s due. I’d like to see the same instinct extended toward supporting the officers and first responders who show up first, every single time, to the exact kind of tragedies I used to run calls on as a civilian paramedic in Cleveland — back-to-back twelve-hour shifts, then straight to night classes to finish my teaching degree, then back on shift the next morning. I know what it costs the people who run toward it. Whoever wins this race in November, that’s the standard I’m going to hold them to.
— THE CONSTITUTIONAL CASE FOR DOING THIS AT THE STATE LEVEL —
Every time a governor’s race gets big enough, someone on cable news inevitably asks why any of this matters when “the real power is in Washington.” I’d like to correct that, because it is exactly backwards, and it is exactly backwards for a reason the Founders wrote down on purpose.
We are a constitutional republic, not a pure democracy, and the distinction is not academic trivia — it’s the entire architecture of why states get to run their own experiments in the first place. Justice Louis Brandeis wrote the line that every serious federalism scholar still quotes, from his dissent in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann in 1932: “a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” That is not a Republican idea or a Democrat idea. It is the entire reason Tennessee could try zero income tax without asking California’s permission, and it’s the entire reason Ohio doesn’t need Washington’s blessing to fix its own tax code, its own zoning laws, or its own school funding formula.
The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states, or to the people, everything the Constitution doesn’t explicitly hand to the federal government — and education, most tax policy, most zoning and land use, and the licensing of most professions all sit squarely in that reserved bucket. Madison spelled out the underlying theory in Federalist No. 10: faction and bad policy are far easier to contain in a smaller, more accountable government than in a sprawling national one, because the sheer size of a national majority makes it harder for any single group of citizens to actually hold their representatives accountable. A governor of Ohio answers to roughly 11.8 million people. A president answers to over 340 million. Guess which one actually knows what a property reappraisal in Medina County looks like on a real family’s mortgage statement.
This is also why “democracy” and “democratic” keep getting used as if they’re the same word, and they are not. “Democratic” is an adjective describing a representative process — elections, accountability, the rule of law applied through elected representatives. “Democracy,” the noun, describes direct, unmediated majority rule with no buffer between a passing mood of 50.1% of the electorate and the law. The Constitution uses the word “republic” exactly once — Article IV, Section 4, guaranteeing “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” It uses the word “democracy” exactly zero times. Madison, in that same Federalist No. 10, described pure democracies as “spectacles of turbulence and contention” that have “in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” I understand teachers taught a generation of Americans that “republic” and “democracy” are interchangeable synonyms, and I understand why people believe it — teachers get things wrong sometimes, and that wrong information gets passed down the exact same way “you only use ten percent of your brain” and “veins carry blue blood” got passed down for decades before anyone corrected the record. The Founders knew the difference. It’s worth the rest of us catching up.
Why does any of this matter for an Ohio governor’s race specifically? Because whoever wins in November is about to run one of Brandeis’s laboratories, whether they frame it that way or not. Zero income tax, phased in carefully with real guardrails, is a testable hypothesis, not a leap of faith — Tennessee, Texas, and Florida already ran the experiment, and the data is sitting there for anyone willing to look at it instead of just feeling something about it.
— QUINN’S LAWS: A FIELD GUIDE TO WATCHING OHIO POLITICS —
Jim Quinn’s old radio “Laws of Liberalism” get quoted a lot online, usually as a punchline, but a handful of them describe Ohio politics with a precision that would make you think he was watching our specific statehouse instead of writing decades of general commentary. Let me apply a few directly instead of just name-dropping them, because a citation without an application is just decoration.
Law #1 — liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. Rent control is the textbook example nationally, and Ohio has largely avoided it, credit where due, but watch what happens with medical debt buyout programs elsewhere: the stated intent is relief for struggling families, the actual mechanism creates a permanent, growing state liability with zero incentive built in for the underlying cost of care to ever go down, because the state has just agreed to eventually eat the bill regardless. You have not lowered healthcare costs. You have subsidized the exact system generating those costs, guaranteeing more of the same behavior, not less.
Law #6 — facts are the enemy of liberalism. Innovation Ohio’s own report on the tax plan is a genuinely useful document, full of real numbers, and I used several of those numbers earlier in this very article because they were accurate and worth engaging with honestly. What I will not do is pretend that report proves zero-income-tax states are a failed experiment, when the actual migration data from Tennessee, Texas, and Florida says the opposite. Facts cut both directions. Use all of them, not just the ones that arrived pre-packaged with your preferred conclusion.
Law #17 — being a liberal is the art of standing on your own head and telling the rest of the world that they are upside down. Watch this play out in real time with the university consolidation fight: state institutions with declining enrollment and heavy program overlap get treated as untouchable sacred cows the instant a Republican suggests trimming them, but the same voices calling it an attack on higher education stayed silent through a decade of steadily rising tuition and administrative bloat that had nothing to do with instruction quality. Suddenly the topic of “waste in higher ed” only becomes urgent when the person raising it has an R next to their name.
Law #24 — every time a liberal tries to fix something, someone somewhere loses their job. Ask any small landlord in a rent-controlled market, any small business owner buried under a minimum-wage mandate that outpaces their margins, or any family-run diner that closed after a “living wage” ordinance priced out its own entry-level positions, the ones that used to give a sixteen-year-old their very first job and their very first line on a resume.
Law #27 — liberals have never seen a tax or a tax hike they didn’t like. David Pepper’s quote on the income tax fight — “it’s time for everyone else to get a break, and not just those at the top” — sounds compassionate right up until you notice the policy attached to it is not actually a tax cut for anyone. It’s a redirection of who pays, dressed up in the language of a cut.
None of this means every conservative idea is automatically correct just because a liberal idea failed somewhere else — that would be its own kind of lazy thinking, and I try to hold myself to a higher bar than that. But when a specific pattern keeps repeating across a specific set of policies, in state after state, calling it out by name isn’t cruelty. It’s pattern recognition, which used to be considered a basic academic skill before it became politically inconvenient for one side of the aisle.
— WAIT, THEY ALREADY DID THAT: A GREATEST HITS COLLECTION —
I like to play a little game with myself whenever a policy debate gets heated, where I imagine the most cartoonishly extreme version of “what’s next” for the other side’s argument — and then, more often than I’d like, I find out they already did it. It’s become less of a joke and more of a prediction model.
