The Oho Statehouse, Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal. Only republish photo with original story.)

Following an election which brought two more Democrats to the Ohio Senate and Ohio House each, but struck down redistricting reforms and maintained Republican supermajorities, lawmakers are planning their next moves when it comes to policy.

The Ohio General Assembly has two more months of its current term before the year begins with a state operating budget to be developed and approved, and other policy priorities to address without federal COVID funding boosts the GA had in previous years.

Four members of the legislature met at a Thursday post-election event hosted by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce to discuss the way forward in addressing topics like education and property taxes, while balancing a need for economic goals alongside social issues.

Lame duck

State Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, sat alongside fellow Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, and state Reps. Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati, and Scott Oelslager, R-North Canton, at the panel discussion.

All the men said bipartisanship should be an aim for the legislature, despite the Republican supermajority, and they all anticipated the usual late nights as the upcoming lame duck legislative session ties up loose ends by the end of the year.

“I can tell you, it won’t be fun,” McColley told his colleagues. “Don’t fall asleep at your desk.”

The Ohio House has four sessions scheduled between now and the end of December, with another three “if needed” sessions set aside, just in case. The Ohio Senate has scheduled five sessions for the rest of 2024.

“I’m actually hopeful we don’t have any sessions, so we can’t screw the state over like we normally do with lame duck every two years,” DeMora said at Thursday’s chamber event.

But DeMora and others do have some bipartisan-sponsored bills to push before they must be reintroduced at the beginning of the new GA.

Specifically for DeMora, he hopes to see passage of a bill mandating insurance coverage for children’s hearing aids, along with an election worker protection bill.

Isaacsohn said he wants to see relief in the area of property taxes, calling it “outrageous” that there hasn’t been legislative movement to stem the “skyrocketing” taxes without impacting local schools who rely on those taxes.

“It’s what our constituents are calling our offices about, it’s what people are feeling,” Isaacsohn said. “And it should not come at the expense of our public schools.”

McColley agreed that property taxes are something the legislature “needs to take a serious look at.”

“I do think Ohioans who are looking at it would be fine if it was just simply more predictable and easy to understand as to how these property tax rates are calculated, and maybe even if there was a cap on the level of increase that can happen going forward,” McColley said.

Redistricting and the general election

The results of Tuesday’s election did not go unspoken by the four legislators. Isaacsohn said it was worth mentioning that the Democrats picked up two more seats in an Ohio Senate that is still strongly held by a Republican majority, and McColley used the fact that Democrats made gains in an otherwise GOP-dominated election as an argument for the current redistricting system in Ohio.

“That is, in my opinion, largely as a result of – not only were there candidates and good races won – but primarily the redistricting bipartisan unanimous map that we came up with in the last cycle,” McColley said.

Tuesday’s elections results mean Republican supermajorities go from 67-32 in the Ohio House to 65-34, and from 26-7 in the Ohio Senate to 24-9.

In unofficial results as they stand now from Tuesday night, President-elect Donald Trump won Ohio 55-44. In an average of the results for the statewide races for President, U.S. Senate, and the three Ohio Supreme Court races, Republican candidates earned 54.22% of Ohioans’ votes, while Democrats earned 44.76%.

McColley was on the Ohio Redistricting Commission when the most recent Statehouse map was adopted – the sixth revision made by the commission in two years – and he said the creation of that map with bipartisan support was proof that a map could be drawn that was “something that may have been intended when the initial amendments were passed in 2015 and 2018.”

The two Democrats on the commission have said they agreed to the map adoption because if they didn’t Republicans said they would’ve drawn something even more unfavorable to Democrats, and in hopes that voters would end the ORC’s map-making with Issue 1 this year.

Oelslager agreed with McColley, saying Ohioans’ the defeat of Issue 1 on Tuesday with 54% of the vote “sent a clear message that they did not want to change the process.”

Isaacsohn pushed back, saying the fact that every single incumbent who ran was reelected in the House and the Senate shows “something is off there.”

“Every incumbent should not win in any year for any party. That’s not a healthy democracy,” Isaacsohn said. “There is no way that 132 of them are doing a good enough job and that voters don’t want a change there.”

