By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER

Ohio Correspondent

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Farm Bureau (OFB) feels positive about the 2018 midterm election results, while the Ohio Farmers Union (OFU) would have been happier to see a little more change.

“Apparently Ohioans are happier with their one-party government than the rest of the nation,” said Joe Logan, president of OFU. “I don’t completely understand that, but that is what we experienced. There are members of Congress that have been there forever; I think that there were some interesting candidates in the election that could have been helpful for rural communities, but we’ll have to wait another two years and see what transpires.”

OFB, through member surveys, relationships with farmers and voting records, declares some politicians in Ohio and nationally to be Friends of Agriculture, said Adam Sharp, OFB president. About 95 percent of those Friends of Agriculture won their election bids.

“That’s how we measure the success of an election,” he said.

Both organizations were happy to see that Ohio Issue 1, the Drug and Criminal Justice Policies Initiative, was defeated.

“We opposed Issue 1 for two reasons,” Sharp said. “One, we did not believe something like that belonged in the Ohio Constitution. Secondly, the way it was constructed wasn’t good policy. So Farm Bureau took a position to vote no on Issue 1.

“We joined many people in the health care industry, hospitals, law enforcement, judges, a large coalition of folks, to oppose. Even though there was a lot of money spent to pass it, we were glad to see it fail.”

OFU also had concerns about the fact that it was a constitutional issue, Logan said. The organization thinks it makes more sense to treat the illness of addiction in a medical manner rather than by incarceration, but said a constitutional amendment was not the way to achieve that.

“There were also nuances about some hard drugs and where the cutoffs were going to be that I think made people kind of ill at ease about going full in on that criminalization issue,” he said. “However, for marijuana, our organization is prepared to decriminalize that.”

Also, both organizations were pleased voters had easily reelected Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown over GOP challenger Jim Renacci. While OFB did not endorse Brown, Sharp said he had been a good friend of Farm Bureau and had worked hard for three cycles of farm bills.

OFU would like to have seen more changeover with the governor’s and other state offices, but will wait and see what happens, Logan said.

“We have been happy to work with now Governor-elect Michael DeWine (the Republican Ohio attorney general who defeated Democrat Richard Cordray) in the past,” he explained. “He has always been open and responsive, and his staff has been reasonably easy to deal with.”

OFB was pleased with DeWine’s election win and looks forward to working with him. “We think he’ll do a great job for Ohio agriculture,” Sharp said of the incoming successor to Gov. John Kasich.

Nationally, the change in party control in the U.S. House from Republican to Democrat, while the Republicans increased their majority in the Senate, indicates the country is still deeply divided along urban-rural, geographic and partisan lines, National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) said in its Weekly Roundup.

In Ohio, though, Republicans won most of the state’s 16 U.S. House seats last week, including 11 incumbents (as well as the four Democratic incumbents). And in District 16, Republican Anthony Gonzalez defeated Susan Moran Palmer – neither was the incumbent.