SANDUSKY, Ohio — Caleb Stidham wanted the Republican nomination for Ohio House District 89. He was also one of six people who got to vote on it. He voted, and he won, 4-2.

Four days later the Erie County Board of Elections refused to certify him, splitting 2-2. And now the Republicans who spent a decade holding this seat are turning on him in public, under their own names.

The sharpest of them is Jon Paul Morrow, the political consultant who worked on the 2014 campaign that put the 89th District in Republican hands in the first place. In a long public post this week, Morrow argued that Stidham should have walked out of the room, and that by staying in it he may have cost his party the seat.

“In 2014, Steve Kraus won Ohio’s 89th House District and put the seat in Republican hands. It has stayed there ever since,” Morrow wrote. “Now Caleb Stidham may have found a way to hand it back to the Democrats.”

Stidham denies there was any conflict. “There seems to be some confusion; there is no conflict of interest because I did not lead or chair the meeting that selected me as the candidate,” he told NBC4 in Columbus.

That answers a question nobody is asking. Huron County Republican Chairman Sven Stahl did chair the Aug. 10 meeting, precisely because Stidham was a candidate. Stidham was sent out of the room while his rivals made their pitches. Then he came back in for deliberations, and he voted.

‘Not picking a Lincoln Day Dinner speaker’

Morrow’s case is not that Stidham broke a rule. It is that the missing rule was never the point.

“A candidate for the nomination sat on the committee deciding who should receive the nomination, participated in the process, and then voted in a contest he won,” he wrote.

Ohio’s vacancy statute contains no recusal requirement for a committee member who is also an applicant. Morrow’s answer to that defense is blunt. “The fact that a statute does not contain the words ‘you cannot vote for yourself’ does not automatically settle every question about self-interest, public authority, and the integrity of the process,” he wrote.

He then drew the same line the Erie County elections board chairman would draw a day later — the line between a party’s own housekeeping and a job the legislature handed it.

“This committee was not picking a Lincoln Day Dinner speaker. It was not deciding party bylaws. It was not issuing an endorsement that voters were free to accept or reject in a primary,” Morrow wrote.

Republican voters had already picked D.J. Swearingen in the May 5 primary. When Swearingen walked away from the ballot on Aug. 4, state law handed six county party officers the power to decide whose name replaced his. Ohio courts have found that party officials can take on a public character when the state gives them that kind of power: in 1962 the Ohio Supreme Court held that county central committee members act as public officers when they exercise the statutory authority to fill vacancies in county offices. Morrow argued the same logic reaches this committee.

He was careful about what he could not prove. Republicans in the district have questioned whether Erie County Republican Party bylaws would even let someone serving in the Ohio House stay on as county chairman. “I have not independently verified the controlling bylaw language, so I am not presenting that claim as fact,” Morrow wrote. “But somebody should verify it.”

And he put his own interest on the table. “For disclosure, I worked as a consultant on Steve Kraus’s campaign,” he wrote. “Readers are free to take that into account. They should.”

The bill comes out of the campaign account

Much of the post is aimed at Republicans on money, not ethics. A fight over the nomination means lawyers, filings and hearings — paid for out of the same account that is supposed to be reaching voters before Nov. 3.

“Every dollar spent defending the nomination process is a dollar that is not being spent communicating with voters and defeating the Democratic nominee,” Morrow wrote.

His point is that none of it had to happen. “He should have left the room during deliberations and abstained from voting on his own nomination,” Morrow wrote. “A victory secured without his own vote would have been easier to defend politically and far less damaging to the legitimacy of the process.”

The obvious rebuttal is arithmetic: Stidham’s vote was needed to get to four. Morrow dismissed it. “The problem is not simply whether his vote supplied the winning margin,” he wrote. “The problem is that a candidate reportedly participated as one of the judges in the contest he was trying to win.”

He closed on the line he used as his title: “What Steve Kraus giveth, Caleb Stidham may yet taketh away.”

Who signed on

Then came the comments, and that is where the damage shows.

Ottawa County Auditor Jennifer Widmer — one of the three Republicans who applied for the seat Stidham voted himself into — thanked Morrow publicly and drew a contrast with how it was handled.

“I was among the group of Ottawa County Republican Women in 2010 who set out to change the perception of what it meant to be Republicans,” Widmer wrote. “We contrasted our service with the slimy politics of the other side. Ottawa County continues to hold those same principles because we know that doing the right thing matters.”

Marcell Strbich — the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who took 29.79% against Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague in the May Republican primary for secretary of state — endorsed the post from his campaign account, writing that Morrow had made the case that “there is no excuse not to recuse yourself.”

One commenter went further and pointed Republicans at the Democrat. “Support Retzke for Representative,” the person wrote. “I’d bet Retzke would have recused himself. #charactermatters”

The November math

Republicans were warning each other about the cost of this before the committee ever met.

Ron Coop, who posted publicly hours before the Aug. 10 vote, argued the bill would come due statewide rather than locally. “The 89th District is a solid 10 point Republican district. A point or two of grassroots staying home will not change local results,” Coop wrote. “However, it takes away votes from State wide candidates. This year will be a tough election for Republicans. They need all the votes they can get.”

Polling taken while the district committee was meeting suggests he was reading the year correctly. A Fox News survey of 1,008 Ohio registered voters conducted Aug. 6-10 found Democrat Sherrod Brown beating Republican Sen. Jon Husted 53% to 45% — with 11% of Republicans crossing over to Brown, and 25% of Republicans who do not identify with the MAGA movement doing the same. Republican Vivek Ramaswamy led Democrat Amy Acton 50% to 48% in the governor’s race. Fifty-four percent of Ohio voters said they view the Republican Party unfavorably; 57% said the same of the MAGA movement. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

He is still not on the ballot

For all of it, Stidham has not been certified.

The Erie County Board of Elections deadlocked 2-2 on Friday, Aug. 14, its two Democrats voting against certification and its two Republicans voting for it. Under state law a tie at a county board goes to the secretary of state, who decides the question summarily and whose decision is final.

Board Chairman Edward J. Leonard said both sides agreed to file written position statements with Director Alexander W. Jones by 9 a.m. Friday, Aug. 21, so he can send them up the same day. The statutory outside deadline is Friday, Aug. 28.

The Republican who decides is Frank LaRose, term-limited as secretary of state and his party’s nominee for state auditor on the same Nov. 3 ballot.

Waiting on the other side is Easton Retzke of Sandusky, who has had the Democratic nomination locked since May 5 and has spent the summer campaigning while Republicans fought over who would face him. An Ohio State political science graduate, Retzke has been endorsed by the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the UAW’s Tri-County CAP Council and has run on public school funding, utility rates, the tax treatment of data centers and an overhaul of JobsOhio.

Swearingen carried this district with 58% of the vote in 2024.