He added that even with the “red wave year all over the country, including in Ohio,” the voter trends still didn’t match the partisan makeup drawn into the Statehouse maps by the ORC.

“We should continue to at least be honest with ourselves about how disproportionate and imbalanced the partisan makeup of the legislature is,” Isaacsohn said.

DeMora mirrored arguments made by Citizens Not Politicians and other supporters after Issue 1 was defeated, saying some of the Ohioans who voted against the measure were “confused” by summary ballot language approved by the Ohio Ballot Board, and actually supported the measure itself.

Moving forward, McColley and Oelslager said conversations could begin within the legislature as to what changes could be made to the state’s redistricting process, including if Gov. Mike DeWine’s preference that the state look to something like the process Iowa has could go forward.

Iowa’s process relies on legislative and gubernatorial approval of maps drawn by a nonpartisan governmental group, in Ohio’s case, possibly the Ohio Legislative Service Commission.

“I do think there will probably be discussions about whether we can improve upon our existing process, and that may very well involve discussions around who sits on the commission,” McColley said.

Funding the state

As for policy decisions in the new year, legislators are hopeful to put forth a budget that addresses the basic needs of Ohioans, even if they disagree on what those basic needs are.

“From a general standpoint, (the Republican caucus) will continue our philosophy of doing all we can to make Ohio a good place to raise a family, begin a business, have a culture where people take a look at our great place and say ‘I want to come there,” Oelslager said.

Those priorities for Oelslager include the three biggest budget items they see for the state: health care, education and the state’s prisons system.

As far as education, Oelslager said implementing the Fair School Funding Plan is “again part of the discussion for renewal,” but so, too, is the EdChoice private school voucher program, “and I’m sure that’ll be part of the K-12 education proposal,” he said.

Priorities may remain largely the same as in other years for the GOP, but the revenues with which to pay for those policies will be impacted by the fading-out of federal funding from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This could be a different budget cycle depending on how a lot of this plays out,” McColley said. “Obviously, the economy’s in a little bit different shape now than it was two years ago, four years ago, six years ago.”

Policy priorities in the new year

McColley said the Senate still plans to work on reducing tax burdens, de-regulation “across the board” and expansion of “education options” for Ohioans.

DeMora had what he saw as an easy fix for the money problems that could show up in the state over the next few years.

“I can find a billion dollars in the budget if we get rid of vouchers,” DeMora said. “We’ll have a billion dollars more to spend in the budget right there.”

Earlier this year, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce found that the state spent $970.7 million on private school scholarship programs in the 2024 fiscal year, the first year of eligibility for nearly all Ohio students.

Other money sources could come from recreational marijuana sales and the expansion of gaming, DeMora said, if the governor was willing to support it.

“We’re going to see if the governor is more into fiscal responsibility or if his opposition to both gaming and marijuana is going to not have him look at those two sources of funding for the state when all this federal money is no longer here,” DeMora said.

Isaacsohn said it wasn’t a bad idea to grab the revenue possible from those sources, but when taxes could be raised on the richest Ohioans instead, he didn’t see the logic.

“Instead of taxing the wealthiest people, we are going to try and raise revenue by hoping people gamble more or do more substances,” Isaacsohn said. “That’s an odd choice, I think, for policymakers to make.”

One thing that will arise despite discussions about the need for more economic goals in the legislature is “cultural issues,” which McColley and Oelslager defended as issues that are important to their constituents.

The Ohio Chamber’s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, Rick Carfagna, moderated the Thursday panel, and said there’s been “this opportunity cost of time, energy and resources that seems to have been spent on divisive social issues at the expense of economic policies.”

He asked legislators if there was a path to refocus on those issues. McColley said it’s possible to do both.

“Frankly, some of these social issues, people look to us and say what other avenue or what other remedy do I have if my state government is not willing to step in and take care of these things,” McColley said.

He said the law that Ohio passed to keep transgender students from playing sports with the group that aligns with their gender identity played into a “central campaign issue,” both nationally and at the state level, one that he said voters supported.

“That’s something that I would say Ohioans want to see happen by and large,” McColley said.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Republican spent at least $215 million on anti-trans ads during the 2024 campaign cycle.