Democrat Matthew Kilboy hopes to topple GOP Rep. Dave Joyce in Ohio’s 14th congressional district: See where they stand on the issues

WASHINGTON, D. C. – Episodes like the tear-gassing of demonstrators in a park near the White House and a riot at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of ex-President Donald Trump convinced retired U.S. Navy nurse Matthew Kilboy that the nation’s democracy was ailing. The Deerfield Township Democrat who runs a consulting business that helps healthcare institutions improve patient outcomes decided that running for Congress might help him improve the nation’s outcome.

Kilboy sees the incumbent Republican congressman he’d like to replace – Dave Joyce of South Russell – as a career politician and Washington insider who prioritizes big business. He contends that an openly gay veteran like himself who’s under age 40 and grew up on a farm would better represent the newly redrawn 14th congressional district than the former Geauga County prosecutor who has served in Congress since 2013.

Joyce disagrees, arguing that voters should reelect him because he can work with both Republicans and Democrats to solve problems. He said he’s led efforts to protect Northeast Ohio priorities like the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative in years when presidential administrations such as former President Donald Trump’s tried to slash it from $300 million per year to $30 million. Joyce used his positions on the Appropriations Committee, which allots government spending, and as co-chair of the bipartisan Great Lakes Task Force to help reinstate the money. A law he authored will increase the GLRI’s funding authorization to $475 million in 2026.

The district the pair want to represent includes all of Lake, Geauga and Ashtabula counties. It was reconfigured this year to include a bigger share of Portage and Trumbull counties than it contained before the maps were redrawn. Sections of Cuyahoga and Summit counties the district previously contained are now in other congressional districts. According to Dave’s Redistricting App, 57 percent of voters in the current district backed Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

By the numbers, Kilboy’s bid looks like a longshot. The almost $52,000 Kilboy’s campaign raised by the end of June is dwarfed by Joyce’s $1.9 million haul.

Then there’s Joyce’s long track record of winning elections. During this year’s Republican primary, he won almost 76 percent of the vote against challengers Patrick Awtrey and Bevin Cormack, who maintained Joyce is insufficiently conservative. Joyce has also fared well in past general elections. Two years ago, he defeated Democrat Hillary O’Connor Mueri with 60 percent of the vote. In 2018, he defeated Democrat Betsy Rader with 55 percent of the vote.

Joyce says he’s running for reelection because he wants to address problems in his district, like combating the opioid epidemic and ensuring the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative gets adequate funding. He says money he helped secure for Great Lakes cleanup helped to restore wetlands along the lakes, reduce fertilizer runoff that produces algal blooms, and fight invasive species.

“I’ve been known since I got here as being someone who gets things done,” says Joyce. “I try to take the problems I see at home and work with local figures to find ideas we can turn into solutions that benefit the district and my state.”

He co-chairs the House Cannabis Caucus, and has been selected to chair a group for GOP moderates called the Republican Governance Group in the next Congress, which he describes as “the dealmakers this legislative body cannot govern without.” He is a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, where he’s the top Republican on the subcommittee that funds national parks. If Republicans take control of the U.S. House of Representatives after November’s election, he’s likely to chair that subcommittee or another of the 12 subcommittees that determine government spending.

He has worked with Democrats on legislation that would prepare the government for the eventual end of cannabis prohibition, another that would create a commission to study how labor shortages occur and recommend fixes, and a recently passed law that would ensure the Department of Veterans Affairs proactively reaches out to veterans newly released from military service to help them integrate into civilian life.

Joyce, who spent more than two decades as Geauga County Prosecutor, says he has tried to promote an “all of the above” approach to alleviate the opioid epidemic by introducing bills to promote treatment for addiction, crack down on illegal distribution, help first responders and “most importantly, go after the fentanyl that is getting mixed in with all these drugs that are killing our kids.”

Joyce says he and roughly 60 volunteers are helping him to knock on doors and get to know voters in the parts of the district he hasn’t previously represented in Portage and Trumbull counties.

Kilboy says he’s campaigning by knocking on doors, attending county fairs and community events and addressing groups that invite him. He’ll also rely on postcards and digital ads to get the word out about his campaign, because he doesn’t have as much money as Joyce.

