Cameron Koffel

Disagree

I don't think taxpayers should be paying for abortions, and under federal law they already largely don't. But this question goes further than that. Title X pays for cancer screenings, contraception, and STI testing for people who often have nowhere else to go. I'm not voting to take that away to make a point about a procedure it doesn't fund. Separate the two and I'll agree with the first half.

I support the line Ohio voters drew in 2023: abortion is legal up to fetal viability. After viability, when the mother's life or health is at serious risk. That's my view, and it's also what 57 percent of Ohioans voted for — including a large majority of the people in this district. I'm not interested in relitigating a question the voters already answered.

Disagree

I don't believe legal personhood begins at conception. I support the viability standard Ohio voters affirmed in 2023, with protection after that point when the mother's life or health is at serious risk. This question bundles several distinct issues — my disagreement is with the conception standard specifically, not a blanket answer on end-of-life care or capital punishment, which deserve their own questions.

Disagree

Families struggling with infertility deserve support, not a state law that puts their doctor at legal risk. IVF requires creating more embryos than are ultimately implanted; a rule against destroying the rest would end the procedure as it's actually practiced. Ohio voters protected fertility treatment by name in 2023. I'm not going to be the legislator who tells couples in this district they can't have children.

Strongly Disagree

Ohioans voted in 2023 to protect these decisions, and I don't think an 1873 anti-vice law should be dusted off to override them. Congress has never voted to ban these medications; reviving a dormant statute is a way to get there without one. Mifepristone is also standard miscarriage care — enforcement would reach women who aren't seeking an abortion at all. If Washington wants to change this, it should pass a law and face the voters.

Ohio already indexes the minimum wage to inflation and exempts businesses under $405,000 in receipts. That structure works. The bigger squeeze on families here is cost of living — property taxes and housing. A raise doesn't help if the bill grows fas

Strongly Agree

Yes — and I'd apply it consistently. Free enterprise means no special carve-outs for the biggest players. Ohio hands data centers a sales tax exemption that ordinary businesses in this district don't get, while the people who live next to them absorb the energy costs. That's not a free market. Private property also means a family shouldn't be taxed out of a house they already own.

1.End the data center sales tax exemption — large subsidies for facilities with few permanent jobs, while neighbors absorb higher energy costs. 2.Ban unrelated amendments dropped into budget bills in the final hours. Waste hides in provisions nobody reads. 3.Require a plain-language fiscal note on every bill before a floor vote. 4.Sunset review — programs should have to justify renewal, not run on autopilot.

It means government doesn't run the church and the church doesn't run the government. Those are two different protections and both matter. The state shouldn't establish a religion, pick a favored denomination, or coerce anyone's belief. It also shouldn't treat faith as something citizens must leave at home before participating in public life. Religious Ohioans have every right to bring their convictions into the public square — that's what voting is.

Disagree

Nobody should be compelled to create something they don't believe — to write a message, design a work, or perform. That's expression, and the state shouldn't conscript it. But that's different from refusing to serve someone for who they are. Ohio's existing public accommodations protections should stay, and a business open to the public should serve the public. The line I'd draw is between compelled speech and ordinary commerce.

B. Nobody in this district should lose a house over a diagnosis, and nobody should be locked out of coverage because of where they work. A public option gives people a floor to fall back on. It doesn't take away private insurance — if your employer plan works for you, keep it. I'd rather compete with the private market than abolish it. Most of this is decided in Washington, but Ohio controls Medicaid eligibility and that's real leverage.

Strongly Disagree

Strongly disagree. Public health surveillance — cancer registries, immunization records, communicable disease reporting — serves patients and is already well established. This is something else: a government list of chronically ill people, built to price what they cost. Once that list exists, someone will use it to decide who's worth covering. Nobody should have to wonder whether a diagnosis puts them in a state database. Keep medical records with doctors.

Strongly Agree

Strongly agree. Foreign policy isn't a state legislator's job, but some of this lands squarely in Ohio's lap. Farmland near sensitive sites, state pension exposure to Chinese firms, procurement and university research security, and the grid. On the last one — we're approving enormous new data center load with equipment and supply chains nobody in Columbus is scrutinizing. That's a state question.

Yes. Israel is a democracy and a close ally in a region with few of either, and the intelligence and defense cooperation matters. But support and a blank check aren't the same thing. Aid should carry clear objectives and real oversight, the way any appropriation should. Asking what we're funding and why isn't hostility toward an ally — it's how you keep an alliance durable and defensible to the people paying for it.

Agree

Agree, though the framing is off. No Ohio city has declared itself a sanctuary city. What exists in Columbus is a decision not to enter 287(g) agreements, made by a council answerable to its own voters. Ohio's constitution gives municipalities authority over local policing. SB 172 would override that. I won't vote to strip Upper Arlington, Grandview, or Columbus of decisions their own residents made.

Disagree

Disagree. The Department doesn't write curriculum — Ohio does, through our State Board and legislature, and that should stay. What it actually does is administer Title I, IDEA special education funding, and student aid. A student with a disability shouldn't have fewer protections because of which state she was born in. Keep a national floor, let Ohio build above it. I'd rather fix what's broken in the agency than delete it and figure out the rest later.

