Anti-trump Republicans debut new ads in Ohio

Republicans working against President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign are targeting Ohio with their latest rebuke of the president.

The Lincoln Project super-pac is aligning with another group, Republican Voters Against Trump, for what they are calling “Operation Grant,” a nod to Ohio native Ulysses S. Grant. That alliance’s plan kicks off with a Lincoln Project advertisement attacking Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic that will air on broadcast and cable television from Friday through Monday in Columbus, Cleveland, Akron and Canton.

Republican Voters Against Trump is planning its own ad for the Cincinnati market.

Their efforts also will include a ground campaign that has had to move onto the web during the pandemic, said John Weaver, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project and former top political adviser to Gov. John Kasich. Weaver said the groups have 20,000 volunteers in Ohio and are planning a town hall meeting for next week.

“From our perspective we think Ohio is ripe for the picking and we intend through Operation Grant to do all we can to move it to Biden’s column,” he said.

Trump won in Ohio by 8 percentage points in 2016, but Weaver pointed to polling that shows the Buckeye State is undecided for 2020. Without the nation’s top political bellwether, he said, Trump cannot win re-election.

“Our intent is to break their Electoral College back,” Weaver said.

Trump has dismissed the Lincoln Project as a group of “losers” and “a disgrace to Honest Abe” as the group has peppered him with attack ads.

In June, it released an ad in Ohio and other swing states with clips of former presidents from both sides speaking during national crises, contrasting them with Trump.

The Lincoln Project has been producing video ads attacking the president with the help of more than $16 million the super-pac has raised, according to a report filed this week with the Federal Election Commission.

It already had aired an ad, “Mourning in America,” which plays off of President Ronald Reagan’s classic 1984 campaign “Morning in America” spot, but it added an Ohio twist for its local push. It attacks Trump’s response to the coronavirus with images of unemployment lines, graffiti-covered commercial buildings and sick people being carted on gurneys.

“There’s mourning in America. And under Donald Trump, Ohio is weaker and sicker and poorer,” the ad says. rrouan@dispatch.com @Rickrouan