What’s next, Ohio taxes its way to prosperity by raising the minimum wage high enough that entry-level jobs simply stop existing… wait, I was just told Policy Matters Ohio is on record right now, this year, arguing the state’s inflation-indexed minimum wage — currently rising to $11 an hour on January 1st — should be pushed toward the $15 mark specifically because, in their words, “our economy can handle it.” Never mind that a citizen-led ballot effort to hit exactly that number failed to even collect enough signatures to make the ballot last year, meaning actual Ohio voters, not pundits, didn’t want it badly enough to sign a clipboard.
Let’s talk about that minimum wage number honestly for a second, because it deserves more than a punchline. Ohio’s minimum wage has been tied to inflation by constitutional amendment since 2006, which is actually a defensible, apolitical mechanism — it rises automatically without a legislative fight every single year, currently landing at $11 for non-tipped workers. MIT’s living wage calculator puts a single Ohioan with no children at $20.38 an hour to cover basic necessities. That’s a real gap, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But the fix the left always reaches for — mandate the wage up to match the living-wage number by government fiat — has never once, anywhere it’s been tried at scale, produced the outcome its advocates promised. What it reliably produces is fewer entry-level positions, because a business’s ability to pay is not determined by a ballot initiative, it’s determined by revenue, and when labor costs jump faster than revenue can absorb, the positions that get cut first are the ones held by workers with the least experience — meaning the sixteen-year-old trying to get his first job, the mom re-entering the workforce after a few years home with kids, the guy with a spotty resume trying to rebuild one. A high minimum wage doesn’t create dignity. It creates a hiring bar that only the already-experienced can clear, which is precisely backwards from what “entry level” is supposed to mean.
Here’s a revolutionary concept nobody on a protest sign ever seems to mention: wages get set through a voluntary agreement between an employer and an employee. Somebody agrees to accept a wage a business is willing and able to pay. If literally nobody accepts those wages, the business raises them to attract workers, because an empty building generates zero revenue. That’s not exploitation. That’s the same market dynamic that sets the price of literally everything else you buy. And before anyone reaches for “but rich CEOs” — that CEO put capital at risk to build the company, buy the equipment, and meet payroll before a single customer walked in. When the business fails, an employee finds a new job within weeks. The person who put up the capital loses every dollar they invested, often loses it more than once across a career, because higher risk is the entire reason higher reward exists in the first place. McDonald’s — a company paying well above minimum wage in most Ohio markets — treats the crew position as exactly what it sounds like: a stepping stone. The manager track is the actual career path, and it does not require a four-year degree or a loan balance to access it. Walmart runs the identical model: work the floor, work the ladder, and a store manager can clear six figures without ever touching a college transcript, out-earning plenty of people carrying a master’s degree and the debt that came with it.
What’s next, a governor’s race in a neighboring state where the incumbent gets mocked for being physically weak by someone who’s never once done a fitness test in his life… wait, that’s basically every time somebody tries to dunk on Secretary Hegseth’s build. I’ll say the same thing here I’d say to anyone running that play: name the date, name the venue, and let’s do a televised ACFT side by side. Put up or sit down.
What’s next, a state constitutional amendment on redistricting gets sold to voters as “ending gerrymandering forever”… wait, I already covered how that played out with Ohio’s own redistricting fights, and I’m not going to pretend either party has entirely clean hands on that one — this is one where the honest answer is that both sides carve maps when they hold the pen, and pretending otherwise, for either party, is its own kind of dishonesty I try to avoid.
— THE CASE FOR VIVEK, INCLUDING THE PART HIS OWN CAMPAIGN WOULD RATHER I SKIPPED —
I promised you the defensible version of this argument, not the highlight reel, so here’s the part that actually requires me to be honest instead of just being a fan.
Vivek Ramaswamy in this race is genuinely a different candidate than the one who ran for president in 2024. Back then he was positioned at the sharpest edge of his party, floating ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and, in a moment that drew real and warranted criticism, invoking language associated with “great replacement” rhetoric — the idea that native-born Americans are being deliberately demographically displaced. That happened. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t, and I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t a legitimately alarming thing to say, because dodging it would make me exactly the kind of dishonest partisan I spend half this article criticizing on the other side.
What I will say is that the candidate running for Ohio governor in 2026 has, by the accounts of reporters who’ve covered both versions of him closely, deliberately moved away from that presidential-campaign persona toward what his own team describes as a “big tent coalition” — Reagan Democrats, libertarians, and constitutional Republicans, in his own words from his launch speech at CTL Aerospace in Butler County. Whether that’s a genuine evolution or a tactical repositioning for a statewide race where alienating the middle is fatal, I can’t read his mind, and neither can you, so judge him the way you’d judge anyone: by what he actually does with the office if he wins it, not by which version of him shows up in a launch speech. President Trump’s endorsement — “a place he loves and won three times, in 2016, 2020, and 2024” — carries real weight with the primary electorate that already chose him over Attorney General Dave Yost, but an endorsement is not a governing record, and I’d encourage anyone reading this to hold Vivek to the same standard I’m applying to Acton: show your work, fund your promises, and don’t ask us to just trust the vibes.
With all of that said plainly and without spin, here is why I still land on Vivek being the better bet for this state specifically, on the merits, not the vibes: his core economic platform — tax competitiveness, energy production, deregulated housing construction, and school choice — is not a collection of untested ideological experiments. Every single piece of it has already been run, at scale, in real states, with real measurable outcomes, and the outcomes point the same direction: Tennessee, Texas, and Florida gaining people and jobs; Ohio’s own EdChoice program growing 283% in a single year because parents chose it with their feet, not because a think tank told them to. Acton’s platform, by contrast, leans on programs that sound compassionate but that no state has yet run long enough to know whether they bend the cost curve down or just shift who’s holding the bill when it comes due. I’d rather bet on the tested hypothesis than the untested one, especially with a state budget that has to balance every single biennium regardless of which party is holding the pen.
And on the honesty test I keep applying throughout this piece — who’s actually shown their math — neither candidate gets a perfect score, and I said that plainly about both of them. But Vivek’s team has at least published a specific mechanism, a specific timeline, and specific offsetting cuts he’s willing to name in public, even when naming them cost him political capital in the university consolidation fiasco. Dr. Acton’s team, per her own campaign’s rollout coverage, has “few specifics on funding” attached to a platform built almost entirely around new spending commitments. Being willing to eat a bad news cycle for transparency is not nothing. It’s actually the opposite of what most politicians, in both parties, choose to do.
