The official Ohio elections calendar says the 2026 gubernatorial campaign begins about 20 weeks from now — at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 4 — the filing deadline for candidates in Ohio's May primary election.
The official calendar lies.
Well, not lies, exactly. It just misses the fact that the race to become the state’s 65th governor has been rattling along for at least a year now.
And still, for both Republicans and Democrats, the picture changes on a near-daily basis.
At least for one candidate.
We do know this: If the Nov. 2026 gubernatorial election were held today, the candidates would be biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy on the Republican side and former Ohio Health Department director Amy Acton for the Democrats.
They have one thing in common: neither one of them has ever been elected to a public office.
Maybe two things in common: One, Ramaswamy, has been waiting for a potential rival to get in or out of the race on the GOP side. Acton has been playing the same waiting game on the Democratic side. Here’s your handy score card as to where things stand now:
The Coach is out
Monday night, Ohio’s GOP elites — lobbyists, legislators, and campaign strategists packed into an event center near downtown Columbus to witness something that should have been routine but was anything but in this unusual political season.
It was the two top-of-the-ticket 2026 GOP candidates — Sen. Jon Husted, who will run for the remaining two years of JD Vance’s six-year Senate term next year, and Ramaswamy, the MAGA gubernatorial candidate — endorsing each other and vowing to run as a team.
Ohio GOP chairman Alex Triantafilou, the master of ceremonies for Monday’s event, seemed quite pleased with the result, although two candidates of the same political party endorsing each other has a distinct dog-bites-man feel to it.
But they had to wait for their moment until Ohio Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel, the former Ohio State football coach with a loyal following in Buckeye Country, made a decision on whether to jump into the governor’s race.
Friday, in a post on X, Tressel took a pass on running, saying his decision came after “considerable thought and prayer.”
That freed Husted and Ramaswamy to love on each other at Triantafilou’s Monday night party.
Tressel’s decision leaves Ramaswamy with what appears now to be a clear path to the GOP nomination.
It had to be a relief. Coach Tressel is highly regarded; Ohioans generally like him.
“Likability” has not been the hallmark of Ramaswamy’s brief experience as a candidate.
The only time his name has been on a ballot in the past is when he was a GOP candidate for president and campaigned through 2023 in the Iowa caucuses.
Ramaswamy began his Iowa campaign in the spring of 2023. The caucuses were in early January 2024.
Polling showed clearly that the more Iowa voters saw and heard of him, the less they liked him — to the point where he finished with only 7% of the caucus vote. The next day, he joined the Iowa winner, Donald Trump, in New Hampshire, where Ramaswamy endorsed Trump and became a loyal MAGA follower.
Waiting for Tim
Acton, too, is playing a waiting game. And she’s probably getting a bit tired of it.
Democrat Tim Ryan, a congressman from the Mahoning Valley for 20 years, has run for the Democratic presidential nomination and for the U.S. Senate, both failed campaigns.
This summer, Ryan had set himself a deadline of Sept. 30 to make a decision on running for governor.
But, last week, in an interview with Columbus’ 10TV, Ryan said he may need a few more weeks to mull it over.
While Ryan continues to consult with whatever muse he employs on decisions like this, Acton is busy organizing her campaign, holding well-attended events all over Ohio, and holding her own in internal polling.
Still, though, it surely would be nice for her to know if she is going to have to deal with a contested primary next May.
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