The Republican primary for Ohio’s 14th congressional representative is a choice between a seven-term incumbent and self-described “workhorse” and a self-described “political outsider” who was most recently a one-term Trumbull County commissioner.

Dave Joyce, of Bainbridge, has the endorsement of President Donald Trump and a huge edge over his opponents — both Republican and Democrat — in campaign war chests. His GOP opponent in the May 5 primary is Niki Frenchko, who lost reelection for her commissioner seat in 2024 after a tumultuous four years in office.

The Democratic primary features three challengers — former Euclid City Council member and resident Maria Jukic, former Ohio Supreme Court justice and 11th District Court of Appeals judge Bill O’Neill of Chagrin Falls and businessman and political newcomer Carl Setzer of Moreland Hills.

With redistricting taking effect with this election, the 14th 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 the portion of Portage County it includes.

This newspaper’s editorial board interviewed all the candidates in both parties’ primaries and is endorsing Joyce and O’Neill — the two most experienced candidates on the ballot in the race for the 14th.

“I’m what they consider a workhorse and not a show horse,” Joyce said. “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.”

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.

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.

All four of Joyce’s rivals are critical of how he has represented the 14th District.

Frenchko, of Warren, alleges that Joyce caters primarily to his well-to-do donors.

“He has forgotten about us,” she said during an endorsement interview with this newspaper. “He doesn’t respond to us. He’s in the D.C. swamp.”

Frenchko casts herself as an outsider who will fight for what is most important to her constituents.

“I’m not part of the Washington political class,” she said. “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 did little to prevent the closure of Trumbull Regional Medical Center — now an empty building she can see from her nearby home — and Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital in Howland. She has made the hospital situation in Trumbull County a central part of her campaign.

Joyce and Frenchko are the only two candidates who currently live in the 14th District. Residence in a particular district is not mandated to run, but we consider it important.

So, too, is experience, and Joyce and O’Neill lead by far in that category. That is the matchup we believe should happen in November’s general election.