Republicans in the greater Akron area must soon choose between an eager 24-year-old with a background in economic development versus the president of Ohio’s preeminent anti-vaccination lobby group.
The candidates are running for a seat in Ohio’s 31st district, one of a small handful of open seat races likely to host a dogfight in the general election, where Democrats hope to break Republicans’ supermajority in the Ohio House. The district forms a C-shape around Akron, including its western and northern suburbs.
Vice President Kamala Harris won the district by 380 votes out of nearly 68,000, according to Dave’s Redistricting App, and out-of-power parties tend to overperform in the midterm cycle after a new president assumes office.
The Ohio Republican Party and the Summit County GOP endorsed Mike Kahoe, 24, who won a seat on the Revere school board at 18 while he was a student there. Since then, he has worked in the lieutenant governor’s office under both Jon Husted and Jim Tressel on economic development – the centerpiece of his campaign. Rep. Bill Roemer, a moderate GOP incumbent, has been fundraising for him as well.
Kahoe would be among the youngest members of the Ohio House, representing a district of about 119,000 while helping craft the state’s $90 billion operating budget.
He’s running against Stephanie Stock, who, as president of the Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, took public stances against both school and workplace immunization requirements, and vaccines themselves. She gained broader traction within the Republican Party as the emergence of COVID-19 disrupted a political order and public health system.
Besides policy differences, Stock has drawn enemies within the GOP over some of her aggressive words and tactics. Her Facebook posts are rife with calling senior Republican figures – most notably House Speaker Matt Huffman, his cousin, Sen. Stephen Huffman, and Gov. Mike DeWine – “dictators” and other insults when preferred legislation related to vaccines or COVID-19 would stall.
“That is the one issue that changed the face of the entire world,” Stock said of the pandemic, speaking at a recent forum hosted by the Ohio Christian Alliance.
“We can talk about taxes, which are a huge problem, and we can talk about jobs and a lot of things. But COVID shut down the world. Public health shut down the world and controlled every facet of our lives.”
The possibility of Stock’s political rise comes as Pew polling indicates Republicans’ faith in vaccinations is waning; the once-eradicated, vaccine preventable disease of measles has returned in thousands of Americans in Ohio and dozens of other states; and Ohio’s kindergarten MMR vaccination rates lag the nation by 5%.
Both Kahoe and Stock’s worlds mirrored one another in certain ways during the pandemic.
Kahoe, as a school board member, aided in the board’s successful push to reopen its schools in the fall of 2020. Stock was regularly in and around the Statehouse in Columbus at the time, pressing lawmakers toward rolling back different public health orders of the era.
“I think COVID was one of the most challenging times to be a school board member in the United States,” Kahoe said. “There was no solution that was going to make everyone happy. We did what we had to do to get kids back in school.”
Whoever wins will face off against J. Noah Spinner, 26, a corporate attorney running unopposed as a Democrat. He said he’s running for office to make sure all Ohioans can access the same quality of care he did as his wife died of cancer in her early 20s while he went through law school.
An up-and-coming economic developer
“My why,” Kahoe said, is that he’s running for statehouse office because he’s tired of seeing people leave Ohio. Whether it’s kids leaving after high school or college for a first job in a bigger city or dads leaving because he got laid off, he said lawmakers need to find creative solutions to keep people here.
“They’re leaving over issues that we can absolutely control,” he said. “It’s jobs that pay enough, homes we can actually afford, safe streets, and schools that actually prepare our students for life.”
He suggested tying state support for higher education more closely to objective employment outcomes, and praised language in the current state budget that helps companies fund internships for high school and college students’ internships.
In a roughly 30-minute interview, Kahoe offered opinions on a range of policy issues. Unlike his opponent, he supports the GOP-backed law that provides $600 million from Ohio’s pot of unclaimed funds to the owners of the Cleveland Browns to build a new indoor stadium outside the city.
He said there’s no need to “outlaw” data centers statewide; that he supports Ohio’s universal voucher system to pay for private schools with public funds; and that Ohio shouldn’t raise its minimum wage.
Kahoe said he has since left the lieutenant governor’s office and is now working at his family’s company, which helps businesses outsource their human resources policies. In a somewhat unusual fashion for his age, he disclosed investments into 36 different diversified securities and mutual funds worth at least $1,000 each.
