Election 2024: Three Ohio Supreme Court seats, political control of court up for grabs

Three incumbents — Democrats Melody Stewart, Michael Donnelly and Republican Joe Deters — are on the ballot on Nov. 5.

However, the slate of Supreme Court races isn’t as straightforward as three incumbents trying to fend off challengers due to a decision by Deters to vacate his own seat to try to win Stewart’s seat out from under her. The political move pits two Supreme Court justices against each other and guarantees that a fresh face will be elected to the bench to take over Deters’ current seat for the remainder of the term.

This is the first presidential election where Ohio voters will see party labels next to candidates for state Supreme Court on the ballot.

Here are the races at a glance:

Ohio Supreme Court justices are voted on by the entire state and serve six-year terms. For 2024, Ohio Supreme Court justices receive a salary of $187,805, which gets adjusted each year. Winners this November would assume office in January 2025.

Implications

Partisan control of the court is of significant consequence for both parties. The Ohio Supreme Court is the top appellate court in the state and has the final say over interpretations of the Ohio Constitution, a document of fundamental law that trumps state laws and that has been increasingly used by organizing groups looking to bypass the legislature and enact substantial changes in the state.

Abortion

The Ohio Supreme Court in coming years is expected to be influential in interpreting 2023′s abortion-rights amendment to the Ohio Constitution, which was approved by 57% of Ohio voters and throws most of the state’s current abortion restrictions into peril.

“There’s still a lot of language in that amendment that needs to be filled out or explained or interpreted, and I think the Supreme Court will get those cases this term and in subsequent terms,” said Marc Clauson, professor of history and law at Cedarville University.

Last year’s abortion-rights amendment does three main things. First, it guarantees that an individual should be able to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” and defines some, but not all, of those types of decisions. Secondly, it forbids the government from “directly or indirectly” interfering, burdening, penalizing, discriminating or penalizing an individual for their reproductive choices. And thirdly, it permits the government to outlaw abortion after “fetal viability,” except in cases where the pregnant patient’s doctor deems an abortion necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.

These are some of the areas within the amendment that, as Clauson said, “could be subject to differing views.” The court still needs to decide, for example, the line in which a pregnancy complication impacts the health of the mother; the lengths the government can go to try to limit abortions; or the full range of decisions that fall under the definition of “reproductive decisions.”

Clauson expects there to be a bit of variance in how a Republican court would interpret the amendment compared to a Democratic court. “That could change at the edges — it’s not going to change the core of the amendment, but there could be some possible limitations around the edges,” he said.

Jessie Hill, a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University who has challenged various Ohio abortion laws before the Supreme Court, told this news outlet the issue of abortion should be at the forefront of voters’ minds when casting their ballot for the Supreme Court races, given that the state is still hoping to defend its ability to enforce an array of abortion restrictions, including a six-week abortion ban and a 24-hour mandatory waiting period for abortions.

“I think that there’s a real potential misunderstanding that people think because they voted for Issue 1 that everything’s resolved and we can move on from the abortion issue,” Hill said. “I think it’s just important to really hammer home that this is not anywhere near settled. We have not reached the end of the story and abortion remains on the ballot, particularly with respect to the Supreme Court races.”

Party affiliations

This will be the first Supreme Court race in a presidential election year where voters will see the Supreme Court candidates’ party affiliation on the ballot due to a recent election law passed by the Republican-dominated legislature.

It marks a considerable change for what used to be billed as a non-partisan race and could steer results come November. In the six years since 2018, Democrats have only won a statewide election four times — three of those have been victories in non-partisan Ohio Supreme Court races.

The political affiliations of Supreme Court candidates weren’t exactly top secret before, as all candidates achieve their party’s nomination through a primary process. Still, Clauson worries that actually having the affiliation on the ballot itself can lead to voters choosing candidates without much thought.

“Many people have not done their homework and so they’re going to come into it with a predetermined idea of ‘Well, this matches my party affiliation so I’m going to vote for them,’ no matter how good or bad they might be,” Clauson said. “It’s incumbent upon the voter, if he really wants to make a good decision, to take a look at whether the candidates are truly quality judges. No matter how they vote, whether they vote for your side or not for your side, you still want quality judges.”

Clauson encouraged voters to look back through candidates’ past decisions to try to get a sense of how they approach legal questions.

“If a justice could read a legal statute and say to himself, ‘This clearly says X, and therefore that is how I must vote,’ even if he doesn’t agree with it, that’s generally a good justice,” Clauson said. “That’s what you want: somebody who’s fair.”

The races

Democrat Melody Stewart vs. Republican Joseph Deters

In some ways, the race Justice Melody Stewart finds herself in today looks similar to the race that made her the first African American woman elected to Ohio’s top bench. In 2018, she won 52.5% of the vote against a Republican opponent who, like Deters, was appointed, not elected, to the Ohio Supreme Court and served only a year.

Hailing from the Cleveland area, Stewart has a law degree from Cleveland State University, an undergraduate degree in music from the University of Cincinnati and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University. Prior to joining the Supreme Court, she won three elections to the Ohio Eighth District Court of Appeals in 2006, 2010 and 2016.

Today, she’s opposed by Justice Joe Deters, the newest face on the Ohio Supreme Court with a longstanding pedigree in state and local politics.

Deters, a Hamilton County native with a law degree from the University of Cincinnati, served over two decades as the Hamilton County prosecutor, interrupted by a stint as the Ohio Treasurer from 1998 to 2004. In late 2022, he was tapped by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to fill a vacancy on the Ohio Supreme Court, which he joined in early 2023. Before that, Deters had no courtroom experience as judge.