— “TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH”: CHECKING THE ACTUAL BILL INSTEAD OF THE BUMPER STICKER —
Since the tax conversation in this race inevitably drags the federal “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into it — Innovation Ohio and plenty of Democrat messaging like to bundle state and federal tax fights into one giant “tax cuts for billionaires” narrative — let’s actually open the bill instead of repeating the slogan about it.
The Act makes permanent the lower individual tax brackets, the doubled standard deduction, and the expanded Child Tax Credit that were set to expire. It excludes tips from taxable income outright. It excludes overtime pay from income taxes. It creates an enhanced standard deduction specifically for seniors. It adds a deduction for car loan interest. None of that is billionaire language. That is language written for a waitress working doubles, a machinist pulling overtime on a rush order, and a retired grandparent living on a fixed income — three groups I happen to know personally, because two of them are sitting in my extended family and the third one describes half the parents of my students.
Is it true that higher earners also benefit, in some cases benefit more in raw dollar terms, from provisions like the extended estate and gift tax exemption? Yes, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because I told you a long time ago that overclaiming damages credibility faster than anything else you can do in an argument. But “some wealthy people also benefit” and “this is a pro-billionaire bill that hurts the middle class” are not the same claim, and treating them as interchangeable is exactly the kind of sleight of hand I try not to run on you. A restaurant server keeping her tips tax-free and a machinist keeping his overtime tax-free are not billionaires. They’re the working- and middle-class families this bill was actually written for, on top of whatever additional benefit flows to somebody with a portfolio big enough to care about estate tax exemptions.
The honest caveat, and I’ll give it fully: some of that relief is offset by tightened work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP, which genuinely could squeeze hourly and seasonal workers who have trouble documenting compliance even when they technically qualify for an exemption — pregnant women, veterans, foster youth, caregivers, and the homeless are all carved out, but bureaucratic friction is real even with a carve-out on paper. That’s a legitimate trade-off worth debating on the merits, and I’d rather you know both sides of it from me than get the sanitized version from either campaign.
— TRADES, APPRENTICESHIPS, AND THE COLLEGE DEBT TRAP NOBODY IN COLUMBUS WANTS TO SAY OUT LOUD —
This is the section where I stop citing think tanks and just tell you what I see every single day, because I teach Anatomy and Physics in a Career Technical Education district, and I have watched the four-year-degree-or-bust pipeline fail more kids than it’s helped.
Here is the conversation I have with juniors and seniors constantly: a kid who is genuinely brilliant with his hands, who can diagnose an engine problem faster than I can diagnose a lab error, gets told by a well-meaning guidance counselor that “real success” means a four-year degree, any four-year degree, regardless of major or debt load. That kid takes out loans for a degree he’s lukewarm about, in a field with soft job prospects, graduates at 22 with fifty, sixty, eighty thousand dollars of debt, and lands a job that pays less than the electrician’s apprenticeship he could have started at 18, debt-free, earning while he trained instead of borrowing while he waited. Meanwhile, the kid who went straight into the CTE welding program sitting two doors down from my classroom is making real money by 20, with zero debt, and gets treated by half the culture around him like he settled for something instead of like he made the smarter financial decision of the two.
Ohio’s own workforce data backs this up in the aggregate, not just anecdotally: skilled trades — electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, diesel mechanics, welders — are chronically short-staffed across this state while four-year enrollment in low-return majors keeps producing graduates who can’t find work in their field. Vivek’s push toward teacher merit pay and consolidating overlapping four-year programs is, whether he framed it this way or not, an implicit acknowledgment that the current system oversells the four-year path and underfunds the trades path, and that has to change if Ohio wants to actually be the best state to raise a kid instead of just the best state to move a kid’s tuition debt to somebody else.
And while we’re here, let’s talk about student loan forgiveness, because it comes up constantly whenever this topic does, usually from people who took out loans voluntarily, understood the terms, and now want somebody else to pick up the tab — often somebody who never went to college at all, worked straight through their own tuition to avoid debt, or enlisted specifically because the GI Bill covered the cost of school in exchange for years of actual service. I have three of those categories sitting in my own extended family, and every single one of them worked, sacrificed, or served to avoid the exact debt someone else now wants forgiven at their expense. If we’re rewriting the rules on voluntarily entered debt obligations just because enough people got vocal about it — including debt that sat in interest-free forbearance for years during COVID — then I’ve got a mortgage, and I’d love it if the renters down the street started chipping in. That’s not a joke, that’s the actual logical extension of the argument, and it deserves to be taken exactly as seriously as the original ask.
— STATE GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY: WHY “WASTE, FRAUD, AND ABUSE” ISN’T JUST A CAMPAIGN CLICHE —
Every candidate for every office since Nixon has promised to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and I said that earlier as a fair jab at Vivek’s own messaging, so let me be fair about the flip side of that coin too: the reason the phrase has become a punchline is not that waste, fraud, and abuse don’t exist. It’s that most candidates say the words and then never actually go looking for the money.
Vivek Ramaswamy briefly co-led the federal Department of Government Efficiency before this campaign, and love or hate what came of that effort at the federal level, it produced something genuinely useful heading into a governor’s race: a documented, public habit of actually auditing agency spending line by line instead of just gesturing at the concept of efficiency from a podium. The federal DOJ’s own 2026 healthcare fraud takedown recovered roughly $6.5 billion across 455 defendants — real money, recovered through actual investigation, not through a press release. That’s the model. Apply it to Ohio’s Medicaid program, Ohio’s unemployment insurance system, and Ohio’s own agency overlap, and you’re not talking about a hypothetical. You’re talking about a proven method that already clawed back billions once this year alone.
Here’s my honest question for anyone who reflexively recoils at the phrase “government efficiency audit”: why? If your agency, your program, or your favorite line item is running clean, an audit costs you nothing but a little paperwork and vindicates you when it comes back clean. The only people who should be nervous about a genuine fraud-and-waste audit are the people currently benefiting from the fraud and the waste. So when I watch entire wings of a political party reflexively oppose audits, oversight, and efficiency reviews on principle, before a single finding has even come back, I have to ask the obvious question: what, specifically, are you worried an auditor is going to find?
