Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), the longest-serving woman in congressional history, beat back a challenge from a term-limited Republican state lawmaker to keep her northwest Ohio House seat.
Kaptur, with almost 21 congressional terms under her belt, has been in Congress for nearly 42 years, longer than her Republican challenger, 38-year-old Ohio state Rep. Derek Merrin, has been alive.
While Kaptur was narrowly ahead after Election Day and declared victory then, her margin was so small the outcome remained in doubt for two weeks. Her margin was expected to be just outside the amount that would trigger an automatic recount.
The race was classified as “lean Democratic” by the Cook Political Report, the next category up from “toss-up.” Kaptur was seen as vulnerable because her district had been redrawn to make it more GOP-friendly after the 2020 census. While she won reelection easily in 2022 in the new district, her opponent, Republican congressional candidate J.R. Majewski, was seen as out of the mainstream with his expressions of sympathy for QAnon conspiracy theories. Kaptur won by 13 points.
Merrin, her 2024 opponent, on the other hand, has been term limited from running again for the statehouse, leaving him free to set his sights on Kaptur’s seat. Merrin chaired the Ohio House Ways and Means Committee and was first elected to public office at the age of 19, becoming a city council member and later mayor of Waterville, Ohio.
Kaptur took office in 1983; she has a reputation as a pro-labor Democrat who’s firmly in her party’s liberal wing and voted against the Iraq War. In her campaign, though, she also touted her membership on the House Appropriations Committee, the House panel that sets annual federal agency and program budgets.
Kaptur has also been one of four bipartisan co-chairs of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus that has pushed for continued aid to the war-torn country. Her Toledo-area district has enough Ukrainian Americans in it that there is a charitable support group called Toledo for Ukraine that sends aid.
See full results from the Ohio House election here.