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The March primary ends with some expected wins and some unexpected surprises decided by very low turnout.

We'll hear from the candidates and look forward to what's next.

This week in the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen councilor.

The fall ballot is set after a primary that saw millions of dollars in spending and only a dismal 22% voter turnout.

Bernie marino won the ohio Republican Party primary for U.S. Senate, beating two challengers in a race that was seen as a battle over who align most closely with former President Donald Trump.

It's a first time political win for the 57 year old Marino, a Cleveland area businessman who sold off his network of luxury car dealerships completely by 2022.

The reality is we have an opportunity now.

We have an opportunity now to retire the old economy and send them to a retirement home and then save this country, because that's what we're going to do.

And I want to thank President Trump for all he did for me for this campaign, for his unwavering support, for his love of this country, because I don't think I've ever seen somebody who loves this country the way he does.

So thank you to President Trump.

And it wasn't even close.

Marino won with just over 50% of the vote, but he was more than 17 points ahead of state.

Senator Matt Dolan with Secretary of State Frank LaRosa, a distant third.

Moreno, Dolan and La Rose all appeared on the show in the weeks before the vote.

They all declared their support for Trump, who won Ohio handily in 2016 and 2020.

But it was Marino who got Trump's endorsement in December.

Marino put $5.4 million of his own money into the race.

But he was also boosted by a Trump rally at the airport in Dayton, the Saturday before the vote, and also potentially helped by a late ad buy from political action committee aligned with the US Senate Democrats.

The PAC Duty and Country spent $2.7 million on ads touting Trump's endorsed candidate, Marino, as too conservative for Ohio.

Republicans complained that was Democratic meddling in their primary, an analyst suggested.

Those ads were launched because Democrats see Marino as the weakest candidate to face incumbent Sherrod Brown this fall.

Dolan and La Rose both said they conceded the race to Marino once the networks called it.

And reached out to Bernie Marino.

Congratulations, said Jerry Brown.

Why do you think the results came in the way they did today?

You know, I'm just.

I'm just observing them now.

I mean, I think we were a little disappointed in the turnout.

But, look, we ran a race where we wanted to present a case for Republicans and say, no, if you want somebody who understands the operations of government, let's go to Washington and actually get things done.

You know, we just didn't get this figured out to enough people.

I started this mission with a very clear statement, and that is that we have a country to save that has has not changed.

Now, just a few moments ago, I called to congratulate Mr. Marino.

That mission is still clear.

That mission is to defeat Sherrod Brown.

This November and put this country back on track by having a senator who has Ohio's values in Washington, D.C.. Democrats and Sherrod Brown wasted no time in launching their counter attacks on Marino.

My opponent has always looked out for himself.

He's even said he's not going to work with people whom he disagrees with in Washington, which means he's not fighting for Ohio.

He's not representing Ohio.

The Ohio Democratic Party put out a statement on election night noting lawsuits on overtime pay against Marino by his former employees.

His support for a national abortion ban and his opposition to the bipartisan border security bill, which Republicans killed after it was criticized by Trump, who plans to campaign heavily on immigration.

This fall's election is on track to be the most expensive US Senate race in state history, and it could help determine who controls the US Senate next year, with Democrats holding it with just a narrow margin now.

There were other races being watched this week among the 99 contests for the Ohio House.

Most of the 30 House incumbents on the ballot held onto their seats in this primary, but four did not.

A dozen of the 22 Republicans dubbed the blue 22 for partnering with 32 Democrats to elect Jason Stephens as speaker last year were facing primary challengers and Jon Cross, Sara Carruthers, Gail Pavliga and Brett Hillyer lost their primaries.

One Democratic incumbent lost.

ELLIOTT Forhan came in last in a three way Democratic race, won by Eric Synenberg, the vice president of Beachwood City Council, who joined the race after Forhan, was accused by another Democratic lawmaker of stalking, though he was never charged.

