Catching Our Eye News Roundup, June 30, 2026

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Ohio poll. USA Today reports, “Acton narrowly leads Ramaswamy in new Ohio governor poll.”

Democrat Amy Acton holds a narrow lead over Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, 47% to 44%, a gap that is within the poll’s margin of error.

Acton leads among voters under 50 and independents, while Ramaswamy leads with voters 50 and older.

Affordability and the cost of living are the top issues for voters aged 50 and older.

• 250. Cleveland.com’s Brent Larkin writes, “Trump’s grotesque distortions of what would otherwise be a gala 250th.”

The United States at 250 has little in common with the nation that celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976. Back then, Americans had reason to believe their government worked exactly as the Founders intended, that the Congress and Supreme Court would not tolerate the crimes of the Watergate era, forcing from office a president whose wrongdoings now seem like third-degree misdemeanors when compared to what’s happening today.

Nevertheless, in the election of 2024, an astonishing 77,302,580 Americans, according to official results, voted to return to the presidency a man who, not long before that, was found by two juries of his peers to have committed 34 felonies related to his business and a year before that, ordered to pay $88 million to a woman a civil jury found he sexually abused in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. About two dozen women have credibly accused Trump of sexual abuse, a habit he boasted about on at least one occasion.

In return for all those votes, Trump has returned the favor by assembling and presiding over a government that is today one of the most reviled on the planet, one where everything he touches, from his botched war with Iran to his lies about how he has disfigured our precious national landmarks, becomes a national embarrassment.

• Free food. The Dayton Daily News’ Ben Dannemiller reports, “Federal court: Dayton ordinance prohibiting giving away food downtown unconstitutional.”

A federal judge sided with a Dayton nonprofit that sued the city after one of its members was arrested in 2024 for distributing food to homeless people downtown.

Southern District of Ohio Judge Thomas Rose ruled Tuesday, June 24, that a city ordinance requiring a permit to distribute food, clothing, or toiletries in public in downtown Dayton is unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.