Early voting is underway in Ohio, with many big statewide races on the ballot. This week, the Statehouse News Bureau is diving into the race for governor, focusing on important policy issues the candidates have talked about in interviews and at events.
Republican Vivek Ramaswamy was clear even before he launched his campaign for governor that he wants to eliminate the state income tax and the capital gains tax on sales of investments, which together brought in nearly $10.5 billion last fiscal year. He talked about it in July as he was endorsed by the political action committee of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, saying it would start in his first year in office.
“It's only—in the scheme of our budget, I say 'only'—a few hundred million dollars. That is achievable in 2027. And that will be the first step of a longer run path at least over the next ten years or sooner to get to zero income tax," Ramaswamy said.
Democrat Amy Acton said for months that she wanted a "working families’ tax cut". In April she released some specifics at a roundtable in Columbus: an earned income tax credit and child tax credits up to $1,000 for people making up to $85,000 a year, which could cost the state around $1 billion a year.
“These two types of tax credits effectively add up to us having a tax cut, a break. But this is like people that are falling through the cracks that are working but not making that much, or maybe even middle class, but it's not all adding up," Acton said.
On property taxes, Ramaswamy talks about rolling them back to pre-pandemic levels, which he said would send $4 billion to homeowners. In an interview in September he was asked how that would work with locally approved tax levies for schools and local services, and said while each county does property taxes differently, the goal is for tax bills to be the same as they were in 2021.
“The net effect is the property tax base is going to be rolled back in aggregate to where it was before the end of the pandemic," Ramaswamy said. "And then another thing that I want going to get in that legislation is that we're going to cap the growth from there to make sure that we don't repeat the same mistakes we made this time around.”
Acton’s property tax plans are more targeted. In an interview in September, she talked about raising the income cap for the homestead tax exemption for older and disabled homeowners to $50,000, and offering up to $1000 in rebates to households earning under $132,000 annually if their property taxes spike more than 4% in a year.
“You see us go after the homestead exemption for those who are most vulnerable, certainly our aging who want to stay in their home that they've been in their whole life. You see us trying to help folks with disabilities and others," Acton said. "We have this property tax rebate for people who have had their taxes spike at a rate that just isn't normal with inflation.”
Acton said she would also crack down on predatory lending practices and fully pay for the Fair School Funding Plan to alleviate reliance on local property taxes. That alone would cost billions.
Ramaswamy has said he wants to wean public schools off relying on property taxes by increasing state funding where there are gaps, and has said the overwhelming majority of Ohioans would not see any relief under Acton’s plan. Acton has noted Ramaswamy began his campaign saying he wanted to abolish property taxes, an idea she called reckless.
Neither campaign has given a firm answer on how they’d pay for their plans.
Republicans accused Acton of planning to raise taxes to cover $21 billion in spending, a figure fact-checkers have said is not true. Acton said in an interview in September she’s not planning a tax increase, but talked about stopping tax breaks for people making over a million dollars a year, and potentially cutting back the funds spent on vouchers and maybe expanding gambling, with the right regulatory environment.
“I am for the fact we have gambling and I would like to see it benefit Ohioans," Acton said. "And certainly I see it as a source of revenue that can help fund the proposals that we need to help bring down the cost of living in this state and provide for the services we need to fund.”
Democrats have said Ramaswamy’s plans would benefit mostly the wealthy, shift the burden to lower-income taxpayers and local governments and blow a hole in the state budget. Ramaswamy has claimed revenue will grow as the state’s population does through his pro-business policies, promising this in April 2025: “We're 11 million people and shrinking today. We're going to be 15 million people and growing by the time I'm done as governor. That addresses our workforce shortage issues. It addresses our revenue issues. Think about what that does to our sales tax revenue.”
That would be an 25% increase in Ohio's population. No other Midwestern state has seen that kind of population growth in modern times.
Either candidate will have to work on these issues with a Republican dominated legislature, though it remains to be seen if the supermajorities in the House and Senate will be in place whenever one of them takes office.
