Congressman Dave Joyce, a Republican seeking his eighth term in the U.S. House, faces Niki Frenchko, a former Trumbull County commissioner, in the GOP primary with three Democrats running for that party’s nomination in the 14th District.

Joyce, of Bainbridge, said he’s effective without being flashy.

Joyce said, “I’m what they consider a workhorse and not a show horse. I’m not flooding your newsroom every day with press releases or out there making an ass out of myself in D.C. just so I can get on national television.”

Frenchko, of Warren, said, “Voters in this district want someone who actually represents their values, not someone who campaigns one way and votes another once they get to Washington. My opponent has voted with liberals more than half the time, according to independent scorecards.”

Joyce responded by saying, “You can go to any one of those vote totals and find what you want. Whatever taste you have, you can pick out a poll or a group and say, ‘I’m terrible.’ But at the end of the day, the president endorsed me, and I voted with the president 97% of the time.”

Frenchko said, “If voters are looking for that kind of record, there are plenty of Democrats to choose from. But this is a Republican primary, and Republican voters deserve a Republican who will vote with their party and represent their priorities.”

The candidates in the Democratic primary, who are all critical of how Joyce has represented the district, are:

• Bill O’Neill of Chagrin Falls, a former Ohio Supreme Court justice and 11th District Court of Appeals judge who in 2008 and 2010 unsuccessfully ran as the Democratic nominee for the 14th Congressional District seat.

• Maria Jukic of Euclid, who served a term on her city’s council, is an attorney and was senior director for the Cleveland Clinic’s Art & Medical Institute before the job was eliminated in August. Jukic tried to run in 2024 for the congressional seat as an independent but failed to qualify because of a lack of valid signatures.

• Carl Setzer of Moreland Hills, executive vice president of Joy Filled Beverages Ltd., who co-founded with his wife, Great Leap Brewing Co., a craft brewery in Beijing, China. This is his first run for elected office.

None of the Democratic candidates live in the 14th District, though they all said they have close ties to the area, with O’Neill and Setzer living in it for years. Congressional candidates only have to live in Ohio to be eligible to run.

The primaries are May 5. Early voting has started.

With redistricting taking effect with this election, the 14th Congressional District will continue to include all of Trumbull, Lake, Ashtabula and Geauga counties. It is adding a small part of Mahoning County and making a minor change to what part of Portage County it includes.

The district favors Republicans 58.5% to 41.5% for Democrats based on partisan statewide voting results between 2016 and 2024, according to the Ohio Redistricting Commission.

JOYCE

Seeking an eighth term in the U.S. House, Joyce said he has “fought tirelessly to grow our economy, cut taxes and secure the border. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, I have helped rein in wasteful spending and return regular order to government funding, helping to pass all 12 appropriations bills out of the House for the first time in nearly two decades, breaking the harmful cycle of continuing funding resolutions.”

Joyce secured $66.1 million in those appropriations bills for the district, including $5 million for runway rehabilitation at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport.

Joyce said he doesn’t shy away from voting for bills to keep the government open.

“I’m an institutionalist, and I believe that it’s important that we continue to” keep the government operating, Joyce said. “My opponent says she wouldn’t vote for these things. Well, guess what? Those people in the ‘vote no, hope yes’ category go home and beat their chest and say they didn’t expand spending. But at the end of the day, they’re very happy that those of us who have the guts to stand in there and make sure this institution works vote the way we do.”

Joyce said among his priorities if reelected is continuing to protect “your wallet through thoughtful government spending. Our government cannot continue to spend at its current levels. However, it’s essential that cuts are thoughtful and surgically applied. In doing so, I will prioritize your Social Security and access to quality and affordable healthcare.”

Joyce said he wants to secure “our communities with policies that defend our borders, fight the opioid epidemic and fund law enforcement. This requires a thoughtful and whole-of-government approach.” That includes, he said, preventing human trafficking and policies that protect courts and judges and combat political violence.

Joyce said he is “fighting for the unique things that make northeast Ohio a great place to live and raise a family, including preserving our Great Lakes and strong manufacturing economy.”

FRENCHKO

A former one-term Trumbull County commissioner who lost reelection in the 2024 Republican primary, Frenchko said Joyce has “forgotten about us. He doesn’t respond to us. He’s in the D.C. swamp.”

Frenchko said she is challenging Joyce because “I’m not part of the Washington political class. I’m not owned by special interests, big Pharma or foreign governments. Republicans here deserve someone who will go to Washington and fight for them as hard as Democrats fight for their agenda, and that is exactly what I will do.”

Frenchko said Joyce sat by and watched the closure of the former Trumbull Regional Medical Center in Warren, which she can see from the window of her home.

“No one did anything about it and no one will stand up in D.C. to push back against policies that allowed things like this to happen,” Frenchko said. “What I see too often is that once people get elected, they fail to remember that the reason they got elected was because of the voters in the district, and they focus on the donors. That’s what happened with David Joyce. He’s been there so long, and he’s got the millions of dollars from all the donors, and that’s who he caters to.”

All Joyce did about the hospital closure, Frenchko said, was write a letter to Pam Bondi, then the U.S. attorney general. Joyce said he’s reached out to University Hospitals and the Cleveland Clinic, urging them to open locations in Trumbull County.