And legislative leaders ordered a state investigation into Forhan's behavior after a report released by House Minority Leader Alison Russo accused him of, quote, a pattern of harassment, hostility and intimidation of colleagues and staff.

Forhan has said the allegations were false.

On the Ohio Senate side, in two battles among conservatives, Republicans George Lang and Sandra O'Brien won over primary challengers with House experience.

Lang beat former representative and anti-abortion activist Candace Keller for a second time, and O'Brien bested Representative Mike Loychik.

There was only one contested primary in the three seats on the majority Republican Ohio Supreme Court.

That will be decided this fall for the open seat on the bench.

Voters chose eighth District Court of Appeals Judge Lisa Forbes over 10th District Court of Appeals Judge Terri Jamison by 2 to 1.

Jamison also ran for the court in 2022 and lost the other two seats up this fall are held by Democrats.

One is Justice Melody Stewart and her Republican colleague, Justice Joe Dieters is hoping to unseat her and win a full six year term.

Deters was appointed last year to the court to fill out the remaining three years of Sharon Kennedy's term after she was elected chief justice.

While the US Senate race got a lot of national attention for many in Columbus.

The results of the Ohio House primary were in the spotlight.

The results are raising some questions about Stephens reelection as speaker next year, as GOP Senate President Matt Huffman is being more open about his plans when he he's in the House.

Huffman is term limited in the Senate and is running unopposed for the House, as is Stephens.

Both Stephens and Huffman spoke at the Ohio Chamber of Commerce's post election event Impact Ohio this week.

Stephens did not directly address the situation at all, but made another push for changing term limits.

It's important to have new blood and new ideas and things, but I think we have to be able to govern effectively and figuring out, you know, where the Russians are and trying to or that billion dollar budget in the first six months of our terms is not easy.

There's a lot of you serve on boards.

Imagine if your board had 25% turnover every two years.

And that's something that we deal with in-house.

They're good people.

They bring different perspectives, but it can be a challenge to some of the things that you guys read the news, you see some of the stuff that goes on, but it's far too easy to cater to extreme points of view versus working to create thoughtful policy that you believe in and growing consensus for when we have term limits, a sort of a period as we do the line.

It won't happen overnight.

And I don't want any changes to be around any longer than I have to.

But I heard no, but I do think it's a question that we in Ohio need to ask ourselves.

What is a good change in our current law really look like so that we can keep that institutional language, that we can also have the first coming in.

Stephens did not speak to reporters, hoping to talk to him afterward.

Huffman spoke later in the day about the proposed amendment that seems likely to make the fall ballot that would create a 15 member commission of non-elected non-politicians to draw state and congressional district maps, which he strongly opposes.

But Huffman did speak to reporters and was more direct than he's ever been before about his plans when he gets into the house.

No, I got to go around and talk to people and there are some people certainly that want me to run for speaker of the House.

And, you know, we have to have a lot of firming up conversations.

But I, I certainly am committed to making sure, whether it's me or anyone else, that whoever is elected speaker is elected by a majority of the majority caucus, which I think will be I think the Republicans will hold the House and I think the speaker should be elected by the majority.

Stephens won the gavel by getting votes from all 32 House Democrats, but with fewer Republican votes, and his rival, Derek Baron Huffman, who donated to incumbents and supported Merrin for Speaker, was asked if he thinks Stephens has done a good job in that position.

I think that it's very, very difficult to lead and legislate.

When he was elected in the manner that he was, I think that, to my knowledge, and I do not think that Larry Householder got elected the same way, although he's probably not a very good example at this point.

I don't think as far as I know, at least in Ohio, never one anyone's been elected.

Now, I think if if you are going to get elected that way, then it's difficult to say.

I'm also the leader of the Republican caucus.

It's just and so, again, I'm not I'm not in on the meetings.

I don't know exactly.

I know there weren't as many sessions held as traditionally there are.

