If Justice Brunner is defeated, the entire Ohio Supreme Court will be Republican. 

In November’s general election, former judge Colleen O’Donnell, a Republican, is challenging the lone Democratic justice on the Ohio Supreme Court. 

If incumbent Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner is ousted, the entire Ohio Supreme Court panel will be Republican. Brunner won her seat in 2020.

In 2022, Ohio lawmakers made the races for the state’s highest court labelled by political party. Since then, Republicans have ousted two other incumbent Democrats to take the court to its current makeup of 6-1 with Republicans in control. 

Brunner has filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the addition of party labels to races for the Ohio Supreme Court. 

Challenger and former judge Colleen O’Donnell has focused her campaign on her work as an immigration judge. She has pledged to maintain “judicial restraint” while interpreting the law as its original writers intended. 

“I do not take the view that the Constitution, for example, is a living, breathing document, and so I honor both substantive and procedural judicial restraint,” O’Donnell said in a recent interview. 

She is the daughter of retired Ohio Supreme Court Justice Terrence O’Donnell. In her crowded primary race, she took 32% of the vote. 

O’Donnell is known for her strict stance on immigration. She formerly presided over asylum cases as a federal immigration judge in Laredo, Texas. 

“While I honored my oath and obligation to interpret the law with integrity and to approach every case with an open mind, I never granted asylum a single time,” O’Donnell said in a statement in May. 

She has remained outspoken against former President Biden’s open border policies and said she “enforced federal law precisely as written, finding zero cases to meet the necessarily high bar for asylum, and consistently ordering removals of illegal aliens.”

“Regardless of my personal, emotional feelings about what I think the law should say, or what might make it better, or what might make it worse, I’m quite comfortable with how to compartmentalize, how to honor the oath that any judge should take to simply interpret the law, rather than rewrite the law,” she said in a recent interview. 

O’Donnell has received endorsements from Representatives Jim Jordan, Warren Davidson, and Dave Taylor.

Incumbent Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner has served on the court since 2021. She formerly served as Ohio’s secretary of state.

“Democracy and the rule of law have to be working together, and the democracy piece is clearly being pummeled right now, and there are many courts who are shoring that up,” Brunner said in a recent interview. 

Brunner has voted against multiple redistricting efforts in Ohio and dissented when the court upheld an appellate court decision in a case that denied a transgender woman’s application to amend her birth certificate. 

She said that while she has not had trouble working on the 6-1 Republican court, she “sure would like a little more company.”