Portage County used to be a purple county, one that would reliably elect a mix of Democratic and Republican politicians to local and state offices, but in recent years, like many other parts of the state, the tides have turned.
On a recent gray winter day at the Portage County Democratic Party Office, Denise Smith was printing off dozens of copies of the official precinct report from the November election. Not only is she the chair of the Democratic Party here, she’s also the chair of the Board of Elections, and she's trying to figure out why Democrats saw such a widespread loss on Election Day in November.
“That’s one of the reasons I’m printing this precinct-by-precinct report," she said. "I think there are some townships where we didn’t get enough people out to vote who were probably not enamored with their current elected official, but they didn’t get out to vote.”
Portage County was in the national limelight leading up to Election Day, after the local sheriff, Bruce Zuchowski, made an inflammatory Facebook post about illegal immigrants and Democrats, which some called voter intimidation. This led to the U.S. Department of Justice monitoring early voting and voting on Election Day in the county to ensure federal voting rights laws were in compliance. Even with all that attention, the Democrat in the race still came up 1,000 votes short, and countywide, Democrats succeeded in only one contested race.
“I think some of it began, well probably it was percolating, and we didn’t realize it, prior to 2020 and the pandemic era," Smith said.
Portage County went for President Donald Trump in 2016, but the seat in the Ohio House that represented most of the county was still occupied by a Democrat, and countywide offices were filled by a mix of Democrats and Republicans. The county’s Republican Chair Amanda Suffecool began to see more of a shift to the right in 2020, when Trump won by more than he did in 2016 and Republicans flipped seats like the Statehouse, she said.
“The statement had always been where Ohio goes so goes the nation," she said. "Well in actuality, there were seven counties within the state of Ohio that drove where Ohio went and so Portage was always one of those.”
Suffecool primarily thinks this has to do with national politics causing a shift in how people are voting down ballot, she said, as well as a few giants in the Democratic Party announcing their retirements from seats they held for decades. Zuchowski originally won the sheriff's seat when longtime Democratic Sheriff David Doak retired in 2020. This year, Democratic Prosecutor Victor Vigluicci retired after 30 years in the position, and no Democrat ran in the race to fill his seat, which was won by Republican Connie Lewandowski.
But Republican Joe Bica has a different take. He won his race in November for county treasurer and previously served on Ravenna City Council and as mayor, races that he ran as an independent rather than a Republican. He thinks the move away from Democrats in Portage County has more to do with the party shifting its priorities than voters shifting theirs.
"The people of Portage County in my mind still are hardworking, fairly conservative individuals," he said, "and they are looking for more family values, more faith based structure."
That leaves Democrats like Randi Clites wondering how the party can reverse its fortunes. She represented Portage County in the Statehouse from 2018 to 2020 and now serves on the county board of elections. Even though she won in 2018, the political makeup of Portage County was already changing, she said.
“That’s why I really really believe that just getting out there, meeting people where they were, which was at the doors, which wasn’t always friendly, but it was important to meet them where they were. And I did that," Clites said.
Clites lost her bid for a second term in 2020 to Republican State Rep. Gail Pavliga, which was partly due to Trump’s reelection campaign, the pandemic and redistricting, she said.
"We are one of those districts that the gerrymandering really took effect," Clites said, "because the current district went from a competitive district to a very hard leaning Republican district."
Pavliga served two terms in the State House but was ousted in March in a tough primary against conservative activist Heidi Workman. Pavliga’s two races against Democrats were close, but Workman’s wasn’t.
“My victory came at somewhere around 10,000 votes," Workman said, "so 10 times the support coming in for my candidacy.”
Workman’s victory as well as another primary upset in the county commissioner’s race has Democrats like Smith worried about where the Republican Party is headed.
“I am hopeful that the fringe that has taken over the local Republican Party is not what most people want in Portage County," she said.
But the results of the sheriff's race particularly are disappointing to Democrats.
"There's a certain point in which you can become too extreme, and voters will pay attention," Clites said. "And they will overthink the party affiliation, and I think they almost did it with the sheriff's race. But they did do it with the clerk of court's race."
Incumbent Clerk of Courts Jill Fankhauser was the only Democrat to win her contested race for another term countywide.
Republicans view these changes differently. The Portage County TEA Party, a fiscally conservative movement within the Republican Party, certainly has legs in the county, Bica said, but it's not the Republican Party.
"The Republican Party seems to be more moderate, and the TEA Party seems to be a much more conservative group," he said. "I think that there's a lot of crossover and synergy between the two groups."
Suffecool views these primary races as one of the only times Republican voters can weigh in on the ideology and platform of their candidates, she said.
"Now, we have an opportunity to just keep upgrading and updating our candidates based on the voters and their preferences and the things that they see and the questions that they have and the things that they feel are important," she said.
The primary upset in the commissioner's race, where Jill Crawford beat incumbent Commissioner Tony Badalamenti, is a good example of this, Suffecool said.
"One of the big battles that has happened in Portage is this talk of the Sheriff's Department and spending," she said, "so Tony Badalamenti is a chiropractor. Jill Crawford is a CPA [Certified Public Accountant]."
This battle over the sheriff's budget took center stage in the commissioner's race. This year's request of an additional $4 million for the sheriff's already burgeoning budget brought pushback from commissioners on the grounds of fiscal responsibility. After losing the primary election and in the wake of the controversy over Zuchowski's Facebook post, Badalamenti resigned from the Republican Party Central Committee.
"The new leadership team of the central committee is not the leadership I want to be part of," he said in a video on an anti Zuchowski Facebook page in September. "To me the damage which this group of folks have done to the Republican Party is heartbreaking."
The vast majority of Portage County voters aren't affiliated with either party, according to the Portage County Board of Elections, at a rate higher than the number of unaffiliated voters in the whole state. As of March, 9,016 voters were registered Democrat, 14,778 were registered Republican and 84,456 did not identity with either party.
"Portage County really was that place who voted for the person not the party," Clites said.
Bica doesn't think the red wave Portage County is seeing now will necessarily change this mindset, he said.
"They're not going to register as a Republican or anything, right? I think they're going to stay independents, but I think that there's that strong sense of more conservative thinking," he said.
Suffecool is proud of what her party has accomplished, she said, but the work isn’t over.
“The statement had always been where Ohio goes so goes the nation. Well in actuality, there were seven counties within the state of Ohio that drove where Ohio went and so Portage was always one of those.”Amanda Suffecool, Chair, Summit County GOP
“There’s a judge race that’s coming up in the next election cycle, and that’s one thing that the Republicans have not been overly successful for is that we had abandoned the playing field for years on judges," she said. "We just didn’t have any candidates. Nobody really believed – I mean the rumor was in Portage that if you wanted to be the sheriff or if you wanted to be a judge, you had to be a Democrat. Well, we’re changing that.”
Now, Smith and the Democratic Party in Portage are thinking about how they can build back trust and awareness throughout the county, she said.
“We’re not being as visible in the rural areas, in the townships here in Portage County as we need to be," she said, "and we’re not listening like we need to.”
But Smith concedes Portage is a Republican County now, she said.
“Will it stay that way? I don’t know," she said. "We’ll see in the next two years.”
