Trump’s Decisive Ohio Senate Endorsement

O n Tuesday, J. D. Vance won the Ohio GOP Senate primary and is now the favorite to win the November general election against Democrat Tim Ryan.

Vance garnered 32.2 percent of the vote — beating out fellow Republicans Josh Mandel (23.9 percent) and Matt Dolan (23.3 percent) and outperforming the final RealClearPolitics polling average, which pegged the race at Vance 26 percent, Mandel 22.5 percent, and Dolan 21.5 percent. Dolan’s late surge in the polls was real but also too little, too late. The collapse of Jane Timken helped Dolan, but Mike Gibbons’s collapse helped Vance more.

The lesson for many will be that the key to winning a GOP primary in 2022 is to become a Trumpist through and through: Vance (like Mandel) aped Trump’s style on Twitter, said Marjorie Taylor Greene “did nothing wrong” by speaking at a white-nationalist conference, and he was “a warrior on the Rigged and Stolen Presidential Election,” according to Trump’s endorsement of Vance. Many politicians have evolved in a Trumpian manner, but this was a wild transformation from the Vance of just a few years ago.

That narrative from Tuesday’s Ohio GOP primaries is complicated somewhat by the fact that Ohio GOP governor Mike DeWine, a traditional Republican at least as critical of Trump as Matt Dolan was, secured his own victory with 48.1 percent of the vote, beating his nearest competitor by 20 points. DeWine, of course, had the advantage of incumbency and of being a fixture in statewide Ohio offices for decades, unlike the five well-funded but not well-known candidates in the Senate race.

Trump’s endorsement can’t work wonders in every race — that’s why he didn’t endorse either DeWine challenger — but it was decisive in Ohio’s wide-open Senate GOP primary. Trump endorsed Vance on April 15, and if you look at the polls (and also at Google search trends before and after that date), the endorsement obviously paid off. As Spencer Kimball of Emerson College Polling said: “Trump’s endorsement was a game changer for Vance.” So Trump-centric were the campaigns of four of the five candidates that after Trump endorsed Vance, the pro-Mandel Club for Growth ran an ad that questioned whether Trump knew what he was doing and again highlighted Vance’s past anti-Trump comments.

Politico’s Alex Isenstadt has a good piece on the Vance team’s campaign to win Trump’s endorsement: Policy, especially Vance’s focus on immigration, helped him somewhat in that respect, but it probably mattered more that Vance had the backing of Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson and was the only candidate with a lick of rhetorical talent. Trump thought Mandel had embarrassed himself in a debate by getting in Mike Gibbons’s face and reportedly said in private that Mandel was “f—ng weird.”

“Vance kept his distance after an early meeting — and ultimately won over the image-focused Trump anyway,” Politico’s Isenstadt reports, “with the former president privately telling Vance he had a ‘beautiful’ golf swing and was a ‘handsome son of a b—-.’”

On April 5 and April 6, I wrote about how Vance had staked out an unpopular position on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when he said on February 19: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” The unpopularity of Vance’s position was demonstrated by polls showing strong support among Republicans for U.S. aid to Ukraine; the blowback Vance received from his own populist-friendly donors; the shifting rhetoric of both Vance and New Right hero Josh Hawley after the invasion; the almost–unanimous votes in support for U.S. aid to Ukraine in Congress; and Vance’s low Fox News and Emerson poll numbers in late February and early March.

Ukraine obviously faded from the news since Russia retreated from outside Kyiv to the eastern part of the country in early April, and Vance’s statement wasn’t enough to stop him from winning close to one-third of the vote. But I never said that the issue would be decisive in the primary: When the most recent Fox poll from early March showed Vance at 11 percent, I wrote on April 5 that “the winning candidate in the five-way race could prevail with less than 30 percent of the vote, and a late 15-point surge is far from unthinkable in a five-way primary election,” and my April 14 piece for the print magazine highlighted the Ohio Senate race as the May primary “where a Trump endorsement could matter the most.” We’ll need to wait for the results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere this month, but there’s a good chance Trump’s decision to back Vance will indeed have been his most consequential endorsement in a dozen states holding primaries in May.