I’m not accusing anyone specific of anything specific here — that would be exactly the kind of unfounded, evidence-free claim I criticize when the other side does it to us. I’m asking a fair question about incentives, out loud, the same way I’d ask any student who suddenly objects to me checking their work: if you’re confident it’s right, showing it to me should be the easy part.
— OHIO’S REPORT CARD: GRADING US AGAINST THE ACTUAL COMPETITION —
I’m a teacher. I grade things for a living. So let’s actually grade Ohio the way CNBC, Site Selection Magazine, and Area Development already do, category by category, instead of just arguing in generalities.
Infrastructure: CNBC ranked Ohio number one in the country in 2025. Not top five. Number one. Our highway network, our freight rail access, and our position within a day’s drive of most of the country’s population are genuinely elite assets that neither candidate invented and neither candidate can take away, but a governor absolutely can neglect or reinvest in that advantage over the next four years.
Cost of doing business: number two nationally in the same CNBC ranking. That’s a real, structural advantage, driven partly by lower real estate costs than the coasts and partly by the property tax ranking I mentioned earlier — 6th best in the country, per the Tax Foundation, even while our overall tax competitiveness sits in the high 30s.
Technology and innovation: sixth nationally, and climbing, driven by exactly the kind of large-scale projects I mentioned earlier — Anduril’s Columbus facility, the broader “Silicon Heartland” branding Ohio’s economic development office has been chasing for years around Intel’s planned semiconductor investment in Licking County.
Overall business climate: top five in CNBC’s composite ranking, sixth in both Site Selection Magazine’s and Area Development’s separate methodologies. Three independent organizations, three different weighting systems, landing in roughly the same neighborhood. That’s not noise. That’s signal.
Tax competitiveness: 37th overall, worst among our five neighbors, dragged down specifically by individual income tax structure (41st) and corporate tax structure (39th). This is the one category where Ohio is objectively underperforming relative to every other metric on this list, and it is also, not coincidentally, the exact category both gubernatorial candidates are fighting over hardest — because it’s the one lever a new governor can actually pull without waiting a decade for infrastructure or workforce numbers to shift.
Population and migration: a net domestic migration gain of just under 12,000 in 2025, reversing a loss of over 32,000 in 2021, but overall growth still crawling at half a percent annually — meaning the turnaround is real, but it’s early, and it’s fragile enough that the next four years of tax and regulatory policy will determine whether it becomes a trend or a blip.
Put it all together and you get a genuinely honest picture: Ohio has world-class bones — infrastructure, location, cost structure, an emerging tech and manufacturing profile — sitting inside a tax code that actively fights against those advantages instead of amplifying them. That is, in the most literal sense possible, the single highest-leverage problem the next governor could fix, because unlike infrastructure, which takes decades to build, or workforce development, which takes a generation to fully mature, tax policy is something a legislature and a governor can actually change inside a single term.
— THE INTEL QUESTION: WHY EVEN GOOD NEWS NEEDS AN HONEST TIMELINE —
I brought up “Silicon Heartland” a few paragraphs back, and I owe you the honest version of that story too, because the campaign trail version of it — from both parties, at different points — has occasionally gotten ahead of the actual construction schedule.
Ohio landed one of the largest single private investments in state history when a major semiconductor manufacturer committed to a massive fabrication campus in Licking County, east of Columbus, and it was genuinely treated, correctly, as a watershed moment for the state’s tech and manufacturing future. What gets left out of a lot of the celebratory coverage is that large semiconductor buildouts of this scale have, in this specific industry nationally, faced repeated schedule slips and shifting completion timelines as chip demand cycles, financing conditions, and federal incentive programs have moved underneath these projects mid-construction. That’s not unique to Ohio and it’s not a partisan talking point against either candidate — it’s the actual, documented pattern across every major fab project of this scale in this country over the last several years.
Why does this matter for a governor’s race? Because whoever wins in November inherits the job of making sure state-level commitments — infrastructure buildout, workforce training pipelines feeding the plant, local tax abatement terms — stay flexible enough to adjust if the federal or private-sector timeline shifts again, without the state getting stuck holding commitments built around a completion date that moved. That’s a genuinely unglamorous, unsexy piece of governance that never makes it into a stump speech, and it matters more to whether this actually pays off for Ohio families than any applause line either candidate delivers about it on a debate stage.
— OHIO’S IDENTITY: FIRST IN FLIGHT, FIRST ON THE MOON, AND NOT REMOTELY FINISHED —
I titled this whole piece “first in flight” for a reason beyond the pun. The Wright Brothers were Dayton bicycle mechanics before they were the first humans to achieve powered flight, and they did it with Ohio tools, Ohio stubbornness, and zero permission from anybody in Washington. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, was from New Concord. Neil Armstrong, the first human being to walk on the surface of another world, was from Wapakoneta. This state has, quite literally, produced the people who did things nobody had ever done before, more than once, in the exact fields — aerospace, engineering, applied science — that this state’s economy is trying to rebuild itself around right now with Anduril, Intel, and the broader defense and technology manufacturing boom.
We are also the birthplace of the modern American manufacturing middle class, the state that put more Americans behind an assembly line and inside a UAW hall than almost anywhere else in the country, and the state that got hit harder than almost anywhere else when that manufacturing base hollowed out across the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. I grew up watching entire towns in this state built around a single factory that eventually closed, and I’ve taught the kids of parents who never fully recovered from that transition. That history is not something either candidate can erase, and it shouldn’t be erased — it’s the entire reason this next chapter, reindustrialization built on energy, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing instead of the industries that left us, matters as much as it does. This is not nostalgia. This is the actual, literal chance to finish a story that got interrupted forty years ago, in the exact towns that got hit hardest the first time.
— RURAL OHIO AND THE FARMS THAT FEED THE REST OF US —
Everything I’ve written so far has leaned toward Columbus, Cincinnati, and the manufacturing corridors, and I’d be doing exactly what I criticize both parties for doing if I closed this article without talking about the roughly 76,000 farms still operating across this state, because rural Ohio does not get to be an afterthought in a piece about making this the best state in the country.