In a response to this news outlet, Deters said his most important issues as a Supreme Court justice include “public safety, upholding the Constitution as it is written, and valuing the rights of all Ohioans.” He highlighted his deference to “originalism,” a static theory of interpreting the constitution based off what the drafters’ words meant at the time of writing.

“I would hope that more judges maintained an originalist philosophy, rather than legislating from the bench and ruling in a way that appeases current and fleeting fads,” Deters said. “That means reading the text of the Constitution and discerning what it meant at the time it was written. In that way, it shouldn’t matter who is a Republican and who is a Democrat but (it) also differentiates me from my opponent.”

Stewart, meanwhile, focused her response to this news outlet on her experience as a judge.

“Completing my first six-year term on the Court coupled with the 12 years I was a judge on the Ohio Court of Appeals makes me the most experienced appellate jurist on the Supreme Court. In stark contrast, my opponent recently finished his 18th month on the court and had no prior judicial experience when he was appointed,” Stewart said.

Stewart said she’d work to make the Ohio judicial system more efficient for Ohioans and to minimize the effects of bias in the courts.

She also vented frustration with her colleague’s decision to run against her instead of trying to win his own seat.

“My opponent is a political appointee who has made the unprecedented decision to run against a sitting colleague. And he is only empowered to do this because his party controls all three branches of government at the state level and recently changed the law to require party affiliation on the ballot for some, but not all, judicial races,” said Stewart, who believes the law was enacted to give Republican Supreme Court candidates an advantage over Democrats.

Republican Megan Shanahan vs. Democrat Michael Donnelly

Justice Michael Donnelly was first elected to the Ohio Supreme Court in 2018, when the Democrat won 61% of the vote in a landslide victory over his Republican opponent.

A native of Cleveland, Donnelly spent 14 years as a trial judge in Cuyahoga County Court of Common pleas, winning elections in 2004, 2010 and 2016. He had spent five years prior as the assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County. He received his law degree from Cleveland State University and an undergraduate degree from John Carroll University.

Challenging Donnelly for his seat is Republican Megan E. Shanahan, who so far has a career arc that largely mirrors Donnelly’s. Shanahan has served as a judge for the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas since 2015, where she was originally appointed by then Gov. John Kasich before winning elections to the seat in 2016 and 2022. Before that, Shanahan had a stint as a Hamilton County Municipal Court judge and spent over a decade working as an assistant prosecutor, first in Butler County and then in Hamilton County under Deters.

Shanahan told this news outlet that she’d bring a “strict constructionist” viewpoint to the Ohio Supreme Court, stressed the importance of electing justices “who do not legislate from the bench,” and said that she’d make “fair, impartial rulings which uphold the law unbiased by personal feeling or favor.”

“I believe a judge should interpret the law, not make the law,” Shanahan wrote. “I will come to the Supreme Court with 12 years of judicial experience along with the ability to win and hold the seat for several terms.”

Donnelly said he he’s running for reelection to continue strengthening the court as an “independent, co-equal branch of state government empowered by the Constitution to serve as a check on the General Assembly and executive officers.”

He expressed concerns with the “callous and craven politicization of the judiciary” which he believes erodes Ohioans’ trust in the institution. He said he hopes to continue serving as a counter to partisanship and recenter the court’s focus on applying the law evenly.

Donnelly also raised concern with blights he’s seen within the Ohio judicial system, including “Preposterous disparities in sentences handed down to defendants convicted of the same or similar crimes” and an increase in “off-the-record backroom plea deals that ambush defendants and ignore the rights of victims, baseless pleas which are inconsistent with the facts and the truth, and ‘dark’ pleas that coerce people to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit while allowing the actual perpetrators of those crimes to go free.”

Dan Hawkins vs. Lisa Forbes

The third race consists of Republican Dan Hawkins, a judge of Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, and Democrat Lisa Forbes, a judge of the Ohio Eighth District Court of Appeals.

Hawkins, a Columbus native, did not respond to this news organization’s Voter Guide. He was elected to the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in tight 2018 race, defeating a Democratic opponent in a deep blue county with 50.3% of the vote. Prior, he was a judge at the Franklin County Municipal Court and worked as an assistant prosecutor in Franklin County for over a decade, according to his campaign website.

Hawkins received his law degree from the Ohio State University and his undergraduate from Bowling Green State University.

Forbes, a Cleveland native, has served on the state’s appellate court since 2020, which is her first position as a judge. Prior, she worked for 27 years as a practicing attorney, including time at a national legal firm. Forbes received her law degree from Case Western Reserve University and her undergraduate from Cornell University.

In a response to this news organization, Forbes promised to “stand by my principles and stick to my guns,” even if it meant dissenting with Democratic colleagues.

“Where the law is clear, I will apply it. Where the law is ambiguous, I will use standard tools of interpretation — considering recognized definitions found in statutes, case law, and dictionaries,” Forbes wrote. “I will not redefine words to serve my own purposes or to achieve a particular outcome because legislating from the bench leads to uncertainty and erodes respect for the court.”

Forbes said she hopes to repair the court’s image by ensuring fairness, balance and independence. For her, this would include providing judges with a new sentencing database so that “like crimes receive like sentences,” using consistent logic and clearly articulating her rationale for Ohioans, being firm on public corruption and standing up against “unconstitutional attempts to reduce the rights of Ohioans.”

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Avery Kreemer can be reached at 614-981-1422, on X, via email, or you can drop him a comment/tip with the survey below.