LENOX TOWNSHIP – Sen. Jon Husted grew up in a place not all that dissimilar from Ashtabula County.
Much like those who have grown up in Ashtabula County, Husted was shaped by his experience growing up in Northwest Ohio, his college experience and the education he received early in his career.
“I have something in common with Ashtabula County,” Husted said while speaking at the 2026 Reagan Breakfast hosted by the Ashtabula County Republican Party at the Lenox Community Center on Saturday, Feb. 28. “I grew up in a corner county, too. I grew up in Williams County, which is the opposite corner in Northwest Ohio. I grew up eight miles from Indiana, way up the corner. When you’re in Ashtabula County or Williams County, you have to want to go there. Nobody in Ohio goes through them to go somewhere else, unless you go out of the state.”
Husted began his life in foster care before getting adopted by his parents, Jim and Judy Husted.
“I was fortunate to have that happen because my birth mother had already had two children,” Husted said. “She had somehow lost her husband in Vietnam, got pregnant, and she was encouraged not to have that baby. I got lucky. I got blessed. I started out in a foster home, and then talk about another blessing, I got adopted by two wonderful people, my mom and dad, Jim and Judy Husted, who are still with us at 88 and 86 years old.”
The Husteds made a home in rural Northwest Ohio.
“It’s a place full of great values, hard work,” Husted said. “My dad worked hard, two jobs a lot of the time. Hard work, personal responsibility, family, faith, freedom. That was just what we believed in. I grew up in a family where my godfather, my uncle, Jack, he worked three jobs. He worked in a factory. He was a custodian at the school at night and then on the weekends, he built houses. They’re just great people.”
As Husted was preparing to head off to college, his family was rocked by the closing of a business.
“Around the time I graduated high school, my dad lost his job, and so did two of my uncles,” Husted said. “The town I went to high school in had around 4,000 people, and the place they worked at had almost 400 employees, and then it was going away. My dad lost his job.”
Husted learned that when a large employer leaves a community, there’s more than an economic impact.
“When that happens, there’s nobody to buy your house,” Husted said. “You have to move. There’s no jobs. The unemployment rate at the time was around nine percent in the state. It’s not just an economic problem. It just tore our family apart because everybody had to leave. A lot of my friends had that happen, too. That always stuck with me, that the economy is about more than just jobs and money. It’s about families. It’s about communities that get torn apart when we don’t do it right.”
Husted attended the University of Dayton and fulfilled a lifelong dream by playing football for the Flyers where he was forced to show some resilience.
“I was a running back,” Husted said. “I was the seventh-team running back. There was no eighth team. On picture day, I go to get my uniform. For those of you that know football, you’ll know why this is funny. The equipment manager gave me number 63. You can’t play running back and wear the number 63. I said, ‘I can’t have the number 63, I’m a running back.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter what number you are, you’ll never play here.’”
Husted proved that equipment manager wrong by going on to start for two-and-a-half seasons and becoming an All-American defensive back. He also won a national championship while playing for the Flyers.
“We don’t give up,” Husted said. “You can never quit. You’ve got to fight no matter what. There’s so many times when I give advice to young people, it’s ‘If you believe it, don’t give up. The difference between success and failure is that no matter how tough it gets, you can’t give up.’”
After graduating from the University of Dayton, Husted took a job in economic development in the City of Dayton.
“I had a really good job,” Husted said. “It wasn’t until many, many years later that I realized the only reason I got that job is because nobody else wanted that job because in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1990s, jobs were leaving, not coming.”
During the 1990s, Dayton was not in a good place economically.
“In the decade, we had five GM and Delphi plants close and we lost, essentially, 30,000 jobs,” Husted said. “You know what that means, not just those jobs, but everybody who worked at the supply chain and at the restaurants and all the things. It was over, and it was hard, and that’s why I care about these issues so much.”
As he and his team looked for ways to bring companies to Dayton, Husted learned a sobering fact about his home state.
“We went to South Carolina for a meeting because they’re the ones that tell businesses where to locate,” Husted said. “I remember this like it happened yesterday. I said, ‘What about Ohio? What can we do?’ And the guy kind of laughed at us, and he said, ‘You realize, I’m not going to tell any CEO (to move to Ohio). Your tax system is a mess. You’ve got lawsuit problems, you’ve got workers’ comp problems. You have disastrous tax systems for businesses. I’m not going to tell anybody to come to your state.’ He said, ‘They laugh at you.’ That felt like a gut punch. You’re so proud of where you work and where you live and they tell you that they’re not coming.”
Instead of giving up on his home state, Husted went to work.
“I remember when I got elected into office, I said, ‘I’m going to fix this,’” Husted said. “This was a fight we’re fighting because I loved Ohio despite all of those things. Most people would say, ‘Well, where you grew up, it failed. Where you started your career is failing. You should leave.’ That’s just not who I am. That means, when something’s not going right, you roll up your sleeves and you go fix it. Isn’t that what Americans do? I’m going to stay and fight because I believe in the people. When I got to the legislature, I remember we started the path.”
At the time Husted began serving in the state legislature, income tax was high, taxes on businesses were high and businesses were relocating to other states.
“We fixed all that, eliminated the death tax,” Husted said. “By the way, it’s not just me, there was a team of people. We were the 37th worst state to do business in. Now, we’re the fifth-best. We’ve had more than 60 companies move from the coast to Ohio over the last five years – pharmaceutical companies, chip companies, aviation companies, all moving to Ohio. It’s great, because I want to do more Made in America and I always say you can’t do more Made in America without Ohio. Ohio makes so many products, from the food you eat to the cars you drive, the trucks that deliver to the Europeans, to the steel, to the chips. We do all of it.”
Because of his love for Ohio, though reluctant to leave home, Husted accepted an appointment to the Senate seat vacated when J.D. Vance was elected to the vice presidency as his running mate, Donald Trump, was elected president.
“I thought long and hard about it for a tortured couple of weeks, about whether or not I wanted to do this,” Husted said. “I just remember thinking I may never get another chance like this again to help the country.”
“It was my patriotic responsibility to go serve Ohio and fight,” Husted continued. “In the announcement that day, I remember thinking to myself, ‘What is it that I’m going to do? What’s going to be my guiding light?’ It’s the same thing that it’s kind of always been, those working families.”
A year into his appointment, Husted said he has done his best to remember the lessons he learned through the experiences he had early in his life.
“I want to tell you just how much we’ve accomplished in just one year,” Husted said. “We passed the Working Man Act. If we hadn’t passed it, all of the tax policy that had been put in place by the previous Trump administration would have gone away. A single Democrat vote, and it would have led to a $3,500 tax increase. Instead, we passed it and gave that same hand about a $5,000 tax benefit.”
