---
title: "A House Seat, a Custody Trial and $26 Million in Two Weeks of Ohio Airtime"
description: "Republicans once begged Max Miller to quit his reelection race; now they are spending millions to save him as his custody fight heads to trial days after the vote"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-31T09:30:16.634Z
modified: 2026-10-31T14:04:21Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-house-seat-a-custody-trial-and-26-million-in-two-weeks-of--403660
language: en
tags: ["politics", "trump", "elections", "divorce", "abuse", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A House Seat, a Custody Trial and $26 Million in Two Weeks of Ohio Airtime

*Republicans once begged Max Miller to quit his reelection race; now they are spending millions to save him as his custody fight heads to trial days after the vote*

By Jan Sokol · October 31, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-house-seat-a-custody-trial-and-26-million-in-two-weeks-of--403660

## In brief

- Rep. Max Miller faces Democrat Brian Poindexter in Ohio’s 7th District, which Trump won by 11 points
- Miller’s ex-wife alleges abuse, including an incident with a gun when their daughter was an infant; he denies all allegations
- Republican spending tops $9 million in the district, including $5 million-plus from the Congressional Leadership Fund, against $17 million from Democrats
- Miller loaned his campaign $1.25 million after raising just $145,000 from donors last quarter
- Miller’s custody trial begins days after Election Day; a House Ethics investigation he requested remains unresolved

Ohio’s 7th Congressional District, stretching from the outer suburbs of Cleveland into the farm country beyond, should not be in play. Donald Trump carried it by 11 points. Yet in a midterm autumn when voters count the price of gasoline and groceries, Republicans find themselves defending even this ground — and defending a candidate, Rep. Max Miller, whose own party spent the summer trying to make him go away.

As [CNN reports](https://cnn.com/2026/10/31/politics/republicans-max-miller-midterms), Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of abusing her and holding a gun to her when their daughter was an infant — allegations he vehemently denies. The custody case at the center of the storm is scheduled to go to trial just days after Election Day. Power, one learns, has its own calendar: the verdict of the voters first, the verdict of the court later, and in between a week of campaigning in which the congressman tells the district, in effect, that divorce is messy and that what the summer knew of him is behind him.

## The rescue

The rescue effort is expensive. Miller’s fundraising has lagged — he raised just $145,000 from donors last quarter and loaned his campaign a million dollars of his own affluent family’s money, adding another $250,000 loan this week, Federal Election Commission filings show. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the House GOP’s leading super PAC, has put more than $5 million into the race; total Republican spending in the district exceeds $9 million. Democrats, scenting a wider map, have spent $17 million.

It was not always so loyal. Over the summer, as the allegations gathered press attention, national Republicans quietly pressed Miller to leave the race so another candidate could take his place before an August deadline. His ex-father-in-law — Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, a Republican — said he should not serve in Congress. The state’s other Republican senator, Jon Husted, called for him to exit. Miller refused. “I have the utmost confidence that my constituents back home know me,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper in early August. “I’m going to continue to push. I am going to win this race.”

Now Speaker Mike Johnson says the House Ethics investigation into Miller — an investigation the congressman himself requested this summer, saying it would clear his name — should be allowed to play out, and he has neither abandoned nor disavowed him. The committee does not release findings this close to an election, and when it will finish is unknown. Miller, if he survives Tuesday, returns to Washington with the inquiry still hanging, and with the custody trial before him — a proceeding now drowned in legal briefs over its scope, as Moreno seeks to amend the shared parenting agreement. Through that battle she has accused him of pushing her during a custody exchange in February and of throwing hot water on her at the end of their marriage. He denies all wrongdoing. He declined to comment for CNN’s story.

## The challenger

His opponent is Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker, who told CNN on Thursday: “I am always going to be nervous until the votes are counted but there’s a lot of good momentum on the ground. We have thousands of volunteers and supporters, polling looks good, but ya know I am going to just continue to work for the next five days to make sure we reach as many people and make sure people exercise their right to vote.”

Neither man has escaped the other’s file of past sins. Poindexter’s early ads featured his daughters teasing their father — a deliberate contrast, at the moment Miller faced questions about his treatment of women. But Republicans answered with the challenger’s own record: a 2013 fight with another man at a baseball game, for which he was arrested but not charged, and a 1998 arrest on suspicion of possessing crack cocaine, in which he was likewise never charged. Poindexter says he has never used hard drugs in his life, that his job drug-tests him routinely and that he has never failed a test.

The arrests became a cornerstone of the Republican advertising, none blunter than the CLF spot released last week titled “what’s he smoking?” — “worse than Poindexter’s thirty-year rap sheet of drugs and assault, his extreme liberal agenda,” its narrator says, before declaring that Poindexter backs higher taxes on working families and seniors’ Social Security and “free healthcare for illegals”: “It makes you wonder, what is Brian Poindexter smoking?”

Poindexter calls the record “overblown.” “I’ve been completely upfront and honest about my record getting in some fights, smoking marijuana a few times and getting some traffic tickets, but the more serious allegations they made about me are complete nonsense,” he said. His answer came in an ad of his own, the challenger shooting pool as he recounts a traffic citation: “the people who know me best know these ads are lies. The people who know Max Miller best hold their breath when he has custody of his daughter.”

## What the voters see

The torrent appears to have worked, though perhaps not as its buyers intended. Kathy Brown, an independent in the district, told CNN she may vote for neither man. “I don’t see either one of them as having a good character so I might go independent this way, which is kind of like throwing your vote out the window,” she said. Corinne Bongers, who has voted more Democratic since Trump took the presidency, said she is “probably going Poindexter” — but that “the ads make them both look like bad people.”

Miller, in a recent advertisement, looks into the camera and takes the matter head on. “For two years, my family’s heartbreak has been dragged onto your TV because well, that’s politics,” he says. “Despite relentless press of investigations, every allegation against me was proven false. As a result, I thankfully share equal custody of our sweet daughter.”

There is something in this contest I cannot help but note, and it is not a fact so much as a reflection: the machinery of a great party, which in August judged this seat lost with this man atop it, now spends nine million dollars to keep him in it, while the other side spends seventeen million to prise him loose. Between those sums stand the voters of the 7th District, holding their noses or their breath, and a little girl whose custody will be argued in a courtroom once the ballots stop mattering to anyone but her.