As a nurse, Kilboy says he often discusses health care issues with voters that range from the affordability of prescription drugs to access to care. He tells them that if he’s elected to Congress, he’d try to implement a federal health care program paid for with tax dollars that would provide basic preventative health care services and require extra payments from people who engage in unhealthy behavior, like consuming fast food three times a day.

“We spend anywhere between $10 trillion and $15 trillion a year on health care but we don’t have great outcomes,” Kilboy said. “We need to prevent people from getting sick because it’s a lot cheaper to do that than it is to take care of people after they’ve got sick.”

Inflation:

Joyce says the most common worries he hears from constituents are about inflation and how rising prices of groceries, gasoline and other necessities have affected “their ability to pursue happiness.” He says he supports House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” agenda, which would limit government spending and return “to running a government that’s lean and mean taking care of business for everyone but also not giving money away like we have been over the last four years.” He also said that making the United States energy-independent would help curb inflation.

Kilboy says the global coronavirus pandemic, the fragile international supply chain it revealed, the war between Russia and Ukraine, and consolidation in industries like meatpacking have all contributed to inflation. He argues that improving the supply chain, breaking up consolidated industries and making more products in the United States would help address problems.

“Enabling small business and medium sized businesses to expand and grow right here, locally, in Ohio, and getting folks into all these empty jobs, we need to fill them to ease up on inflation,” Kilboy says.

Energy:

Joyce says the United States was a net exporter of energy in 2019, and denounces President Joe Biden for trying to “kill fossil fuels” and stop all investment in them.

“If you want electric cars, you still have to produce the energy for that somewhere,” Joyce says. “We need to maximize the production of energy, cleaner energy. American gas is 40% cleaner than Russian gas. We’ve cut our emissions more than China, India and Russia combined.”

He says that unless the United States does what’s necessary to reduce its reliance on foreign countries for energy, “we’re going to continue to have this problem with rolling blackouts … I think you’re really going to see folks in the Northeast, when they start filling their tanks with home heating oil and they see the price escalation there, they will really feel the punch of it.”

Kilboy says the United States should develop a broad portfolio of non-fossil fuel sources to address the nation’s energy needs, including taking a closer look at nuclear energy. He says nuclear reactor accidents at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, Ukraine’s Chernobyl, and Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plants were all “one-off things that happened … that will never happen anywhere in the world again.”

“We need to look at things like hydrogen fuels and continue to invest in nuclear and solar,” Kilboy said. “We need to look at everything, all the technologies we have now, and advance it, ramp up production.”

Student loans:

Both candidates expressed a degree of skepticism about Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 of student loan debt held by the U.S. Department of Education for borrowers who make less than $125,000 per year, or $250,000 for married couples.

Kilboy says he personally has significant student loan debts and understands that it’s a struggle for some people to pay them off, but he is concerned about saddling middle class Americans with the burden of paying for other people’s loans.

He says the debt reduction will help some low income people “get out of the debt cycle and get a leg up in life,” but the nation needs to address problems like the high cost of tuition and textbooks as well as predatory lending that has contributed to student loan debts. He says cuts in government aid to schools forced them to raise tuition, but schools should also trim fat and spend “less money on administration and frills that aren’t necessary” to provide a quality education.

Joyce calls it “fundamentally wrong” for taxpayers to bail out students’ debts and says he hopes courts overturn the policy. The Biden’s “debt transfer” would cost $400 billion to $600 billion and most benefits would go to households in the top 60% of income, says Joyce.

“It’s absurd for him to do this when you’ve got these people who have worked in trades or worked themselves through school and did what most Americans would do to receive an education,” Joyce says. “I don’t have an issue with reducing interest on the loans, but you can’t just make the loan go away.”

He has introduced legislation that would increase the tax levied on annual university profits, expand the number of universities that must pay the tax, and impose extra tax hikes on the endowments of colleges that raise the net price of attendance above the rate of inflation over the preceding three years.

Ukraine:

Kilboy and Joyce agreed that the United States needs to assist Ukraine, and both called for oversight over how the money is being used.

“Ukraine has a history of corruption and there’s some concern there, but at the end of the day, we absolutely cannot let Russia come in and annex another sovereign country,” Kilboy says.