“Everyone’s impacted by what happened, and just the fact that he’s so oblivious to normal human beings, normal Republicans, is just disturbing,” Frenchko said of Joyce. “He could have just paid attention to healthcare and checking in with the hospitals, not just whenever you have someone running against you. That’s the only time anyone’s seen him. He could have found out what was going on. He could have tried to get congressional hearings relative to the matter. Maybe even try to force the issue of fraudulent conveyance.”

Frenchko said the federal government “should be focused on rebuilding American manufacturing, strengthening supply chains here at home, and creating stable, good-paying jobs for American workers. That starts with restoring fiscal discipline. Congress must stop passing trillion-dollar omnibus bills and begin reforming the broken budget process that fuels runaway spending. We also need to restore American energy independence because energy costs affect everything from gas prices to groceries and manufacturing costs.”

O’NEILL

O’Neill was elected to the 11th District Court of Appeals in 1996, serving for 10 years. He was elected in 2012 to the Ohio Supreme Court, leaving in early 2018 to unsuccessfully run for governor. This is his first campaign since then.

O’Neill has worked the past 12 years as a pediatric registered nurse in the Cleveland Clinic’s emergency room and is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel.

“I’m a constitutional scholar, and if ever in the history of America that we need people who revere and understand the Constitution, it’s right now,” O’Neill said. “It’s being violated on a daily basis. The Constitution is being ignored, and particularly by David Joyce.”

O’Neill said his top priorities in the campaign are Medicare for all, building green energy jobs and stopping the war in Iran.

O’Neill said, “40% of Americans have adequate health insurance guaranteed by the government. That’s Medicare, Medicaid and military. But the other 60% are at the mercy of the private insurance companies that have high co-pays and low caps. Those folks spend the better part of their life in fear that they’re going to have a medical catastrophe that’s going to take away their life savings. We see them as ER nurses, it’s too late.”

O’Neill said, “The only answer that makes any sense for all of this is Medicare for all. That would take care of the patients. It would take care of the doctors. It would take care of the hospitals.”

O’Neill said the government needs to focus on building “green energy jobs like solar-powered commuter rail instead of repeating asphalt jungles. Place solar panels on top of all government buildings. They pay for themselves in seven years and protect the environment.”

O’Neill also wants the war in Iran to stop immediately.

“We need to stop declaring war every three weeks,” he said. “Everybody knows the Iran war is a mistake. It is not planned out. It is not constitutional, and it is costing us lives and money. The Republicans in Congress know that. But they’re waiting for me. They literally are waiting for me to come join Congress because we’re only three votes short right now” of Democrats controlling the House.

O’Neill said members of Congress need to be told “to do its job by enforcing the U.S. Constitution that mandates Congress, and only Congress, has the authority to declare war.”

JUKIC

Jukic said she decided to run for the seat after federal immigration officers fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis in January.

“I’m tired of sorting people into two categories when most of us are in the massive middle,” Jukic said. “I want to listen, learn and find common ground because I think that working together, we can solve some of these problems and move forward better as a country.”

Jukic said her top priorities are working for the people, the Constitution and rule of law; to provide more access to healthcare and affordability issues.

“We have out-of-control overreach of the executive and the lack of courage by members of Congress, particularly Republican members of Congress, and standing up to that so they’ve given up their right to being a third branch of government,” Jukic said. “The other house-is-on-fire situation is the war in Iran. We shouldn’t be there. We need to get out of there as soon as possible.”

Jukic said she wants to fight for “regular working people,” by focusing on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, jobs development and “anything for the people because I feel that regular people are really getting screwed by the elite.”

Jukic wants to improve tax policy for the middle class and not for billionaires.

She said, “I would initiate a bipartisan movement of Congress members who are serious about finding solutions to improve tax policy for middle-class Americans who work for a paycheck while finding responsible ways to balance the budget and decrease national debt.”

Jukic wants to “break up healthcare monopolies” and lower Medicare eligibility to 62 “to match the earliest age a person can receive Social Security.”

SETZER

Setzer grew up in a blue-collar Painesville family in what he called a “doomsday cult” church in Lake County. While he no longer believes the teachings of that church, Setzer said his experiences with it allow him to connect with rural, conservative voters.

Setzer said, “There’s a lot of people that think you’ll never knock the rust off the Rust Belt, you’ll never bring good manufacturing jobs back, but I think those are fallacies that could easily be disproven if the right person that understood manufacturing, understood fabrication, understood what economic development can do with the right government policies and the right government support could do for the region” was in Congress.

Setzer’s top priorities are Medicare for working-class families, a consumer bill of rights to protect Americans’ privacy and a comprehensive overhaul of career development.

Setzer said his Medicare plan would expand access to healthcare to anyone who fills out a W-2 or W-9 tax form. With health insurance coverage often tied to employment and controlled by private insurers, Setzer said his proposal would cover Americans with Medicare already having the infrastructure and bargaining power in place to negotiate lower prices for services and prescription drugs.

“That immediately gets cash back in the pocket of the laborer, but it also saves an immense amount of money for the small, medium and large business owners that are doing the employer benefit pay in,” he said.

Setzer said his consumer bill of rights would restore control over personal information to the people who generate it because that personal data is “collected, analyzed and sold by corporations with little transparency or accountability.” It would also establish a universal system that allows people to remove themselves from marketing databases with “a single action rather than navigating dozens of separate opt-out systems.”

He said, “A modern economy should not require surrendering basic privacy.”

Regarding career development, Setzer said his “goal is to build a more efficient, human-centered workforce system – one that helps people discover, prepare for and advance in careers through their lives.”