Sen. Niraj Antani, R-Miamisburg, said Monday that he will not run for re-election to the seat representing much of Dayton and southern Montgomery County suburbs including Kettering and Centerville.
Antani made the announcement to WHIO-TV and would not answer questions from the Dayton Daily News about his decision or what plans he might have for the future.
Also on Monday, the Montgomery County Republican Party received notice that Antani would be resigning from its central and executive committees, according to Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Twp., a suggestion to Montgomery County Republicans that Antani’s immediate political ambition would lie elsewhere.
“Who knows, but if you’re going to run … in Montgomery County, you’d probably want to stay on the central committee and the executive committee, wouldn’t you?” Young said.
Antani represents Senate District 6 until the end of 2024. Democrats are lining up to vie for the seat after the latest round of redistricting left it vulnerable to switch parties.
Most recently, Jyl Hall — Kettering city councilwoman and daughter of popular local politician Tony Hall — announced her campaign last week.
Credit: PROVIDED
Credit: PROVIDED
In the March 2024 primary for the Democratic nomination, Hall is poised to compete against second-term Rep. Willis Blackshear Jr., a Dayton Democrat who is foregoing a House re-election campaign; and Jocelyn Rhynard, a member of the Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio board and the Dayton Board of Education. Both Blackshear and Rhynard have pulled petitions from the Montgomery County Board of Elections but have not yet formally announced their candidacies.
At her campaign launch party last week, Hall, a self-described moderate, told this news organization that she intends to win over voters of the Ohio 6th Senate District by staying out of inflammatory rhetoric and focusing on “kitchen table” issues, which she would hope to address as a senator by reaching across the aisle to work with the Senate’s Republican supermajority.
“You don’t have to be window dressing in Columbus, Ohio, as a Democrat. You can represent the issues that really matter to people. And I believe those issues to be the things that families talk about at the kitchen tables,” Hall said. “I’m not somebody who really gets into a lot of the hot button topics that are designed to divide and conquer. I’m interested in bread-and-butter issues.”
She referenced food security, transportation, child care and public education as a few of the issues important to her.
Senate District 6 has been represented by Republicans for more than a decade, and redistricting gave Democrats a prime opportunity to pick up a seat in the Senate, where they’re outnumbered 7-to-26.
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