Bryan Williams, chairman of the Summit County GOP, said the party will support whomever wins the primary. But he suspects party insiders support Kahoe for his Husted/Tressel relationships and technocratic focus on jobs and education about as much as they’re alienated by Stock’s bridge-burning behavior against respected leaders like Huffman.
Plus, he said Stock goes past opposition to mandates and into unfounded conspiracy around vaccines.
“I think Republicans abhor individual mandates, but they’re not opposed, personally, to the use of vaccines,” he said. “Where there’s agreement with Stephanie, it’s on the mandate side. Where there’s disagreement, it’s not seeing autism or some bad outcome behind every vaccine, or some big pharma conspiracy.”
This cycle, a federal super PAC called the American Conservative Fund, which has ties to the sports betting company Draft Kings, has spent roughly $1 million on ads in five contested Ohio House Republican primary races so far this year. That includes ads shown to an audience of tens of thousands, disclosed in Meta’s library, stating that Kahoe will “strengthen schools, deliver property tax relief, and stand firmly with law enforcement to keep our communities safe.”
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An anti-vaccine advocate
Stock declined an interview request. She agreed by email to respond to written questions, but didn’t answer most of them, including specifics about her views on whether she thinks parents should get their children vaccinated against polio or measles.
In a statement, Stock said “establishment” figures including Republican leadership and special interests are supporting her opponent because “I can’t be bought or controlled.” She pledged to fight for legislation that positively impacts people’s lives.
“I am not running on the single issue of medical freedom, but I am going to apply that same tenacity to fighting to end property taxes for seniors and homeowners, fighting to ensure that data center development is 100% in the hands of voters, and to identify and clean up fraud in Medicaid and cut spending in our budget,” she said. “And I won’t be voting for any taxpayer funded pet projects for leadership.”
For years, she has clashed with physicians, public health workers and sympathetic lawmakers over vaccines, regularly proclaiming their supposed dangers or bashing school immunization requirements.
Before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, you could find Stock quoted in local media downplaying the death rate of the measles virus. The Ohio Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2019 issued a warning about anti-vaccination advocacy cards that Stock and the Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom were distributing to children with their Halloween candy.
“Safe vaccines don’t exist,” the cards state, per WKRC, a Cincinnati TV station.
Stock, as is common within the movement, objects to the term “anti-vaccine” and classifies herself as pro-”medical freedom.” She has become a fixture at the Statehouse, supporting legislation to revoke COVID-19 mask requirements or to prohibit water officials from adding fluoride to public systems.
“A bio-weapon attack could happen at any time,” she said at the Ohio Christian Alliance candidate forum. “What laws do we have in place to ensure that we will remain open and will still be able to function?”
Scott Lipps, a Republican ex-chairman of the Ohio House Health Committee where he aligned with Stock about as frequently as they butted heads, predicted Kahoe will win handily.
“Stock approaches lobbying with anger and an aggressive behavior that set her own cause back,” he said in a text message.
‘The voters have seen the Trump economy’
Whichever Republican wins will face off against Spinner, an attorney with Vorys, a white-shoe law firm. He graduated from Cuyahoga Falls High School and the University of Akron. (In an echo of his possible opponent in November, he ran for the Ohio House as a high school senior.)
He has a political pedigree in the area – Summit County Democratic Party Chairman Mike Derrig noted his mother, Susan Spinner, sits on Cuyahoga Falls’ city council. Despite the district math, Derrig said the fall election won’t be as close as it looks on paper.
“I think the voters have seen the Trump economy and want to see a change here in Ohio,” Derrig said. “They’ve seen the leadership under the Republicans.”
In an interview, Spinner singled out two people on his mind when asked why he ran for office. For one, there was his late wife, Shelby. While her loss was tragic, he said he saw what modern medicine can do when it drove her cancer into remission in November 2024, and its limitations and the compassion of its practitioners when she died about a year ago.
In office, he said he wants to make sure everyone, not just those who can afford it, can receive such quality of care.
The other inspiration he shared was a teacher who he said he remembers seeing fired when he was in high school. When he asked, he said it was failure to pass a school levy that necessitated the firing. He objected to the state “burden shifting” and putting it on communities to propose and pass levies to keep schools afloat, and he said he supports universal free lunches at schools to ensure no student goes hungry during the day.
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