MARIETTA, Ohio – On the banks of the Ohio River in ruby red Washington County, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton promised to staunch, if not prevent, a possible environmental disaster caused by leaking liquid fracking waste.
She promised that, if elected, she’d honor a resolution passed by the local, GOP-controlled city council that imposes a three-year moratorium on permitting new fracking waste injection wells in the county. It’s been a hotbed of injections, and, in a few cases, deep underground leaks that local politicians and water authorities say threaten the water supply.
“We have a chance to prevent the worst from happening,” Acton said.
Acton appeared in Marietta as part of a multiday tour through Appalachia as she made her pitch for votes in Republican-leaning Ohio ahead of the November election. This part of the state used to be within reach for state Democrats, thanks to its industrial history of union workers connected to its steel mills and coal mines. But President Donald Trump won all three of the counties Acton visited this week by at least 40 points in 2024. In one, Gallia County, he won by a whopping 59 points.
The stop raises the question of whether a Democrat can win votes in rural America by focusing on local problems.
Acton is running in the November election against Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, a supporter of the oil and gas industry. In a statement, campaign spokesperson Evan Machan didn’t address the injection well issue but instead referenced Acton’s refusal to debate Ramaswamy ahead of the election.
As she campaigned in Marietta on Thursday, Acton garnered some unexpected political support as she took aim at oil and gas, long a mainstay Republican constituency, from Susan Vessels, the Republican president of the local city council.
Vessels and the council have feuded with state and county Republicans over what she describes as inaction while fracking companies pump millions of gallons of toxic fracking brine underground at extraordinarily high pressure. Some wells sit just miles from local water aquifers; the Ohio Department of Natural Resources has accused several of those wells of leaking waste underground.
She offered an unequivocal endorsement of Acton, describing her as an honest and accountable problem solver and one of the most powerful figures willing to listen.
Acton pledged to help but made no claim that doing so would be some kind of skeleton key for solving an increasingly polarized political environment or winning over a region where Democrats struggle each cycle.
“My promise for Ohio is that no one is going to be unseen in this state,” Acton said, before riffing on the natural beauty of the river or the idea of turning the riverfront across the state into a park system.
A glut of injection wells
Washington County is well familiar with an environmental mess. Marietta is a 20-minute drive from the former DuPont Washington Works plant, which for decades released PFAS into the environment before the company was forced to pay more than $500 million for contaminating the groundwater. It’s been on edge more recently as four injection wells here have all been accused of leaking brine underground.
Adding to some leaders’ concern is the fact that 17 injection wells have received state permits to operate in Washington County – more than in the entire state of Pennsylvania. Environmentalists, local water treatment plant officials, and some local politicians like Vessels have come to see them as threats since ODNR has shut down several of them in the area for leaking, a term technically known as “brine migration.”
A concern for residents, activists and local officials: If the wells are leaking underground and manage to breach and destroy nearby oil wells, what happens when the brine infiltrates an aquifer?
That thinking drove the council last summer to pass a largely symbolic, three-year moratorium on Class II injection wells in town to study the issue.
The vote came as something of a poke in the eye of the local state senator and chair of the Ohio Senate Energy Committee, Brian Chavez, who owns some of those wells and has tussled with Vessels over the issue. Chavez is a political ally of Ramaswamy’s running mate, Rob McColley, who is the Republican leader of the state Senate.
Can voters be persuaded?
Vessels said most voters are desperate for a return to “normalcy and grace” in elections. And while her stand against local elected Republicans got her thrown out of local GOP leadership, her ensuing plaudits around town have made her bullish on Acton’s strategy.
“I’ve never been more popular in my entire life,” she said. “You can’t have much of an economy if you don’t have clean drinking water. We need, in this community, to care about this problem before waste migrates into our aquifer.”
However, Willa O’Neill, chair of the Washington County Democratic Party, said she is not sure that solving local problems changes minds in politics these days.
“I think that has broken down,” she said. “The vitriol, and the lies that are out there, and the fact that there’s so much negativity surrounding anything politically, and I think that that’s been caused by our leadership who have wanted to pit us against one another.”
Acton isn’t the first recent Ohio Democrat to make a point of campaigning in Southern Ohio. The two strongest statewide Democratic candidates this decade – Senate candidate Tim Ryan in 2022 and then-Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2024 – made numerous visits during their elections. But neither broke 31% of the vote. Both lost statewide.
Asked about her plan to compete for votes in Appalachia, Acton described her visit as part of an extended listening tour. She said voters still respond to her leadership in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’ve gone everywhere in the state. I’ve been on the road literally for two and a half years,” she said. “I have a constituency that doesn’t seem to know party.”
Leaning into education
Environmental concerns over fracking aren’t the only issue Acton is trying to leverage to win votes in Southern Ohio. She also traveled Wednesday to Gallia County, the county Trump won by 59 points two years ago. In Rio Grande, a town of about 700 people, Acton sat down with school officials at the Buckeye Hills Career Center to hear their concerns about school funding.
The district treasurer, Stephanie Rife, said school fiscal officers around the state are worried they’ll be forced to cut student travel to help balance their budgets. And Robert Cornwell, president of the regional joint school board that operates the career center, complained to Acton that lawmakers in Columbus have chipped away at districts’ local control while failing to fund them adequately.
“We have gone two decades with the wrong direction of being unconstitutional in our funding of public schools,” said Cornwell, who’s also the director of Gallia County EMS.
The trip gave Acton a chance to plug her school funding platform – she has pledged to increase K-12 school funding to the levels envisioned in a 2019 bipartisan plan. Republicans opted not to fully phase in the plan in the most recent school budget, saying the state couldn’t afford it, to the frustration of school officials.
“I want to fully fund them. And it’s a matter of priorities, what your budget’s about,” Acton told school officials.
Ramaswamy, meanwhile, has called Acton’s spending plans too costly and has vowed to roll back property taxes, a major source of revenue for schools and other local governments.
Speaking with reporters later at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, where Acton took a campus tour before addressing students in a speech that was closed to the press, Acton fielded questions about whether or how she might reverse Democrats’ long-term decline in Appalachia.
She made the case that voters across the state are looking for a change. Like Tim Ryan did in 2022, she cited polling numbers that show her competing while winning over independent voters and even a few Republicans.
“I think this is an opportunity right now in this moment, in this watershed moment, to heal what has been broken,” Acton said.