Ohio remains a top-ten national producer of soybeans, corn, and dairy, and agriculture as a whole — including the processing, distribution, and equipment industries that ride alongside it — remains one of the largest sectors in the state’s economy, employing far more Ohioans than most political coverage ever bothers to mention because it doesn’t generate the same kind of ribbon-cutting photo op as a semiconductor plant. Every tax and regulatory conversation in this article applies just as directly to a family farm in Darke County as it does to a startup in the Short North — property tax reappraisals hit working farmland just as hard as suburban subdivisions, sometimes harder, because farmland valuations have swung wildly in recent reappraisal cycles in ways that have pushed multi-generation family operations to the edge of profitability on paper wealth they can’t actually spend.
Broadband access remains a genuine, unglamorous problem across large stretches of rural Ohio, not because providers are lazy, but because the economics of running fiber to a farmhouse three miles down a gravel road simply don’t pencil out without some form of public-private partnership or targeted state investment — the same deregulation instinct that helps housing and energy in urban corridors needs a different tool in rural counties, because the problem there isn’t excessive red tape, it’s genuinely thin population density making private investment alone insufficient. A candidate who only talks about cutting regulation without also talking about targeted rural infrastructure investment is telling you he’s only thought seriously about half the state.
— THE OPIOID RECKONING: MAKING SURE SETTLEMENT MONEY ACTUALLY BUYS RECOVERY —
Ohio got hit by the opioid epidemic as hard as almost any state in the country, and this is one of the rare places in this entire article where I want to give Dr. Acton real, specific credit before I raise my concern, because pretending she has no relevant record here would be dishonest. During her time as state health director, she worked across party lines to help hold pharmaceutical companies accountable and shape the resulting settlement that now funds addiction recovery programs across Ohio. That’s a real accomplishment, not a talking point, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise just because she’s my opponent’s opponent in this race.
Here’s my actual concern, and it has nothing to do with who gets credit for the settlement and everything to do with what happens to the money next: opioid settlement funds nationally have a documented, recurring problem of getting absorbed into general state budget gaps, spent on programs only tangentially related to actual addiction treatment and recovery infrastructure, or distributed through processes opaque enough that nobody outside a state auditor’s office can actually track whether the money reached a treatment bed or a sober-living program instead of a line item with a loose enough definition of “prevention” to justify almost anything.
Whoever wins this race in November needs to commit, specifically and publicly, to transparent, itemized public reporting on exactly where every opioid settlement dollar goes, year over year, audited the same way Vivek’s DOGE instincts would audit any other line item. I don’t care which candidate proposes that mechanism first. I care that one of them actually does it, because I have watched, as a paramedic and now as a teacher, what happens to families and to kids when this crisis goes unaddressed, and I am done watching politicians of either party treat a genuine public health catastrophe as a photo-op with a ribbon and a press release instead of a problem that needs a state auditor’s actual signature on where the money went.
— A NOTE TO ANYONE ABOUT TO VOTE FOR THE FIRST TIME —
If you’re reading this because
shared it, or because a friend sent it to you, and this is going to be your first governor’s race, I want to talk to you directly for a second instead of past you, because I teach kids your exact age every single day and I know how this usually gets pitched to you.
Nobody is going to tell you a governor’s race matters more than a presidential race, because presidential races get the fireworks, the debates everyone watches, and the media coverage that lasts a full election cycle. But I’d argue, and I’d defend this in front of any of my students, that a governor’s race affects your actual daily life more directly than almost anything happening in Washington. Your state income tax rate — the one Vivek wants to zero out over the next decade — comes out of your paycheck starting the first week you get hired, not in some abstract future. Your property tax, if you ever buy a home in this state, gets set by decisions made in Columbus, not D.C. Whether your little brother or sister has an EdChoice option if their assigned public school is underperforming gets decided by whoever wins in November, not by anyone in Congress. The minimum wage on your first job, the licensing requirements if you want to become an electrician or a cosmetologist or a nurse, the tuition structure at Ohio’s public universities if you go that route — every single one of those gets decided at the state level, by people whose names you are about to see on a ballot that a huge percentage of eligible voters your age simply skip.
Here’s the blunt version: the people who show up to vote in governor’s races, midterms, and off-year local elections are disproportionately older, and policy skews accordingly, because elected officials respond to the electorate that actually shows up, not the one that could theoretically show up if it felt like it. If you want policy that reflects what your generation actually needs — student loan sanity, trade-school parity with four-year degrees, a tax code that doesn’t punish you the moment you start earning real money, housing you can actually afford before you’re forty — the only mechanism that produces that outcome is showing up in the races nobody else bothers to show up for. Presidential turnout in this country regularly clears 60% of eligible voters. Governor’s races in non-presidential years routinely fall into the 40s or lower. That gap is not destiny. It’s an opportunity, sitting there, for whichever generation decides to actually claim it.
— A WORD ON WHERE I COULD BE WRONG —
I try to hold myself to a standard where I’d rather tell you the honest, defensible version of an argument than the exaggerated one that feels better going down, because the exaggerated version always eventually gets checked, and once it does, nothing else I say gets trusted either. So let me lay out, plainly, the specific ways this entire piece could age badly, instead of pretending I have a crystal ball.
If the income tax phase-out proceeds without Ramaswamy or the legislature ever publishing the specific offsetting cuts or revenue replacements Innovation Ohio is demanding, and Ohio ends up quietly shifting the burden onto property and sales taxes the way critics predict, that is a legitimate failure mode, and I would rather you hold me to having said so here, in writing, than pretend I never considered it. If the university consolidation fight reopens and gets handled with the same lack of care as the initial rollout, that’s worth revisiting too. If the “big tent coalition” framing turns out to be purely rhetorical positioning for a general election and governs instead like the 2024 presidential-primary version of the candidate, voters in this state deserve to notice and say so loudly, and I’d expect plenty of the same Reagan Democrats his campaign is courting to walk away just as fast as they arrived.
On the other side, if Acton wins and the medical debt buyout program becomes exactly the kind of open-ended, ever-growing state liability critics warn about, without ever actually reducing the underlying cost of care, that’s a legitimate failure mode for her platform too, and I’d expect the same honesty about it from anyone covering this race fairly, myself included.