So but one of the reasons I'm interested in doing that is answer to Andrew's question, which is we need to make sure that the majority of the Republican caucus is supporting whoever the speakers and that we all support them.

And if Speaker Stephens had a majority of the caucus, even if I wasn't going to vote for him, then that's who I would vote in.

If it's somebody else, that's who I'm going to vote for also.

Karen.

Does that mean that you would not be.

Speaking to.

Democrats?

absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, no, no.

I'm sorry.

I absolute excuse me.

I absolutely will be speaking for Democrats.

So, you know, it's it's not true in every state, but certainly in Ohio and in Texas, lots of other places.

All the members, all 99 members get to vote for speaker.

So, you know, I absolutely will be.

A few of those folks have contacted me first thing Wednesday morning.

And so, yeah, I certainly will be able to do that.

And it's not just for purposes of a speaker's race.

To look back on all that happened with this week's primary vote and what's ahead, I sat down with my colleagues at the Statehouse news bureau, senior reporter and producer Joe Ingles and reporter Sarah Donaldson.

We survived.

We survived the primary, I think.

I think we went into election night, maybe not knowing what would happen because the polls had shown the lead between Marino and Dolan and LaRoche had gone back and forth and back and forth.

We probably should have expected what we saw, though, given the results that we saw in May 2022 after Trump endorsed J.D.

Vance.

So let me just start with we'll start with you, Joe.

You were with Frank Rose on election night.

What was it like where you were?

Well, I was at a restaurant bar here in the Columbus area, and it was a small place.

It wasn't really big.

There were some supporters there, but there wasn't that exuberant, happy kind of mood.

You could tell that from the moment you hit there, it seemed like people were just waiting for the polls to close and kind of wondering where it would all fall.

And then when they when the polls closed, they had the the national networks on the TV for another hour after that.

So we weren't getting any results.

And but then when we did get results, people were you know, it was quiet in there.

He came in, he conceded the race and that was about it.

Now we go from that where it was expected.

One thing we knew pretty well for sure based on the polls was that Frank Lubbers was not going to win.

On the other side, Sara, you were with Bernie Moreno, who seemed the most likely to win, though.

I was with Matt Dolan.

There was that one poll that showed that Dolan was in the lead for a while.

Tell me what it was like to be up with the one who eventually won.

Yeah.

So I think it was pretty cautious optimism the whole night, even from the beginning.

You know, I anecdotally heard one man kind of talking to his wife right after the polls closed and he said, you know, he's endorsed by the former president, kind of reassuring her that, you know, his candidate is going to be the one to pull it off.

But folks really streamed in, a lot of folks wearing Trump gear and merino gear, kind of a mix of Trump hats, MAGA hats, Bernie Marino pins.

So I saw a lot of that.

But it was I mean, it was pretty optimistic.

It was at a hotel in Westlake, which is a suburb of Cleveland.

Marina was not there until the results were actually.

I mean, it was probably like 30 minutes after the AP called the race.

But he actually took the stage.

But it's not like he was walking around and talking with folks beforehand.

And I was with Matt Dolan in a suburb.

Independents just south of Cleveland.

And we saw Dolan there early on.

But at once, the same kind of thing.

It was a smaller bar restaurant kind of set up, which is, Joe, you and I have been doing this for a while.

It's kind of unusual.

We're used to the bigger parties where they the setup is big, all the candidates are there, that sort of thing.

That was just simply not the setup, I think, for any of these this time around.

So let me ask you about your overall impressions of the primary.

We heard words like nasty, expensive, which is objectively true.

It was an expensive primary.

What how did you view what you saw among the candidates and do you think it's a preview of what we're going to see in November?

And I'm going to start with you, Sarah.

Yeah, I don't know that it got nasty until the bitter end.

I feel like it was really, really meaty for a while.

And I know our focus a lot of times is also what's going on at the state House.

But there wasn't a lot going on until the last couple of weeks.

