Splitting Lorain County

In our politically polarized times, split-ticket voters are often thought of as a vanishing breed, but they haven't disappeared completely from Lorain County. Republicans scored numerous victories in contested races, hanging on to two county commissioner seats and the Recorder's Office while flipping a judgeship and the Prosecutor's Office from blue to red. Republican Jack Hall also was on pace to defeat Democrat Rich Resendez in the race to replace retiring Sheriff Phil Stammitti, a Democrat. There were more than 4,900 outstanding absentee ballots and provisional ballots still to be factored into the results, but those votes tend to follow the trend of results reported on Election Day. Hall was leading by a little over 1,300 votes, according to unofficial election returns from the county Board of Elections. President-elect Donald Trump was winning the county with 81,818 votes, an improvement on the 79,520 votes he received in 2020. (He lost the county by 131 votes in 2016.) Democrats lost ground in the presidential race, with Vice President Kamala Harris clocking in with 72,991 votes. President Joe Biden received 75,667 county votes in 2020. The news for local Democrats wasn't entirely grim. Two judicial candidates, Donna Freeman and Domestic Relations Judge Frank Janik, won, as did county Clerk of Court Tom Orlando and county Treasurer Dan Talarek. Judicial races are hard to parse because, at least at the county level, the candidates run without being identified by party affiliation on the general election ballot. Orlando and Talarek likely benefited from the power of incumbency, the largely nonpolitical nature of their jobs, their relatively weak GOP opponents and, especially in Talarek's case, their longevity. Orlando has been clerk since 2015 while Talarek has been treasurer since 1989. Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Cleveland, who lost statewide to Republican businessman Bernie Moreno, was winning the county with 78,037 votes compared to Moreno's 70,576 votes. Lorain County was the only Ohio county that went for Trump in the presidential race to break for Brown in the Senate contest. Brown's local success can be attributed to the fact that he represented Lorain County in the U.S. House of Representatives before winning his Senate seat in 2006 when he unseated now Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican. Brown likely lost statewide because of Ohio voters' shift to the right in recent years. Local Democrats, however, won't be able to count on nostalgia and incumbency forever if they want to win over county voters who also have been shifting toward the GOP. In 2020, Republicans Dave Moore and Michelle Hung defeated two incumbent Democratic commissioners and Mike Doran beat longtime Democratic Recorder Judy Nedwick. Republicans might have taken the Prosecutor's Office as well four years ago had their candidate, Bob Gargasz, not made comments about shooting protesters and stacking them up like "cordwood." In 2022, county Auditor Craig Snodgrass, a Democrat, won reelection in part because his opponent, Rodger Roeser, left a trail of awful social media posts. Snodgrass will be up for reelection in two years, when voters will likely still be smarting over rising property values that led to increases in property taxes. Even though Snodgrass survived two years ago, then-county Commissioner Matt Lundy, a Democrat, lost a squeaker to now-Commissioner Jeff Riddell, a Republican, by 136 votes. This year, Moore was beating Democrat Brian Baker by more than 3,200 votes, while Republican Marty Gallagher was beating Lorain City Councilman Tony Dimacchia, D-at large, by more than 6,800 votes to take the seat now held by Hung. Gallagher beat Hung in the GOP primary in large part because she was caught having an affair with a subordinate she voted to hire in 2021. She and Moore had a hard falling out after that. Although Hung found a temporary ally in Lundy, once he was gone, she could do little more than rage against a partnership that Moore and Riddell forged. Gallagher's primary win over Hung showed that Republican voters weren't willing to tolerate the sort of scandal she brought. We also suspect that Hung's ongoing feud with her fellow commissioners fueled the idea that she was the root cause of the chaos in the commissioners' office. We hope her departure will settle things down so the commissioners can focus on serving county residents in a transparent manner. Scandal also led to Democratic Prosecutor J.D. Tomlinson's loss to Republican Tony Cillo by more than 20,000 votes. Tomlinson, too, had dated a subordinate, Jennifer Battistelli, and later reached a $100,000 settlement with her over her being disciplined for reporting what she claimed was discrimination against a coworker. There was far more to the story, including allegations of domestic violence and sexual harassment, which Tomlinson desperately tried to conceal from the public. About a month ago, Tomlinson and his chief of staff, James Burge, were charged with allegedly pressuring Battistelli to change her story. It's also worth noting that while Democrats performed well in their traditional strongholds of Elyria, Lorain and especially Oberlin, their wins in some of those communities weren't of the scale they once enjoyed. (Except Oberlin, where Harris was ahead of Trump 4,010 votes to 518 votes.) For example, in Elyria, with outstanding ballots still to be factored in, Harris was beating Trump 11,472 votes to 10,209 votes this year. Four years ago, Biden beat Trump by 12,300 votes to 9,949 votes. The county's villages and townships, meanwhile, went for Trump by wider margins than four years ago. In 2020, Trump received 24,729 votes compared to Biden's 14,209 votes in those communities. This year, Trump was leading the race with 26,012 votes compared to Harris' 13,948 votes. The county's political realignment remains a work in progress.