I’m not hedging here to avoid taking a position — I took one, clearly, throughout this entire piece. I’m hedging because pretending either candidate is a guaranteed, risk-free bet would be lying to you, and I’ve spent this entire article asking both candidates to show their work. It would be more than a little hypocritical to refuse to show mine.
— WHAT I’D ASK OF HIM, VETERAN TO CANDIDATE —
If Vivek Ramaswamy is standing in the Statehouse next January taking the oath, here is what I’d actually want him to remember, and I’d say this to his face given the chance, not just type it into an article.
Remember that the phase-out of the income tax means nothing to the family whose kid’s Career Tech program gets cut to balance a budget line before the growth on the other side of the ledger ever materializes. Fund the transition carefully, publish the numbers Innovation Ohio is asking for even if the answer isn’t perfectly comfortable, and don’t ask working families to run the same experiment blind that a legislator with a state pension gets to run with a full safety net underneath him. Remember that “cutting red tape” cannot become code for cutting the inspections that keep a factory floor safe for the guy running the line, or the safety net that catches the veteran who’s one bad week away from a crisis instead of a headline. Remember that school choice only works as advertised if the traditional public schools serving the kids who don’t leave — the ones in my own classroom, in a high-need district that gets treated as an afterthought by both parties every single budget cycle — don’t get quietly starved while the exit door gets wider for everyone who can afford to walk through it.
And remember, specifically, that roughly 54,000 combat-wounded veterans nationally are still waiting on Congress, not a governor, to fix a federal offset that’s been robbing our retirement pay for over two decades, and that a governor of Ohio has real, non-symbolic leverage here too: use the office to publicly, repeatedly, loudly pressure Ohio’s congressional delegation to sign that discharge petition, H.Res. 1247, and get the Major Richard Star Act to an actual floor vote. It costs a governor nothing politically to stand up for combat-wounded veterans. It would cost me, and 54,000 people like me, everything if every elected official in this country keeps treating it as somebody else’s problem to solve next session.
That’s not a partisan ask. That’s a promise-keeping ask, aimed at whoever wins, regardless of the letter next to their name.
— ONE ISSUE I’M NOT GOING TO PRETEND SETTLES ITSELF —
I’d be leaving a hole in this article if I didn’t at least acknowledge Issue 1, the 2023 constitutional amendment enshrining reproductive rights protections in the Ohio Constitution, which passed with 56.78% of the vote in a direct citizen initiative — not a legislative act, a direct vote of the people themselves. I raise it here specifically because it’s actually a fascinating case study in the republic-versus-democracy distinction I spent an entire section on earlier: Issue 1 is closer to pure, direct democracy than almost anything else on an Ohio ballot in years, bypassing the legislature entirely and amending the state’s foundational document by simple majority vote. Whatever you think of the outcome, the process itself is worth sitting with for a second, because it’s the rare case where “the people voted directly” is not a metaphor.
I’m not going to use this article to relitigate that vote or tell you how to feel about it, because that’s a genuinely contested moral and policy question that deserves more room than a subsection of a governor’s-race article, and pretending I can settle it in a paragraph would be exactly the kind of overclaiming I’ve spent this whole piece warning you about. What I will say is that it’s now a matter of state constitutional law, decided directly by Ohio voters rather than imposed by either party’s legislature, and any candidate who tells you he or she can simply wave it away with an executive order is either badly misinformed about how state constitutional amendments work or hoping you are.
— WHY THIS RACE MATTERS FAR PAST OUR OWN BORDERS —
Ohio used to be the single most reliable bellwether in American presidential politics — from 1964 through 2016, the state picked the winning presidential candidate almost every single cycle, which is why every four years you’d watch national reporters camp out in Columbus like it was the only county in America that mattered. That reputation has faded some as Ohio has trended more consistently Republican at the presidential level over the last decade, but the underlying reason national press still parachutes into this state every cycle hasn’t changed: Ohio is large enough, diverse enough, and economically representative enough — manufacturing, agriculture, urban cores, rural counties, a genuine mix of union households and suburban professionals — that whatever works here tends to be a preview of what works, or fails, everywhere else in the industrial Midwest.
That’s exactly why this specific governor’s race is being watched well outside our state line. If Vivek’s income tax phase-out produces the growth and migration numbers his campaign promises, expect neighboring states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana — to face real pressure from their own legislatures to match it or lose businesses and residents to Ohio the same way Ohio has spent years losing them to Tennessee and Texas. If it produces the budget crisis Innovation Ohio predicts instead, expect every Democratic candidate in every neighboring state’s next election cycle to run ads with Ohio as the cautionary tale, the same way conservative candidates nationally have spent a decade pointing at California and Illinois. Either way, Ohio in 2026 is about to become the experiment everybody else in the region is quietly watching before running their own version of it.
That’s not pressure I’m inventing to make this article sound more important than a state race actually is. That’s just how federalism, the actual working version Brandeis described, functions in real time — one state runs the experiment, and the rest of the country either copies the parts that worked or avoids the parts that didn’t, without needing Washington to mandate either outcome. Ohio doesn’t need to be the biggest state in the country to matter nationally. It just needs to be the one that ran the experiment first and honestly reported what happened.
— THE ONE THING BOTH CAMPAIGNS SHOULD BE PROTECTING NO MATTER WHO WINS —
Whatever you think of either candidate’s tax or spending plans, there’s a piece of Ohio’s financial picture that predates this race and deserves protecting regardless of who wins in November: the state’s rainy day fund, formally the Budget Stabilization Fund, sits near $3.5 billion, the largest balance in state history, built up under back-to-back Republican administrations after starting at a genuinely embarrassing 89 cents — not 89 million, 89 cents — when Governor Kasich took office in 2011. Fitch has Ohio’s long-term credit rating at a full AAA. Moody’s holds a positive outlook on Ohio’s Aa1 rating. Those are not partisan talking points. Those are independent credit agencies, whose entire business model depends on being right about a state’s ability to pay its bills, telling you Ohio’s fiscal management has been genuinely disciplined for over a decade.
