While there weren’t any major shocks with the primary election results, the margins of victory for some were surprising.

With the Republican Senate Campaign Committee bankrolling and essentially running the reelection campaign of state Sen. Sandra O’Brien of Lenox, her victory over challenger, state Rep. Mike Loychik of Bazetta, for her 32nd Ohio Senate District seat in the GOP primary was expected.

O’Brien not only had a huge financial advantage over Loychik, she’s run and won the seat before, and she is very well known in Ashtabula County.

But I anticipated Republican voters in Loychik’s home county of Trumbull, which has more voters than the rest of the district combined, coming out for him and making it a much closer race.

It didn’t turn out that way.

O’Brien beat Loychik by 15.4% in Trumbull County on her way to victory, winning by a lopsided 27.8% margin after running up the vote in the rest of the district.

In Trumbull, Chris Becker, first county assistant prosecutor, was expected to beat Thomas R. Wright, a former 11th District Court of Appeals judge who did little campaigning in the Democratic primary. Becker won with Wright getting 35%.

But what wasn’t expected was that Jack Pico, a Democratic candidate for a domestic relations / juvenile court judge, who actually campaigned, did even worse than Wright getting 34% in a losing effort to Kara Leonard Stanford.

In the Republican primary for the 7th District Court of Appeals — which is the election as no other candidates filed for the November general — Columbiana County Municipal Court Judge Katelyn Dickey beat Mary DeGenaro, a former appeals court judge and Ohio Supreme Court justice.

Dickey and her husband gave $350,000 to the campaign and spent most of it on advertising as of Feb. 28, which certainly helped her win.

Not only did Dickey get 69.3% of the vote — which is more than anticipated — but she won all eight counties in the appeals court’s district. This is the same district that DeGenaro won four previous times.

On top of that, DeGenaro lost her home county of Mahoning — despite receiving the local Republican Party’s endorsement — getting a mere 38% of the vote to 62% for Dickey.

Who knew what to make of the Democratic primary for the open 6th Congressional District contest between Michael L. Kripchak and Rylan Z. Finzer?

Both are political unknowns and neither raised money for the primary with the Democratic establishment writing off the race because the district so heavily favors Republicans based on partisan voting trends during the past decade.

That’s why better known Democratic candidates stayed out of the race.

For some reason, Kripchak easily won, beating Finzer by a margin of almost two to one. Kripchak also won all 11 counties in the district.

On the Republican side, it was a lot more competitive than anticipated with state Sen. Michael Rulli beating state Rep. Reggie Stoltzfus by about 9%.

There were actually two primaries in the 6th for both political parties.

One to move to a June 11 special election to fill the unexpired term of Republican Bill Johnson, who resigned Jan. 21 to become president of Youngstown State University, and the other to run in the Nov. 5 general election and start serving a full two-year term in January 2025.

That some in the Democratic and the Republican primaries voted for different candidates for the two primaries can probably be chalked up to confusion of seeing the same candidates on the ballot twice.

Stoltzfus was able to keep it closer than expected because he won nine of the district’s 11 counties. He got 63.5% of the vote in Noble County and 63.8% of the Monroe County vote.

But only about 3,300 Republicans combined voted in those two counties.

Rulli won the Republican primary because of his tremendous popularity with GOP voters in Mahoning, which is, by far, the district’s most-populous county. Mahoning accounted for about 25% of the vote. The county had about 43,000 Republican voters with Rulli getting 78% of the vote.

Of Rulli’s total votes, 39% of them came from Mahoning County.

Without Mahoning County, Rulli would have lost to Stoltzfus by about 6,000 votes.

Rulli told me after the results came in that he did better in the nine counties he lost than expected.

Have an interesting story? Contact David Skolnick by email at dskolnick@vindy.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @dskolnick.