Election 2026

Amy Acton Beats Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio Governor's Race

A very normie Democrat beats an idiosyncratic MAGA candidate.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 11.3.2026 10:53 PM

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Amy Acton has been elected as the next governor of Ohio. A doctor who led Ohio's Department of Health at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she faced off against entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who gained national attention as a candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries before dropping out of the race and endorsing Donald Trump.

The Associated Press has called the race for Acton, with 50.7 percent of the vote.

Acton is, by all indications, a fairly normie Democrat. She's been heavily criticized for her lockdown policies during the pandemic, which were not among the nation's most stringent but were still "impermissibly arbitrary, unreasonable, and oppressive," per one Ohio judge.

Going forward, she's likely to be good and bad in all the ways that normie Democrats of 2026 usually are.

Among Acton's campaign promises were a child tax credit, some sort of age verification requirement for app stores, and a moratorium on new data centers in Ohio until they "exclusively build with union labor" and meet other conditions. She also criticizes Ohio's school voucher system and........

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