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By Evan Vorpahl & Caitlin Mahoney
This article was originally published by Truthout
Ohio’s state court election has been a circus of corporate and dark money campaigning.
Since mid-October, two right-wing super PACs have spent untold sums on ads portraying two of the four candidates running for seats on the Ohio Supreme Court as soft on crime. This campaign against judicial candidates supported by Democrats is a tried-and-true element of the attack playbook for special interests seeking to undermine judges that might hold corporations accountable.
One of the groups, called First Principles PAC, is a core part of Leonard Leo’s $1 billion+ dark money court capture operation. The other PAC, Ohioans for a Healthy Economy Action (OHE Action), is affiliated with the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and has been funded by billionaires Dick Uihlein, Jimmy Haslam, and Vivek Ramaswamy. The two targets of the ads, Jennifer Brunner, the lone Democrat on the Ohio Supreme Court, and appellate court judge Marilyn Zayas, are running against Republicans Colleen O’Donnell and Dan Hawkins respectively.
Ohio’s spring judicial primaries showcased hyper-partisan campaigning, which has now carried into the general election: Hawkins and O’Donnell have also campaigned alongside the Donald Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy and his campaign for governor have been heavily criticized for spending millions on ads featuring the estranged mother of his opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a “liar.” That woman has not seen her daughter for 47 years since she lost custody of her children after siding with Acton’s stepfather, who was indicted for raping Acton starting when she was 10 years old.
Meanwhile, last month, Republican Ohio Supreme Court Justice Dan Hawkins appeared at a banquet hosted by the Ohio Christian Alliance. At that event, he lamented the supposedly “rogue, liberal judges” derailing Trump’s agenda. He also emphasized that he and the other Republican justices “understand the importance of what it is to be a conservative justice … We need to make sure we maintain this strong conservative majority on the Ohio Supreme Court … together we can make sure Ohio’s Supreme Court stays in strong conservative hands.” That “conservative” court has wielded judicial power in distinctly un-conservative ways, overturning or ignoring recent legal precedents to help Republicans redraw voting maps and rewriting parts of a state ballot measure in ways that tipped the scales in favor of opponents of reproductive rights.
The stark partisanship in the election of Ohio judges is the product of decades of work by billionaires and right-wing operatives to open the floodgates of dark money influence in the state. It’s also a direct result of Republicans insisting on putting political party labels on judicial candidates in 2021. A main tactic in this campaign, pushed by corporate interests and the network of Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing capture of the U.S. Supreme Court, has been to manipulate how judges are selected. With a now 6 to 1 right-wing majority, Ohio may be this far right campaign’s largest state court capture success story.
The Dark Money Fight to Make State Judicial Elections Partisan
It didn’t have to be this way. A century ago, widespread partisan corruption in elections led Americans to demand a change in how judges were selected. This culminated in the “Missouri Plan” and other related merit-based selection systems in many states. These procedures, which focus on experience and merit rather than partisanship for the selection of officials who are supposed to act as neutral arbiters, have acted as guardrails to insulate judicial power from party loyalty.
Although Ohio did not change its judicial selection process to a merit-based system, the state passed a law in 1911 mandating nonpartisan ballots for the selection of judges, a move that helps support judicial integrity by protecting the ideal that candidates be elected for their dedication to fairly interpreting the law, rather than loyalty to a political party or donors. (A year later, in 1912, the legislature passed a law allowing for partisan primaries, but general elections remained nonpartisan until 2021.)
Over the years, as big money began to seep into judicial elections, Ohio courts grappled with the conflicts of interest that political spending in judicial races inevitably brings. In 2006, The New York Times reported on Ohio’s weak recusal practices and a perceived correlation between campaign contributions and judicial decisions: “[J]ustices routinely sat on cases after receiving campaign contributions from the parties involved or from groups that filed supporting briefs. On average, they voted in favor of contributors 70 percent of the time.” Then-Justice Paul Pfeifer, a Republican, told the Times, “Everyone interested in contributing has very specific interests … They mean to be buying a vote.”