This matters directly to the income-tax debate at the center of this whole race, because a healthy reserve is exactly the kind of cushion that makes a multi-year tax phase-out survivable if revenue comes in under projection during the transition — it’s the difference between a rocky year and a genuine crisis. It also means Innovation Ohio’s warnings about program cuts shouldn’t be dismissed as pure alarmism, because a reserve fund is meant to smooth short-term shocks, not permanently backstop a structural revenue hole year after year. Whoever wins in November inherits both the asset and the responsibility that comes with it: don’t raid the rainy day fund to paper over a phase-out that isn’t actually working, and don’t let a “we’ve got the fund, we’re fine” mentality become an excuse to skip the hard math on funding sources that Ohioans, on both sides of this fight, are rightly asking for.
— ENERGY: NUCLEAR, NATURAL GAS, AND WHY THE GRID IS SUDDENLY EVERYONE’S PROBLEM —
I mentioned energy earlier in the jobs section, but it deserves its own room, because the entire AI and data-center boom currently reshaping American manufacturing runs on exactly one non-negotiable input: electricity, in enormous, constant, predictable quantities, and Ohio is sitting on assets most states would kill for.
Ohio already operates two nuclear plants — Davis-Besse near Toledo and Perry outside Cleveland — providing the kind of stable, zero-emission baseload power that a data center actually needs, unlike solar and wind, which are wonderful additions to a grid but can’t be the backbone of a facility that cannot tolerate downtime. Layer on top of that the Utica and Marcellus shale formations running under the eastern half of the state, giving Ohio access to some of the cheapest natural gas in the country, and you have the raw ingredients for exactly the kind of energy-abundant environment that site-selection consultants for semiconductor fabs, AI data centers, and advanced manufacturing plants are actively hunting for right now, state by state, in real time.
Here’s the uncomfortable political truth for anyone still treating energy policy as a pure culture-war fight: the states winning these massive facility announcements are, disproportionately, the ones that stopped treating nuclear and natural gas as enemies of the environmental movement and started treating them as the actual bridge to a stable, electrified, lower-carbon grid. Ohio does not need to choose between “all renewables” and “all fossil fuels” — the honest engineering answer, the one every serious grid operator will tell you off the record, is an all-of-the-above approach anchored by nuclear baseload, supplemented by natural gas for flexible peak demand, with renewables filling in where the economics genuinely make sense. Vivek’s “produce more energy, bring down electric bills” pitch is vague as a campaign slogan, sure, but the underlying physics and economics behind it are not controversial among the actual engineers running Ohio’s grid. They’re controversial among people who’ve never had to keep a hospital’s lights on during a heat wave.
— CRIME, COPS, AND WHAT THE ACTUAL DATA SAYS INSTEAD OF THE VIBES —
Public safety gets treated in most campaigns as pure vibes — a candidate stands next to a police cruiser, says the word “safe” a few times, and moves on. Let’s actually look at the numbers, because Ohio’s real crime story is more encouraging than either party’s messaging usually admits, and giving credit where it’s due matters more to me than scoring a partisan point.
Ohio’s violent crime rate has run roughly 23% below the national average for a full decade running, according to the state’s own Legislative Service Commission, using FBI Crime Data Explorer figures — 293.6 per 100,000 in the most recent full reporting year available, compared to a national rate well north of 380. Among our five neighboring states, only Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky beat us; we’re ahead of Indiana and well ahead of Michigan. That is a genuinely solid statewide baseline that neither gubernatorial candidate invented and neither can claim sole credit for, because it reflects years of local policing strategy, community investment, and, frankly, a fair amount of demographic and economic variation across a large and diverse state.
Columbus specifically posted its lowest homicide rate since 1978 in 2025, with Part I crime — the FBI’s most serious offense category — down in every single measured category except rape compared to the prior year, and a national report named the city among the top five in the country for driving down gun violence that same year. Cincinnati and Cleveland saw smaller declines over the same broader period, which tells you the improvement isn’t uniform and there’s real work left to do in specific cities and specific neighborhoods, particularly Cleveland, which independent studies still rank as the state’s most dangerous city by a wide margin, driven heavily by concentrated poverty and unemployment in specific corridors rather than the city as a whole.
The honest takeaway: Ohio’s overall trajectory on public safety is genuinely positive, driven substantially by local police departments doing real, unglamorous, data-driven work — Crime Gun Intelligence Centers that traced and analyzed over three thousand firearms in Columbus alone in 2025 — and the next governor’s job is not to invent a public safety strategy from scratch. It’s to make sure state resources, training funding, and support for exactly those kinds of intelligence-driven local programs keep flowing to the cities still lagging behind the statewide trend, particularly Cleveland, instead of getting distributed as a flat, one-size-fits-all formula that ignores where the actual problem is concentrated.
— “HE’S JUST A BILLIONAIRE OUT OF TOUCH WITH REGULAR OHIOANS” —
I want to address this attack line directly because I hear some version of it constantly, and it deserves a real answer instead of a dismissive one.
Yes, Vivek Ramaswamy built genuine wealth — first through Roivant Sciences, a biotech company he founded in 2014, and later through Strive Asset Management, which he co-founded in 2022 — and yes, that puts him in a financial category almost none of the voters he’s asking to support him will ever occupy. That’s a fair thing to notice, and pretending wealth is irrelevant to how a candidate might relate to an average family’s grocery bill would be its own kind of dishonesty.
Here’s my actual response to it, though: the “out of touch rich guy” attack has been run against candidates in both parties for as long as anyone can remember, and it has never once, in my observation, correlated reliably with how that person actually governed once in office. Some genuinely wealthy officials have governed with real attention to working-class concerns. Some officials who came from nothing have governed in ways that actively hurt the people who look like their own younger selves. Net worth is not a policy position, and treating it as a substitute for actually reading the policy — which is exactly what this entire article has spent thousands of words doing — is intellectually lazy regardless of which party’s candidate it’s aimed at. If the actual complaint is that his tax plan disproportionately helps people at his own income level, that’s a specific, testable, legitimate critique, and I addressed it directly and honestly several sections back instead of dodging it. “He’s rich, therefore distrust everything he says” is not a specific critique. It’s a vibe standing in for one.
— WHAT “BEST STATE” ACTUALLY HAS TO MEAN, IF THE WORDS MEAN ANYTHING —
I want to close with the actual philosophy underneath everything I’ve written, because policy details matter, but they’re downstream of a much simpler question: what is a state government actually for?
