Once soft-spoken, Ohio conservatives embrace the Buckeye bomb throwers
COLUMBUS, OHIO >> Republicans running for the seat of retiring Ohio Sen. Rob Portman appear determined to bury the soft-spoken country-club bonhomie that was once a hallmark of the party in this state and replace it with the pugilistic brand of conservatism owned by Donald Trump and amplified by a new band of Buckeye bomb throwers.
The race descended into a brutal slugfest as the leading candidates, author-turned-venture capitalist J.D. Vance, former state treasurer Josh Mandel and a selffunded businessman, Mike Gibbons, entered the final weekend before Tuesday's primaries accusing one another of being insufficiently right-wing or disloyal to the man in Mar-a-Lago.
Ohio used to be known for the quiet conservatism of George Voinovich, a celebrated former senator, and Mike DeWine, its current governor; for the merlot-swilling happy-warrior days of former House Speaker John Boehner; for the moderation of John Kasich, a two-term governor; and for the free-trade, free-market ideology of Portman.
Instead, affections for such Ohio leaders are being weaponized — in broadsides from the candidates and advertisements by their allies — as evidence that rivals are paying only lip service to Trump and his angry populism.
“Josh Mandel: Another failed career politician squish,” a new ad from a super PAC supporting Vance blared on Ohio television sets Friday, calling Mandel, who is mounting his third Senate run, a “two-time loser” and “a moderate for the moderates.”
After so much vitriol, Ohio's primary will begin to shed light on just how much power the former president can still wield from his exile. But in the final days of campaigning, the leading contenders left no doubt about his ideological hold on the party.
At an evangelical church near Dayton on Friday, Mandel campaigned with Sen. Ted Cruz, RTexas, who sought to blunt the impact of Trump's endorsement of Vance two weeks ago.
“At the end of the day, it's not going to come down to who endorsed whom,” Cruz said before he and Mandel brought an older crowd to its feet with stem-winding paeans to conservatism and criticism of Democrats.
Some in the crowd of more than 100 worried that the endorsement of Vance had significantly lowered Mandel's odds of victory.
“I think it went down quite a bit,” said Paul Markowski, a retired police officer in a Trump 2020 cap.
He said he had not forgiven Vance for comments he made in 2016 denouncing Trump and saying that some of his support was driven by racism.
“I could get over him not supporting Trump,” Markowski said. “But when he bad-mouthed us, the voters, that pissed me off.”
Vance, for his part, pressed his attack on Mandel, who had vied for Trump's endorsement with ads calling himself “pro-God, progun, pro-Trump.” Vance's spokesperson, Taylor Van Kirk, called Mandel “a phony, fraud and sellout who claims to be `anti-establishment' in public but throws President Trump and the entire MAGA movement under the bus to the establishment behind closed doors.”
In turn, the one Republican who has said the party needs to move on from the former president, state Sen. Matt Dolan, castigated Vance for bringing members of the party's extremist wing, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, into the state Saturday — not because of their extreme positions but because they are “outsiders” who are “telling Ohioans how they should vote.”
In the rush to the right, Gibbons, who had styled himself a businessman in Trump's mold and was once the front-runner in the Senate contest, pledged his fealty to a right-wing movement, called the Convention of States, to rewrite the Constitution to restrain federal power.
All of the major candidates in the Republican Senate primary have insisted they are the true conservatives in the race, but only one, Vance, has the official imprimatur of the former president. That means the judgment that Republican voters render Tuesday will go a long way to show whether even conservative candidates like Mandel and Gibbons can overcome a cold shoulder from Trump.
“President Trump is a major factor in this state,” said Alex Triantafilou, the longtime chair of the Hamilton County Republican Party, which includes Cincinnati. “He just is. He still motivates our base in a way that some people think is waning, but it's not from my perspective.”
Still, to call Tuesday's Republican primary a referendum on the future of Trumpism — in Ohio and beyond — would go too far. The state's low-key Republican governor, DeWine, does not appear to be threatened in his quest for reelection by a primary challenger, Jim Renacci, whose “Putting Ohio First” campaign adopted MAGA themes in its attack on DeWine's pandemic-control efforts. Trump declined to endorse Renacci, seeing no prospect for victory.
The former president's attacks did chase the one Ohio Republican who voted to impeach him, Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, into retirement, and he buoyed a former White House aide, Max Miller, who is running for an Ohio House seat, despite an accusation from one of Trump's press secretaries, Stephanie Grisham, that he had physically abused her.
But in other contests, such as a heated Republican primary in northwest Ohio, mainstream Republicans are expected to prevail against conservative showmen like J.R. Majewski, who painted his vast backyard into a 19,000-square-foot Trump election sign and posted a video of himself walking through a shuttered factory with an assault-style rifle.
In the bellwether Senate race, however, Trump's influence is undeniable. The state was once a reliable birthing ground of centerright Republicans, such as Portman, Boehner and DeWine, who has been in Republican politics for 45 years as a House member, senator, lieutenant governor, attorney general and governor.
But the free-trade, free-market and pro-legal-immigration sentiments that were once hallmarks of the party have been washed away by Trumpism.
And the Ohio primary will kick off a four-week period that will reveal much about Trump's sway with the party.
Vance, buoyed by the endorsement bump and leading in a Fox News poll, is scarcely tacking to the center, confident in the support of the Republican base. On Saturday, he barnstormed through Ohio with two figures from the right fringe of the party, Greene and Gaetz. Today and Monday, he will be joined on the campaign trail by two other figures firmly in the former president's camp: Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Charlie Kirk, the bombastic leader of the far-right Turning Point USA.
But after trailing in the primary contest for months, Vance enters the final stretch as something of a front-runner, with the other candidates training their fire on him.
A pro-Vance super PAC, heavily funded by Peter Thiel, the Trumpaligned financier for whom Vance works, fired back Friday with an ad running in Columbus, Dayton and Cleveland that portrays Mandel as a “squish.” Mandel's embrace by the Republican nominees for the presidency in 2008 and 2012, John McCain and Mitt Romney, is treated in the advertisement like a scarlet letter, and kind words from Kasich might as well have come from Nancy Pelosi.
“Josh Mandel, he's for them, not us,” the narrator intones, a clear message that Tuesday's primary is geared toward the Republican extremes, not the sort of voters who once backed Kasich and Romney.
Gibbons, still in the hunt for the nomination, will trot out yet another Trump ally, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, on Monday to attest to his conservative bona fides.