Between 2018 and 2020, Ohioans voted to narrow the right-wing majority on the Ohio Supreme Court from 7-0 to 4-3, despite millions in outside spending from groups affiliated with the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and other right-wing groups. Following those losses, the Republican-controlled legislature passed SB 80, which added partisan labels to general elections for high-level judicial races. The bill was introduced by Republican State Sen. Theresa Gavarone, who has worked closely with Leo’s network and other right-wing dark money groups.
In 2026, Gavarone was twice named a “policy champion” by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill that pairs state legislators with special interest groups and corporate lobbyists to endorse regressive bills or policies. ALEC legislators then try to get these “model” bills made into law in their state, without revealing the role of ALEC or the special interests they may have secretly voted with to adopt those bills behind closed doors.
Gavarone’s award was for her work advancing voter suppression legislation pushed at ALEC’s pay-to-play conference by the Honest Elections Project (HEP), a Leonard Leo group that is a six-figure funder of ALEC. HEP is the alias of one of Leo’s core groups and its bills make it harder for Americans to vote.
Gavarone has also worked behind the scenes with fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity to craft other electoral legislation in Ohio. This year, Gavarone and Republican State Sen. Jane Timken (more on the Timken family later) co-sponsored legislation to put an amendment on the ballot to enshrine voter ID restrictions in the state constitution that make it harder for Ohioans to vote. Voter ID is one of many tactics for legislators peddling debunked voter fraud disinformation.
A number of people with ties to the Federalist Society, which Leo co-chairs, and other right-wing groups also testified in the legislature in favor of the bill, including Chris Bonneau, a longtime advocate of partisan judicial elections for the Federalist Society, and Robert Alt, an active member of the Federalist Society who helms The Buckeye Institute, part of the State Policy Network of groups closely tied to ALEC. The Buckeye Institute has operated in tandem with many Leo-tied groups, filing coordinated amicus briefs in high-profile cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Travis Taylor of the dark money Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) also testified. FGA is notorious for its recent widespread lobbying effort to relax child labor laws.
The Republican-gerrymandered state legislature passed Gavarone’s bill to add party labels to judicial candidates in general elections, which Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce hailed it as a major “policy victory.”
Justice Jennifer Brunner filed a lawsuit seeking to strike down that law, arguing that it “placed the appellate level judges and the justices of Ohio in positions to be viewed by the public as partisan.” She also noted that the measure “imposes a partisan check on the decisions of non-partisan trial judges.” In other words, placing partisan labels next to judicial candidates could cause the public to view judgeships as political positions dedicated to furthering the agenda of a political party, rather than viewing judges as independent arbiters of the law. On October 14, 2026, ahead of heated state supreme court elections, a federal district court judge rejected Brunner’s lawsuit.
A New Hyper-Partisan Era for Judicial Campaigns
In 2022, spending in Ohio’s first partisan judicial elections after the passage of SB 80 skyrocketed to $21 million, the most expensive judicial election in state history. Groups tied to the Ohio Chamber as well the Republican State Leadership Committee, a 527 nonprofit group that has received millions from the core groups tied to Leo, have accounted for a large share of that spending. Republicans swept the 2022 and 2024 supreme court elections, and they are seeking to take unanimous control of the court this November.
As the Ohio Supreme Court has become more and more partisan, it has also grown increasingly emboldened.
In April 2026, five Republican justices on the court struck down the state’s 70-year ban on judges making political endorsements. The ruling was even a bridge too far for fellow Republican Justice Pat Fischer, the lone dissent, who pointed out that the majority ignored precedent and procedure and invented a question within the case to enable themselves to make partisan political endorsements despite neither party in the case raising that question. Fischer also noted that the decision threatens the court’s impartiality and the public’s confidence in the court’s credibility. Notably, the Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct has long barred such endorsements, stating “[a] judge or judicial candidate shall not engage in political or campaign activity that is inconsistent with the independence, integrity, or impartiality of the judiciary.” (Justice Brunner had recused herself from the case.)
The effect of the ruling was almost immediately evident. Republican Fifth District Court of Appeals Judge Andrew King ran an ad in the Ohio Supreme Court primary bragging that he was “the pro-Trump constitutional conservative for [Ohio] Supreme Court.” And Republican Supreme Court Justice Dan Hawkins has been on the campaign trail with Ramaswamy, who gave $50,000 to OHE Action in 2024, as it was running ads supporting Hawkins.