I don’t think it’s for creating dependency and calling it compassion. I’ve watched, both as a paramedic running calls in Cleveland and as a teacher in a high-need district now, what happens to a family, a neighborhood, or a kid when the only relationship they have with the state is receiving something from it, indefinitely, with no path back to standing on their own. That is not kindness. That is a slow, well-intentioned trap, and the fact that it’s well-intentioned doesn’t make the trap any less real for the person caught in it. A government that keeps a population dependent, generation after generation, is not lifting anyone up. It’s securing a permanent constituency, and I think a huge number of people who vote for that outcome would be horrified to hear it described that way, because they genuinely believe they’re helping. I believe they believe that. I just don’t think the results back it up.
The alternative is not indifference. It’s not “figure it out yourself with no safety net,” and I want to be clear about that distinction because it’s where this argument usually gets deliberately misrepresented. The alternative is a state that builds the actual on-ramps — school choice so a bad assigned school isn’t a life sentence, apprenticeships and trade pathways that don’t require six figures of debt to access a real career, a tax code that lets a family actually keep more of what it earns instead of taxing it away and then means-testing a fraction of it back through a bureaucracy, energy and housing policy that brings costs down structurally instead of subsidizing the symptoms of costs that are already too high. That is what “best state” has to mean if it means anything beyond a marketing slogan: not the state that gives you the most, but the state that gets out of the way of you building the most for yourself and your kids, while still catching you if you genuinely fall.
I taught myself this lesson the hard way, working twelve-hour paramedic shifts and going straight to night classes to become a teacher, then doing it again the next day for years, because nobody was going to hand me that teaching credential — I had to build it, exhausted, on my own schedule, around a job that already asked everything I had to give. Nobody owes anybody a life. But a government that makes it needlessly harder to build one — through a tax code fighting its own infrastructure advantages, through zoning that outlaws the starter home a young family could actually afford, through a minimum-wage debate that ignores what happens to the sixteen-year-old trying to get his very first shift — is not neutral. It’s an active obstacle, dressed up as help, and Ohio has the chance right now, this November, to decide which version of itself it actually wants to be for the next four years and probably the next generation after that.
— ONE MORE THING ON HIGHER ED, IN FAIRNESS TO THE INSTITUTIONS THEMSELVES —
I spent real time criticizing the rollout of the university consolidation idea earlier, and fairness demands I say the other half of that sentence too: Ohio’s flagship research institutions are genuinely excellent, and no serious conversation about “subpar” state universities should ever be read as an attack on the whole system.
Ohio State University sits among the largest research universities in the country by enrollment and research expenditure, with nationally ranked programs in engineering, agriculture, and its medical center, which anchors an enormous share of Central Ohio’s healthcare economy on its own. Case Western Reserve in Cleveland punches well above its size in medical and engineering research funding. The University of Cincinnati’s co-op program — alternating semesters of classroom study with paid, real-world work experience — is one of the oldest and most successful models of its kind in the entire country, producing graduates who leave with actual job experience and dramatically less debt than peers who spent four straight years in a classroom without ever touching the industry they’re entering. These are not the institutions anyone serious is talking about when they raise consolidation. The actual conversation, done honestly, is about overlapping regional campuses and duplicate programs competing for a shrinking pool of traditional-age students in specific corners of the state system, not about tearing down Ohio’s genuine centers of research and innovation excellence. Naming four specific campuses out loud before doing that distinction in public was the mistake. The underlying question — does Ohio need every single program at every single campus it currently funds, at a moment when high school graduation numbers are flattening statewide — is a completely legitimate one to ask, carefully, with the flagship institutions’ actual excellence held up as the standard the rest of the system should be measured against, not torn down to match.
— THE BOTTOM LINE —
If you made it this far, here’s the entire article compressed into four sentences, because you’ve earned the summary after everything else.
Ohio has genuinely elite infrastructure, a genuinely improving migration trend, and a tax code that is actively working against both of those advantages instead of amplifying them. Vivek Ramaswamy’s platform — phased income tax elimination, deregulated housing and energy, expanded school choice, merit-based teacher pay — is built on policies that have already been tested at scale in other states, with real, measurable, favorable results, even though his own team hasn’t published every funding detail critics are rightly asking for. Amy Acton’s platform leans on compassionate-sounding, largely unfunded new spending commitments that no state has run long enough to prove out, alongside a genuinely commendable, credit-where-due record on opioid accountability and a real break from her own party on immigration enforcement cooperation. I’d bet on the tested hypothesis over the untested one, with my eyes open about exactly where Vivek’s plan still needs him to show his work — and I’d hold whoever wins to that standard on day one of their term, not just on the campaign trail.
— CLOSING —
I write these long ones because Ohio deserves more than a bumper sticker, and because I think most of you reading this are capable of sitting with actual numbers instead of just a slogan, even when the numbers complicate the story I’d prefer to tell. I gave you the honest version of Vivek Ramaswamy’s case, warts included — the university consolidation stumble, the unpublished offset details, the 2024 rhetoric he’s had to walk back. I gave you the honest version of Amy Acton’s case too, credit included — the opioid settlement work, the ICE cooperation pledge that broke from her own party, the genuine problem of medical debt she’s not making up. That’s the only kind of argument I know how to make in good conscience, and it’s the only kind I think actually changes anyone’s mind, because an argument that only works if you don’t check it isn’t an argument. It’s a hope.
has the harder job now: turning a campaign platform built on tested ideas from other states into a specific, funded, Ohio-shaped plan that survives contact with an actual legislature and an actual budget cycle. I’ll be watching that just as closely as I watched the campaign, and I’d encourage every single person reading this to do the same, regardless of who you’re voting for in November.
IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE this article so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this — every share really helps get the word out. Use it. COMMENT below with your take. Are you more persuaded by the tested-hypothesis argument for Vivek’s tax plan, or by Innovation Ohio’s funding concerns? Tell me.
And if you want MORE of this — the data, the history, the science, the stories — JOIN Bski’s Classroom community or follow me on YouTube. Even better, subscribe to my account; it is about the cost of a cup of coffee per month. That is it. Your support keeps this classroom open, and I promise I will never run out of material as long as the left keeps trying to out-dumb itself.
But what do I know, I am only a medically retired combat medic who wrote his own Anatomy and Physics textbooks because nobody else was going to teach these kids like they were capable of understanding them, and who happens to think a state budget deserves the same rigor I demand from a lab report.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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