After another GOP sweep, are Democrats eyeing the Ohio Supreme Court doomed?

COLUMBUS, Ohio – At the close of the decade, Ohio Democrats showed unexpected strength on the Ohio Supreme Court, with judicial candidates dramatically overperforming their statewide counterparts and bringing their first majority since 1986 just into reach.

Then in 2021, Republicans amended a century-old state law and forced candidates to run with their party labels on the ballot instead of running independent from the parties. After — and Democrats would say because of — that change, Republicans have won six of six contests by double-digit margins.

Justice Jennifer Brunner is now the lone Democrat on a seven-member bench. Her term ends in 2026, raising the question: Can Democrats win again on the Ohio Supreme Court?

“Under the current rules, I think it would be very difficult unless there are significant shifts in the electorate,” said Vanessa Tey Iosue, the lead consultant behind two of the three Democrats’ races.

“To me, it shows people were voting straight party ticket. And when you politicize judicial races, you risk politicizing the entire judiciary. That’s where we are as a state.”

Republicans Joe Deters, Dan Hawkins, and Megan Shanahan, all won by 10% to 11% Tuesday, margins of well above 500,000 votes each out of 5.3 million ballots cast. It’s a result that tracks fairly closely with the victory of President-elect Donald Trump (who won by about 11%) while exceeding the margin of Senator-elect Bernie Moreno (about 4%). They toppled two sitting justices, Michael Donnelly and Melody Stewart, and defeated an appeals court judge, Lisa Forbes.

Come January, Republicans hold a 6-1 majority. While it’s a sharp change from the recent 4-3 dynamic of the past few years, it marks a return to Republican dominance on the Supreme Court. Since 1990, Republicans have held an average of five seats on the bench.

David Pepper, an attorney who was the chairman of the Democratic Party during its recent judicial hot streak, said Democrats would have won Tuesday but for the party labels change. The proof, he said, is in previous election results. In 2018, Donnelly won by 22% and Stewart won by 5%, all in a cycle where Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, won at the top of the ticket. In 2020, Brunner won by more than 10%, even while Trump won by 8%, although Republicans won the chief justice slot that year by about a 10-point margin.

“Trump won by 8 and Brunner won by 10,” Pepper said in an interview. “The reason they changed the rules is because that kind of loss was freaking them out.”

In 1911, the Ohio General Assembly adopted the Nonpartisan Judiciary Act, which provided that judges would run on ballots without stating their party, according to Steven Steinglass, a law professor who wrote a history of the state constitution. Candidates still ran in partisan primaries and the parties supported their preferred candidates but this wasn’t reflected on the ballot itself.

“The people behind that at the time believed that party designations got in the way of voters choosing who they believed to be the best candidate,” Steinglass said.

In 2021, Republicans changed the rules on a party line vote. Sponsors argued the change provided an important piece of relevant information to voters. Plus, they argued it would mitigate the problem of voter “drop off” between presidential and judicial races. Here, they had some success. About 300,000 fewer voters picked a justice than a president this year, compared to drop off of more than 1 million in 2020 and as much as 1.5 million in 2016.

The analysis on the party label law hurting Democrats is probably correct, according to Michael Hartley, a Republican political consultant who has managed successful statewide races. But it’s missing the central problem: Democrats, he said, have gotten crushed for years in non-judicial statewide races. Republicans, as of Tuesday, control the governor’s office, all statewide seats, both U.S. Senate seats, and both chambers of the General Assembly by wide margins. Ohioans, Hartley said, simply do not buy what Democrats have been selling and are getting the information they need from the partisan label.

“My question there is, are you afraid of the party label?” he asked. “Are you afraid to identify as a Democrat?”