Elect Kellie Deeter to the Ohio House

Voters have two strong choices in the race to replace term-limited state Rep. Dick Stein, R-Norwalk: Democrat Brenda Buchanan and Republican Kellie Deeter. (There's a write-in candidate in the race as well, Andrew N. Leonard of Willard, but he has no chance of winning and we didn't interview him.) Buchanan, 61, has worked in radio for years. She currently works remotely scheduling commercials for several stations in the New England region. Deeter, 50, is a certified nurse anesthetist and certified nurse practitioner who owns her own business, Firelands Anesthesia and Firelands Medispa. Unlike Deeter, Buchanan has experience in elected office, having served two terms on the Columbia Schools Board of Education, which included several years as its president. However, Deeter has experience working in Columbus. She's lobbied, with some success, on behalf of nurses, trying to expand their scope of practice. (It's an issue she pledged to continue working on if elected.) Her lobbying work means she understands how Columbus works and how to forge the alliances necessary to get things done for her constituents. She also already knows many of the players in state-level politics. It's for those reasons that we believe Deeter is the best choice to represent the 54th House District. The district includes parts of Erie, Huron and Lorain counties. In Lorain County, it includes Grafton, Kipton, LaGrange, Oberlin, Rochester, South Amherst, Vermilion and Wellington as well as the townships of Brighton, Brownhelm, Camden, Columbia, Grafton, Henrietta, Huntington, LaGrange, New Russia, Penfield, Pittsfield, Rochester and Wellington. It also includes parts of the townships of Amherst, Carlisle and Eaton. (Deeter lives in Norwalk, while Buchanan lives in Columbia Station.) Thanks to gerrymandering, Deeter is almost certain to win the race. The district has morphed a bit during Stein's tenure, but it has remained reliably Republican, and Stein has, accurately in our view, argued that he represented the politics of his constituents. We've had numerous policy disagreements with Stein over the years, especially over the pandemic and the various culture-war fights he always seemed to be on the wrong side of. Those disagreements reached the point where we couldn't bring ourselves to endorse Stein in the past two elections. However, we always gave Stein credit for being accessible and working hard at constituent service. We believe both Buchanan and Deeter would continue to do the same. Deeter told us in an endorsement interview that she wanted to focus on the issues that affect Ohioans, such as affordable health care and smart agricultural policy. In much the same way, Buchanan also impressed us as someone who would work to serve all her constituents to the best of her ability. "I believe in working for the people and not the party," she told us in a separate interview. Buchanan holds the positions one might expect of a Democrat. For example, she is pro-choice and favors common-sense gun reform such as expanded background checks. She's opposed to the sort of extremist culture-war bills that GOP lawmakers introduce all too frequently in Columbus. Deeter's politics are conservative, but we also were impressed with the pragmatic approach she said she would use if elected. (She's also far more reasonable than the hard-right Anthony Savage, whom she bested in the GOP primary.) "I'm always going to vote being mindful of what my district wants," Deeter told us. When we asked Deeter about abortion rights, she told us that while she was personally pro-life, she considered abortion to be a non-issue right now because voters approved an abortion-rights amendment to the Ohio Constitution last year. She said much the same about legalizing recreational marijuana, which she opposed. She recognized that voters went the other way last year and said she wouldn't try to undo their decision. She did say she would like to reexamine how taxes collected on marijuana sales are spent. When it came to energy policy, Deeter told us that she favored "all of the above." In other words, she argued, reasonably, that while coal, gas and oil have a place in meeting Ohio's energy needs, so do nuclear, solar and wind. When we asked her about the long-held GOP goal of eliminating the state income tax, Deeter recognized the complexities of the idea. She said while she favored reducing income taxes, the state needed to have a plan to maintain revenue to continue to provide services. Such a plan has yet to materialize. Deeter told us she didn't want to go to Columbus to wage culture-war fights, although she acknowledged that she would have to vote on them and suggested we might not always agree with her votes. That's probably true, but we're willing to give Deeter a chance to prove herself to be a pragmatic lawmaker. Voters should as well. This editorial has been updated.