Joyce says it would “send the wrong message to the world” to let Russian President Vladimir Putin continue trying to expand his empire.

Last month, Joyce joined a majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted against a stopgap government funding bill that would provide $12.3 billion in emergency aid for Ukraine He released a statement that denounced the legislation as “inadequate” and said it doesn’t “reflect or address the current needs of the American people.”

“While I support much of what’s in the bill, the fact remains that it does nothing to address the high price of energy or provide new sources of reliable, affordable energy, it takes no action to reduce inflation or prevent an economic recession, and it lacks any additional resources to secure our southern border,” Joyce’s statement said. “It is lazy, irresponsible governing at a time when the American people need the exact opposite.”

The 2020 election:

Joyce and Kilboy agree that the 2020 election was conducted fairly.

Joyce was not among the 147 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives who voted to overturn 2020 election results. He says Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose “did a hell of a job” in ensuring that Ohio’s last presidential election was conducted properly, and noted that Democrats previously challenged the results of presidential elections won by Republicans.

“I remember Vice President Biden saying ‘It’s over, do you understand me, it’s over!’ when Democrats in the House of Representatives raised objections to President Trump’s 2016 election,” Joyce said.

Kilboy says he was concerned by the election’s aftermath, where Trump’s supporters tried to strongarm state officials into changing results and looks forward to examining results of investigations being conducted by the Justice Department and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Abortion:

Joyce agrees with the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the 1972 Roe v. Wade precedent that previously legalized abortion and says each state should be able to set its own rules. Joyce opposes abortion but believes it should be permitted in cases of rape, incest and to save a mother’s life.

As a nurse, Kilboy says he believes abortion decisions should be left to women and their health care professionals without government interference. He called the Supreme Court ruling a “mistake” and said Congress should pass legislation that would protect the right to abortion health care services and block states from taking it away.

“We now have seen that your zip code dictates the type of health care services you’re able to get legally,” said Kilboy, who observed that in addition to the 10-year-old rape victim who had to leave Ohio for an abortion, the state’s abortion ban also affects people who need the procedure for other reasons.

Guns and mass shootings:

Joyce, who prosecuted a 17-year-old who fatally shot three Chardon High School students in 2012, believes better mental health services and proper gun safety training are needed to curb mass shootings.

“I’m convinced he had no understanding of the permanence of what he did,” Joyce said of T.J. Lane, who was sentenced to life in prison for the Chardon killings. “This isn’t a game, and when we shoot that projectile, it’s meant to kill people … If you get a car at 16, you have to have supervision before you’re allowed to drive the car out on your own. I think the same thing holds true with weapons.”

Kilboy, a retired naval officer who has a concealed-carry permit, supports universal background checks whenever firearms are sold, as well as a waiting period for the background investigations before the sales can go through. He also believes the sale of semi-automatic assault rifles should be outlawed.

“As a service member, I view semi-automatic assault rifles as a weapon of war,” Kilboy said. “I don’t see a single reason why anybody in this country who is a civilian needs to possess a weapon of war.”

Policing:

Joyce decries “the insanity” of people who call for defunding the police, and said law enforcement officers “risk their life and limb for us” on a daily basis.

“Any policeman or policewoman who goes out there, the next person they stop in traffic could be their last one,” Joyce said.

He said police have a difficult job, and the proportion of those who behave improperly is tiny. He said the grand jury system and other protocols are in place to prosecute police misconduct, and that police “for the most part, are pretty good about policing themselves.

Joyce said the federal government should make sure police have proper training and equipment to address the situations they encounter. He said fire and police departments in his district have trouble finding enough workers, and there should be ways to subsidize loans to train emergency services workers for those open jobs.

Kilboy said he’s met with several police organizations in the district, and supports federal grant programs to assist with police training, and a degree of federal oversight over police departments with documented histories of extreme tactics.

“State and local communities have to fix the problem,” Kilboy said. “The local community drives these things. The federal government isn’t in the place to step in our try to dictate at the micro level.”

Kilboy said law enforcement is overburdened, and some of the situations police must respond to, such as domestic disputes would be better handled by a social worker or case worker. He said he’d support federal programs to boost the police by hiring employees to handle the types of calls that don’t require “someone with a gun and badge,” and remove some of that burden from them.