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Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Deputy Director Madison Sheahan finished third in her Ohio Republican congressional primary Tuesday night, handing ICE critics a talking point but leaving Republican officials convinced they have the right candidate to flip a battleground seat.
Sheahan’s loss to former state Rep. Derek Merrin brings relief to Republicans concerned about her electability against Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio.
Kaptur is the longest-serving woman in congressional history and a top National Republican Congressional Committee target in the midterms as a potential seat to flip in the battle for the narrow House majority. The House is currently 218-212, with five vacancies and one independent who caucuses with the GOP.
“40-year career politician Marcy Kaptur has failed Ohioans for decades and Northwest Ohioans are ready for change,” NRCC spokesman Zach Bannon told Fox News on Wednesday morning.
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“While Kaptur has pushed a radical far-left agenda of higher taxes, open borders, and sex change surgeries for kids, Derek Merrin is set to flip the seat red in order to deliver commonsense leadership and real results.”
Merrin won 44.1% of the vote, according to the latest Associated Press election results, with state Rep. Josh Williams second (24.3%) and Sheahan third (20.2%).
The northwest Ohio 9th Congressional District has been identified as one of the Republicans’ best pickup opportunities of the midterms.
Merrin’s win sets up a rematch with Kaptur, who has represented the Toledo-area seat since 1983 and eked out a 2024 victory by just 0.64%, losing by just 2,382 votes. Trump carried the district by 7 points in 2024 and Kaptur’s narrow reelection margin last cycle makes the seat especially vulnerable.
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Sheahan, 29, entered the race after leaving her post as deputy director of ICE in January, leaning heavily into her work carrying out President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. The former aide to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem hailed her record at ICE in her campaign launch video, saying she was best suited to flip Kaptur’s seat due to immigration enforcement experience.
“In Washington, hypocrisy, excuses and failure can earn you a lifetime job,” she said. “But on my family farm, that would have put us out of business.”
But her pitch did not break through in a primary where local analysts said voters appeared more focused on economic issues, including manufacturing jobs and tariffs. Merrin also began the race with stronger name recognition locally. Sheahan, a native of tiny Curtice, Ohio, near the shores of Lake Erie, labeled herself “a Trump conservative,” but had just recently moved back to the area after leaving ICE and spending time in Louisiana and South Dakota.
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The result avoids what some Republicans privately viewed as a potentially riskier general-election matchup. While immigration remains a motivating issue for GOP voters, Sheahan’s association with ICE came as the agency faced heightened scrutiny over aggressive enforcement tactics, including fatal shootings by immigration officers earlier this year.
“There hasn’t been an enormous amount of chatter about her,” Democrat operative Aaron Pickrell told the The Washington Post. “Even within Ohio Republican politics, immigration does not seem like the driving factor.”
Her loss also suggests that Trump’s immigration platform, while still central to the Republican brand, may not be enough by itself to carry a candidate through a competitive primary in a battleground House district.
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“In less than one year at ICE, I’ve stopped more illegal immigration than Marcy Kaptur has in her 43 years in Washington,” Sheahan said in her January campaign launch video alongside Noem in ICE garb.
“So when the call came to help President Trump clean up the dangerous immigration mess, as deputy director of ICE, I answered the call.”
While Democrats will attempt to point to the ICE ties as being an unpopular electoral issue this cycle, immigration enforcement “is still a winning issue for Republicans” in the district, state and nationally, a GOP operative told the Post.
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Immigration “does fire up the base in districts like that, especially in a low-turnout election when you need low-propensity Trump voters,” the operative added. “This issue galvanizes them.”
Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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