Days after winning his own race for Congress, Columbus’s congressman-elect is already wading into the city’s next big political fight. Don Leonard told The Columbus Dispatch that he plans to back Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin in the 2027 Columbus mayoral race, an early endorsement that lines up two self-styled change candidates against City Hall’s incumbent mayor.
Leonard told The Columbus Dispatch that he believes Hardin is the future of the Democratic Party and brings a bold vision for transforming central Ohio. “Shannon Hardin is somebody who gets big ideas and thinks about how to get them done,” Leonard told The Dispatch.
Hardin is challenging fellow Democrat Andy Ginther, the incumbent Columbus mayor, who is seeking a fourth term, according to The Columbus Dispatch. The challenge sets up a rare public split at the top of the city’s Democratic establishment, with the sitting council president running against the mayor he has served alongside.
The field may not stop at two names. State Rep. Munira Abdullahi has also pulled the requisite paperwork to run for mayor, and some lesser-known longshots are considering getting into the race, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
How many candidates ultimately make the ballot matters for how the race unfolds. If more than two candidates qualify, Columbus will hold a nonpartisan primary, and the top two vote-getters will advance to the general election, according to The Columbus Dispatch. That structure rewards candidates who can build a broad coalition early — and makes a high-profile endorsement like Leonard’s more valuable now, while the field is still forming.
Leonard arrives in the mayor’s race with fresh credibility as an outsider who won. A Columbus resident, he survived his own bruising congressional primary against Adam Miller, a former state representative backed by the party establishment, and he told The Columbus Dispatch that he received little support from Ohio Democrats even after that primary was over. His endorsement of Hardin reads as a deliberate signal that he intends to keep backing challengers to the establishment, this time at City Hall.
The endorsement is also, in part, a debt repaid. Hardin was one of the few elected Democrats to support Leonard during his congressional run, and he attended Leonard’s election-night party in Hilliard, according to The Columbus Dispatch. At a moment when much of the party apparatus stood back, Hardin stood with Leonard — and Leonard is now returning that support in the most public way available to a new member of Congress.
The harder question for Hardin is whether a 12-year member of Columbus City Council can credibly run as the candidate of change. The Columbus Dispatch noted that Hardin’s long council tenure means he lacks the outsider credentials Leonard carried into his race. Hardin has recently pushed back against the old “Columbus Way” — the city’s tradition of consensus-driven, establishment politics — and has expressed regrets for his previous silence, according to The Dispatch.
Leonard leaned directly into that argument. He told The Columbus Dispatch that Hardin told his supporters he regrets some of the ways in which he “breathed life into this Columbus Way” and vowed to do better. “I haven’t heard Mayor Ginther say that, and I doubt I will,” Leonard told The Dispatch.
Hardin, for his part, welcomed the backing. He told The Columbus Dispatch he is grateful for Leonard’s support. “Don Leonard defied the odds, beat the establishment, and built a movement of everyday people, because his message of change resonated with Columbus. I am grateful to have his support as I work to earn voters’ support to do the same in this campaign for Mayor,” Hardin told The Dispatch.
For Columbus voters, the endorsement clarifies the shape of the 2027 contest more than a year before they will decide it. On one side stands a mayor seeking a fourth term and defending the governing approach that has run City Hall for a decade. On the other stands the council president — an insider by resume who is increasingly campaigning as a critic of the system he helped run — now with a newly elected congressman amplifying his call for change.
What happens next is the slow work of a long campaign. Candidates will continue to file paperwork, line up endorsements and test whether the field grows beyond Ginther, Hardin and Abdullahi. If it does, the nonpartisan primary will narrow the race to two finalists for the general election. NewsForce247 will follow the filings, the endorsements and the first policy fights of the 2027 mayoral race as they develop.