Election Ohio: Cox, Harbaugh challenge incumbent Turner for U.S. House seat

Election day is Nov. 5.

Early in-person voting began Tuesday and includes the two Saturdays and the two Sundays before Election Day. Absentee voting by mail began Tuesday and ends with a postmark deadline of Nov. 4.

The 10th Congressional District includes Montgomery and Greene counties, plus south and central Clark County, including the city of Springfield.

Amy Cox

This is Cox’s third political campaign in the past five years. In both 2020 and 2022, she ran against Republican State Rep. Rodney Creech for a seat in the Ohio House. Creech won those races with 71% of the votes in the 2022 general election and 54% in 2020.

Cox, an Eaton resident, said she’s running today because the “issues of the working class have been grossly neglected for decades.”

“We need policy that doesn’t destroy our middle class and working class, so we can have a strong economy in this country,” she said.

Cox works as an urban agriculture scientist at Guided by Mushrooms, a business in New Lebanon, and has previous experience in food science. A 2001 graduate of Wright State University, she has degrees in education and biology.

Cox also taught in public schools for 15 years, mostly in Indiana.

Near the top of her political to-do list if she is elected: Working to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law, restoring the legal architecture dismantled by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision in June 2022.

Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment in November 2023 that enshrined access to abortion in the Ohio constitution. Cox does not need see that victory as safe, however.

“No state is safe, when the federal government can kick all this back to the states,” she said.

She sees the U.S. Supreme Court as needing sweeping reform.

Calling it a “rogue Supreme Court,” Cox said she wants to see term limits and ethics rules for justices. She also wants to add members to the court’s current roster of nine.

“We’ve expanded it before,” Cox said. “We can do it again. It just takes guts.”

In general, she lamented what she sees as a lack of courage in the House of Representatives. She criticized Turner as a “(Donald) Trump-enabler” and a “Mike Johnson-enabler,” referring to the former president and current House speaker.

“I don’t see too many guts in the House of Representatives,” Cox said.

She said Wright-Patterson Patterson Air Force Base deserves protection. She wants to expand research there to address agricultural needs and climate change.

“Wright-Patterson ain’t going anywhere if I’m elected,” Cox said.

Michael Harbaugh

Harbaugh is independent, not endorsed by any political party. This is his first run for political office.

Asked what inspired him to throw his hat into the ring, the Kettering resident said, “the corruption of the two political parties.”

“It just seems like this is the wealthiest country on Earth, and our working-class, normal everyday people are getting screwed,” Harbaugh said.

Harbaugh is the father of a child with Type 1 diabetes. That fit into his thinking when considering a run for office.

He is covered by Ohio Medicaid, which provided healthcare coverage for about 3.55 million Ohioans who met income requirements last year, according to the Health Policy Institute of Ohio.

“The health care issue really hit home for us, being the father of a type 1 diabetic toddler,” Harbaugh said. ”Fortunately, we are on state of Ohio government insurance.”

He recalled nurses advising him to “stay poor.”

“Because if you make just a little bit more, you’re going to be gouged, $500 to $1,000 a month out of pocket,” he said. “And that’s the truth for many other families that we’ve met here in the Dayton area. They make just a bit too much, and they’re going to be absolutely crushed.”

Harbaugh co-owns The Wild Banana food truck, which he operates with his family. He said he drives DoorDash and performs other part-time jobs during the winter.

While campaign season is in full swing, Harbaugh said he planned to take his food truck to North Carolina this week to serve first responders and help in disaster relief.

While he sees the need to protect local jobs, he’s not certain Wright-Patterson itself needs protecting. This summer, he hosted rallies outside of Turner’s Dayton office to protest against warfare.

“We can protect their jobs and give them jobs in this country,” he said of the more than 35,000 people who work at Wright-Patterson. “But we’ve got to reduce some of the wasteful military spending.”

Mike Turner

Turner is the longtime incumbent, having served in Congress since 2003 and having served as mayor of Dayton for eight years before that.

In the 2022 election, he beat Democrat David Esrati, taking 61.7% of the vote.

Turner has risen to senior membership on the House Armed Services Committee and the chairmanship of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — two perches from which he strives to protect Wright-Patterson, which boasts the largest concentration of employment in Ohio in one location.

The Dayton Republican is an increasingly familiar face on Sunday morning news talk shows and cable TV news programs. He turned heads this past April when he said that Russian propaganda had taken hold among some of his House Republican colleagues and was “being uttered on the House floor.”

“My primary focus is to work for the economic development of the region, including the continued expansion of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,” Turner said in an interview.

“We were able to celebrate this year the fact that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has doubled during my term in Congress, from 19,000 to 38,000 people inside the fence, continuing its foundational place as the economic cornerstone of Dayton, but also a growing and thriving federal military base,” Turner said.

Given the Air Force’s reorganization, the next few years won’t be any less important than the past two years for the base, he predicted.

“As the Air Force is going through its reevaluation about its structure and mission, having a strong advocate to be able to advance Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and impact the opportunity for federal funding at the base is incredibly important,” he said.

Turner has not shied away from working with Democrats when he feels that’s appropriate. Sen. Sherrod Brown and others highlight their cooperation with him, and Turner said he has “played catch” with Brown to advance local projects. (Federal spending packages originate in the House.)

“From my time working as mayor of the city of Dayton, I’ve always worked on a bipartisan basis,” he said. “I continued that in Congress, both in the committees … but also with our local elected leaders, at the city, county and even the federal level.”