The November election in Ohio's 6th Congressional District is a matchup of two candidates who just this summer competed for the open seat.
Republican Michael Rulli will remain the district's representative, after winning the seat for a second time in less than a year, according to the Associated Press. He has been the district's representative since defeating Democrat Michael Kripchak in the June 2024 special election.
Rulli lead Kripchak 66.73% to 33.27% late Tuesday with 93.7% of the state's precincts reporting, according to the Ohio Secretary of State.
The seat had been vacated by former Republican Rep. Bill Johnson who stepped down in January, part-way through his seventh term, to become president of Youngstown State University.
Michael Rulli
Prior to his election to congress in the June special election, Michael Rulli was in his second term representing the 33rd Senate District which covers Mahoning and Columbiana counties, according to a bio on the Ohio Legislature's website. His family has lived and owned a business in the Mahoning Valley for generations. Today, he lives in Salem.
Rulli also serves as director of operations for his family’s grocery chain – Rulli Bros. He's been hitting the campaign trail hard, talking to voters about the issues that matter to them, like inflation and border security, he said.
Rulli's campaign website indicates he previously served as president of the Leetonia School Board and received the Torch Award from the Better Business Bureau in 2017. Rulli lists education, a stable economic climate and safe communities as top priorities.
Michael Kripchak
Democrat Michael Kripchak was born and raised in Youngstown.
He worked as a research science and acquisitions officer at the Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts after graduating from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 2004. He then moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in entertainment before attending graduate school at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
After starting a business in Erie, Pennsylvania, Kripchak moved back to Youngstown when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. He now works at a local restaurant and consults on government contracts, he said.
“I don’t feel I’m a typical Democrat,” Kripchak said. “I don’t want to take my talking points from the national Democratic influencers. I’m focused on the farmers. I’m focused on manufacturing.”
If elected, he said his top priority is to bring high-paying jobs to the area through strengthening unions and encouraging innovation in the Ohio River Valley.
“That includes bringing in advanced composite materials production using the bones of our industry that are already here — using the strength and the work ethic of the people that are already here, to manufacture the materials of tomorrow,” Kripchak said.
Rejuvenating the education system and supporting local farmers are also important to Kripchak.
“Farmers have the right to own the seeds that they plant, they have the right to repair the equipment that they use and then need to be free of the worry of this debt spiral that so many of them are falling into today,” he said. “And we do that by working on the farm bill.”
Kripchak said it was the events at the capitol January 6, 2021 that inspired his run for office.
“The long and short of it is that too many people have died, both civilian and military, to get our country to where we are today as a world leader representing freedom around the world for us to just throw it away to authoritarianism,” he said.
About the 6th
The 6th Congressional District covers the state’s Appalachian region from Youngstown to Marietta. The entirety of Carroll, Columbiana and Mahoning counties are in the district, as well as parts of Stark and Tuscarawas counties. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey, more than 700,000 people live in the district, 87% of whom are white.
Most of the population is working class, with household income between $35,000 and $50,000 annually. About 40% of the population is 25 and older and has a high school diploma. Two percent did not graduate high school.
The 6th District includes part of southeast Ohio which contains most of the state’s oil and gas wells. That makes the district an important mining region. More than 6,500 residents work in the agriculture and natural resource industry, 55% of whom work in mining, quarrying or gas and oil extraction.
The district's politics
Although district lines were redrawn in 2022, Sabato’s Crystal Ball still rates the 6th District as safely Republican. Of the more than 500,000 registered voters in the district, about 19% are Republican, and 13% are Democrats, according to an Ideastream Public Media analysis of Ohio Secretary of State records.
“Ohio 6 covers a lot of territory that has really become much more Republican in recent years, particularly with the emergence of Donald Trump as the leader of the Republican Party,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virgina’s Center for Politics. “In fact, under the old iteration of Ohio 6 that was in place during the 2010s, no congressional district in the entire country moved further toward the Republicans at the presidential level.”