Strongly Agree

Yes — with the emphasis on disclosure and control, not a blanket ban. No foreign government should have influence over curriculum, research direction, or hiring at an Ohio institution. Confucius Institutes were the clear case and OSU was right to close ours. But legitimate exchange programs like Fulbright are also government-funded and worth keeping. The standard should be: full public disclosure of every foreign gift, and no strings on what gets taught or studied

Agree

Agree. Parents direct their children's upbringing — that's settled law and it should be. It's also why I've pushed for parents to be told what's happening in their kids' schools rather than finding out later. The one limit is the one the law already recognizes: a parent's authority doesn't extend to serious harm or medical neglect. Short of that, the presumption belongs with the parent, not the state.

Disagree

Disagree as written. A blanket rule that any social transition — a name, a haircut — is abuse would make mandatory reporters turn families in to children's services, and I've seen what that referral does to a home. My standard is consent: no child should be pushed into a medical decision, or out of one, against their own will. That's coercion either way, and Ohio's abuse statutes already reach it.

Disagree

Disagree — on the legal claim, not the religious one. What a church teaches about marriage is the church's business, and no government should tell it otherwise. But civil marriage is a legal status the state issues, and Obergefell settled that eleven years ago. Ohio families have built lives, adoptions, and estates around it. I'm not going to reopen a question that's closed and would only put existing families in limbo.

Neutral

No appetite to expand, no appetite to roll back what voters already approved. My concern is what we've already built. Sports betting went live in 2023 and the advertising and app design got well ahead of the safeguards. Before Ohio talks about online casino games, I'd want real problem-gambling funding, working self-exclusion, and limits on how aggressively these products are marketed to young men.

I'm a Christian. What I try to carry from it is fairly simple: love your neighbor, and follow the life Jesus actually lived — one of humility and love, spent with people the powerful had written off. That shapes how I want to serve more than it tells me how to vote on any single bill. It means treating the person across from me as someone worth listening to, including when we disagree. It means being honest when the answer is complicated instead of saying whatever gets me through the room. And it means measuring this job by whether the people in this district are better off, not by whether I've kept a party happy.

Disagree

Disagree — I think showing ID makes sense. But requiring one creates an obligation to make it genuinely easy to get. Ohio made state IDs free, which was right. The remaining barriers are practical: BMV hours, getting there without a car, and replacing an underlying birth certificate. Fix those and this stops being a fight. A requirement the state makes hard to satisfy isn't security, it's a filter.

Disagree

Disagree. I don't support cash payments distributed by racial category. But the honest version of this question isn't about checks — it's about specific, documented harms with identifiable victims, like families whose homes were taken by redlining or highway construction. Where a government did something concrete and traceable, remedying it isn't reparations by race, it's fixing a wrong that particular government caused.

Agree

Agree on competitive sports — that's already Ohio law and I'd leave it. But this question bundles five different things. Sorority houses are private organizations, not the legislature's business. Prison housing and domestic violence shelters are safety questions that facilities have to assess individually, and a categorical rule from Columbus would get someone hurt in one direction or the other. Same principle throughout: safety and fairness, applied to the actual setting.

Strongly Agree

Strongly agree. The science isn't seriously in dispute, and pretending otherwise costs us time we don't have. But a state legislator's version of this isn't a treaty — it's the grid. Ohio is approving enormous new data center load, and the question of who pays for that power and where it comes from is being decided right now with almost no public scrutiny. Get that wrong and we lock in higher bills and dirtier generation for twenty years.

Nuclear. It's the only carbon-free source that runs around the clock, which is what data center load actually requires. Ohio already has Davis-Besse and Perry. Natural gas bridges the gap near-term, but the buildout should be planned, not improvised.

Moderate

Moderate — though the label does less work than the answers above it. On some of these I'll land where conservatives land, on others where liberals do, and on several I'd reject how the question was framed. That's not fence-sitting. It's what happens when you work through issues one at a time instead of taking a party's whole package. There's no party next to my name, on purpose.

No.

No.

Public safety first, then rehabilitation — and the two aren't in tension. Most people who go to prison come home. Whether they come home employable and stable is a public safety question, not a soft one. I work at a criminal defense firm, so I've watched how the system actually runs: how much turns on whether someone can afford counsel, and how a case that never should have been charged can cost a family everything.

Strongly Agree

Strongly agree — this is one of the clearest obligations government has. The disagreement is never about the goal, it's about the tools. I'd fund investigators and prosecutors who work these cases and make sure they have the resources to move quickly, before I'd mandate blanket age verification that puts every adult's ID in a private database. Protect kids without building surveillance infrastructure around everyone.

Strongly Agree

Strongly agree that no religious code — any religion's — overrides the Constitution or Ohio law. That's settled and it should stay settled. What I'd be careful about is the phrase "in any form." Courts already enforce arbitration agreements and contracts from Jewish and Christian religious bodies as ordinary private agreements. The rule should be the same for everyone: no parallel legal system, and no different treatment by denomination.

Four things. Extreme risk protection orders — with a real hearing, a clear evidentiary standard, and counsel, not a rubber stamp. Universal background checks, so a private sale isn't a loophole around the same check a dealer runs. Safe storage where minors are in the home. And actually enforcing the prohibitions already on the books for domestic violence convictions and active protection orders. I work in criminal defense. Due process isn't a caveat on these — it's what makes them hold up.