The Captured Court Is Hurting Real People
The extreme partisanship on display in Ohio is a direct result of the right-wing’s long-term campaign to make it harder to hold corporations and billionaires accountable.
Changes to state tort or injury laws are protecting corporations from accountability at the expense of everyday people by making it much harder for consumers to sue for damages. The Ohio legislature passed a massive tort reform package in 1996 that was heavily backed by the U.S Chamber of Commerce and its Ohio state affiliate. When the Ohio Supreme Court found it unconstitutional three years later, the Chamber launched a scorched-earth campaign against Justice Alice Robie Resnick. A Chamber-tied front group called Citizens for a Strong Ohio spent $4.2 million on misleading ads targeting Resnick’s reelection campaign, and later spent years fighting to hide its funders.
Meanwhile, attorneys and legal “experts” tied to the Leo-led Federalist Society and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have urged the Ohio legislature to continue shielding corporations from accountability. They have also pushed back against citizens seeking to protect their ability to sue for damages incurred from environmental hazards like lead paint and asbestos.
A few recent rulings by the captured court illuminate just how far it is willing to go to promote the anti-consumer agenda of its corporate and billionaire benefactors. In the 2024 “boneless wings” case, a 4-3 Republican majority ruled against Ohioan Michael Berkheimer, who was seeking compensation for the lifelong harms he has suffered after a nearly one-and-a-half-inch bone was lodged in his esophagus and became infected after he ate “boneless” wings. The Republican-dominated court ruled absurdly in that case that the restaurant was not liable because “boneless” referred to a cooking style, rather than the actual lack of bones in the chicken.
In another glaring example, in 2025, a 6-1 Republican majority on the court rejected additional damages to the widow of a worker who died by asphyxiation when he walked into an elevator control room at a TimkenSteel plant that had filled with nitrogen gas. Despite the business’s alleged history of safety violations, the court ruled against the widow collecting damages beyond her husband’s death benefits of $800 a week, because nitrogen gas is not legally “toxic,” even though it causes death if it displaces the oxygen humans need to stay alive. Justice Brunner, the lone dissent, wrote that the decision “[flew] in the face of reason.”
Besides the generically pro-corporate ruling, the decision specifically favored the politically connected Timken family, which owns TimkenSteel. The Timkens have been described as Ohio Republican royalty. The family has contributed heavily to Republicans in the state, including candidates for the Ohio Supreme Court such as Dan Hawkins.
Timken money has also supported former justice Judith French, who in 2014 told voters point-blank:
The Ohio Supreme Court is the backstop for all those other votes you are going to cast. Whatever the governor does, whatever your state representative, your state senator does, whatever they do, we are the ones that will decide whether it is constitutional; we decide whether it’s lawful. We decide what it means, and we decide how to implement it in a given case. So, forget all those other votes if you don’t keep the Ohio Supreme Court conservative.
The Timken Company Good Government Fund and Republican State Sen. Jane Timken, who is married to the former CEO and board president of TimkenSteel (now Metallus Inc.), also contributed $11,000 collectively to the campaigns of three of the justices who presided over the case. A spokesperson for the court asserted that the justices are under no obligation to recuse unless they deem themselves to have a conflict.
Months after the TimkenSteel decision, a bill was proposed to increase the non-economic damages cap in personal injury lawsuits. (Ohio law limits non-economic damages to $250,000.) Ohioans for a Healthy Economy, the Ohio Chamber group currently running attack ads against Democratic judicial candidates Brunner and Zayas, ran ads against the bill this spring.
In Ohio and across the country, corporate and far right interests are pouring money into efforts to change how judges are selected, politicizing the bench through partisan labels, and currying favor with campaign donations. The eroding independence of state courts will continue to have devastating effects on everyday Americans — unless citizens fight back and insist on stronger recusal standards, stronger anti-corruption and campaign finance disclosure rules, strict limits on political spending, and a process for selecting state judges based on merit, not money.
Lisa Graves, True North’s executive director, and Deputy Executive Director Alyssa Bowen contributed to this story.
This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.
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