I think once you kind of got the feeling that maybe it was going to be a little tight with Dolan and with Marino, it got a little more interesting, you know, the Trump endorsement and the Vance endorsement of Marino were there for a while.

Those were facts of the race for much of the race.

But DeWine coming in at the last minute and making an endorsement after he said he wasn't going to endorse, you know, those sort of facts kind of made it interesting.

And I think it got a little nastier, a little more kind of jabs being thrown closer toward the end.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

But I also thought it was kind of boring and it was not informative.

And when I say that, as you know, watching it, there were a couple of debates, but the debates didn't tell me anything new about the candidates.

I didn't hear anything new and they didn't seem to be pushed.

And I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that the candidates were not making themselves available to the media, especially the statehouse media, who knew the situations very well.

And could ask the kind of questions that would be interesting and kind of differentiate the three candidates.

The three candidates were very much alike in many ways.

So the nastiness you're talking about was all of this outside noise and all of these dangling things that, you know, really had not much to do with the actual substance, but were just more like style kind of things.

I'm hoping, Karen, I'm hoping you can always help, but I'm hoping that that is not indicative of what we're going to see in November.

And the candidates did make themselves available to be on this show, which is appreciated.

But I think part of that comes from one of the things we do here is allow an extended conversation.

It's hard to talk about nuance and things that are the differences among the candidates when you only have a very short period of time in soundbites or in debates.

You're right.

The debates really did not tell us a whole lot that we didn't already know or really showcase the differences among the candidates.

I mean, we talked about it on this show about the differences on Ukraine and that the whole different approach since one candidate had the in Trump endorsement, the other two had kind of hoped for a one.

Frank Rhodes definitely wanted it.

Matt Dolan had said before he would accept it, but didn't seem to be angling for it to speak.

It was it was a lot of just out trumping each other.

Right wing America first policies.

Everyone's talking about America first policies.

And even Dolan, who has been more outspoken about not really liking Trump's personality, said he's all for Trump's policies.

So that that was kind of the consistent theme you heard from the candidates, and it really made it hard to differentiate between them.

Lots of slogans and jargon, very little substance.

Well, that and building on what Sara just said, this primary was described as a battle between Trump Republicans and old Guard Republicans.

When you kind of factor out Frank LaRose, who looked like he was not going to be in the top two, and you had Matt Dolan, who was endorsed by DeWine and former Senator Rob Portman.

Marino endorsed by Trump, endorsed by JD Vance, Jim Jordan, some of these other folks.

Is was that fair to say that it was a battle between Trump Republicans and the old Guard Republicans?

And does that mean the old Guard Republicans like Mike DeWine, Rob Portman, John Kasich are gone?

One of the things that really stuck out to me, Karen, is that more than 20% of the OC, first of all, 20 I think was 22% of eligible voters.

But it's such low turnout.

I think turnout was 22%.

Yeah, so it's a low turnout, but more than 20% of those who voted in the GOP primary voted for Nikki Haley, who's not even in the race out.

She down a while.

Before.

Yeah.

So that tells me that over 20% of the people who voted in that race basically were not happy with Trump or they wouldn't have voted for Haley.

Right.

So I think there is a I think the old guard is still there.

They're alive and well.

And as we go into a general primary setting, I think we're going to see some of these candidates are going to have to talk about their, you know, where they stand on things.

They're going to have to appeal to more moderate people in order to win.

You can't just win with Uber Trump candidates.

You know, you've got to with Uber Trump voters, you've got to have moderate.

So you've got to have those Republicans who are disaffected.

Some of those have to come to you.

They're going to have to do things to make that happen.

And certainly the folks that I mentioned, Mike DeWine, Rob Portman, John Kasich, they got huge margins of victory when they ran.

I mean, Mike DeWine ran in 2022 and it was a landslide victory for him.

So it's not like these are not these are unpopular candidates because they're they're not clearly, at least with the results of polling.

Let me ask you, Sarah, we've been talking about this primary for months, but like Joe just mentioned, 22% turnout.

Was that something that surprised you in any way?

I mean, it's tough to say.

I have you guys have been following these sorts of elections a lot longer.

But I mean, the top of the ballot wasn't terribly interesting.

Yeah, the race was over.

And that's obviously sometimes what often does bring out more voters is the top of the ballot.

I'm always interested in anecdotally because of how Ohio's primaries are, you can be a Democrat and go to the polls on Election Day and say, I want to vote a Republican ballot.

So my question with the people who voted for Nikki Haley, are they Democrats voting against Trump already and maybe casting a ballot for Marino or Dolan or whoever they want to see in the Republican primary, but they're going to vote for Sherrod Brown in the fall.

So that's kind of the question I have on Election Day.

But yeah, it's really low turnout.

And I think that's the other hard part when we're talking about, you know, is Trump still the kingmaker in Ohio?

You're talking about such a small portion in a hyperpartisan primary of Ohio voters.

It's really hard to use that to set up November.

And I think it's interesting because Ohio moved its presidential primary to play a role every single time.

And yet this time there was no role to play.

There was already over.

One of the other things that I think is interesting about that Nikki Haley group and the idea of Democrats crossing over to vote for Republicans either to vote to stop Trump or for whatever reason, there is still no labels.

We talked about on this show last week with an interview that I did with Joe Manchin.

The idea of a third party presidential candidate, which a third party presidential candidate almost certainly cannot win.

But could that be a spoiler here?

So I think that's something that maybe to think about going forward.

Joe, you were following the House races, and I want to ask you about what happened on election night with you had 12 incumbents who had supported Jason Stevens for speaker, who had challengers.

The night did not go well for a couple of them.

Well, for four of them, yeah.

We saw Representative John Cross of Findlay Lose.

We saw Representative Sarah Caruthers down in southwest Ohio.

She lost her race.

We saw Representative Brett Hillyer, all of these people, he lost his they they lost and they were supporters.

They were vocal supporters of Speaker Stevens.

But we you know, while we saw that, we also saw some people who were elected to seats that were they weren't going up against an incumbent.

And they are thought to be more in, you know, kind of anti Stevens at this point.

But there wasn't like it wasn't a nail in the coffin.

I mean, I'm reading these news releases from the people who don't like like Speaker Stevens and they're saying, election night, you know, that just that's the minute that that's it, you know, And it's like, no, not really.

Because no, we don't know until we know.

And that's January.

And if you ask me, that's like eternity and political horror.

It's so far away.

Yeah.

But I am also hearing, though, that Senator Senate President Matt Hoffman, who ran unopposed in his primary, is running unopposed, essentially.

Well, I think the Democratic candidate has dropped out.

So he'll he'll be in.

He'll be.

He'll be.

And that he's got the votes lined up to be speaker.

But of course, we don't know till we know.

I mean, Derek Maron thought he had the votes.

Yeah, till he did.

Exactly.

So I think the other person that lost on election night, there was an incumbent who lost two races.

Gail Pavlik Yes, it was a key role played a key role in the movement of that controversial higher education bill, Senate Bill 83 out of a House committee that bills been one of these bills that's been sitting there that Republicans some say that there are the votes to move that forward.

That's the one that would ban most D-I training and the faculty strikes.

Part of that was taken out.

But that's a real controversy.

It's the legislation.

It is.

You can hear more from Joe, Sarah and me about this primary and what's next on our new podcast, State House Scoop.

It premieres Monday.

Look for it wherever you get your podcasts.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State News dot org or find us online by searching state of Ohio show.

Sarah Donaldson will be in this chair next week.

Please join us then for the state of Ohio.

Support for the State House news bureau comes from medical mutual dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans offering health insurance plans as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med Mutual AECOM.

The law offices of Porter Wright Morrison, Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter recom Puerto Wright inspired every day the Ohio Education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.