I’ll get to that money quote I have in my title in just a second. But first, this:
A GOP group aligned with a former staffer for Sen. Rob Portman is hoping to rally Ohio swing voters against J.D. Vance as part of a national effort to block Republican candidates who cast doubt on the 2020 presidential election.
The Republican Accountability Project is launching a $500,000 digital campaign featuring Republican voters in Ohio who plan to cast ballots for Vance's opponent, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan. The organization hopes to undermine candidates in key states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania who aligned themselves with former President Donald Trump and peddled false claims about election fraud.
"These are all people who voted Republican their entire lives, and they don’t recognize the party," founder Sarah Longwell said. "I think 2017 J.D. Vance would say the same thing.”
Among the group's key backers is John Bridgeland, a Cincinnati native and Republican who worked in Portman's congressional office. Bridgeland decided to support Ryan after seeing Vance walk back past criticisms of Trump and seek his support in the contentious GOP primary for Portman's seat.
Now that is a small investment but according to Longwell, it is a targeted buy aimed at winning over Republican voters who can’t stand Vance. As we have been seeing in polling, there’s certainly a section of Republican voters that won’t back Vance because Governor Mike DeWine (R. OH) has been over performing Vance by double digits. But here is the targets group of voters is going after:
Ohio Republicans who provided testimonials for the campaign said Vance can't be trusted because of his inconsistent views on Trump, something the "Hillbilly Elegy" author has been open about on the campaign trail. Former state Rep. Joan Lawrence said she'll support Gov. Mike DeWine and other Republicans in the November election, but she's unwilling to vote for Vance because of his fealty to the former president.
She also believes the Republican Party as a whole no longer respects the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution.
"I really am ashamed to say I’m a Republican," Lawrence said. "It’s embarrassing."
I can’t blame this section of Republican voters for being embarrassed by Vance:
J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, is one resident of this newly platted Caesarian section, as a recent profile in the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed. It referred to a year-old interview Vance gave on a far-right podcast in which he spoke approvingly of Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed monarchist who argues for an American Julius Caesar to take power.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said, referencing the era preceding Caesar’s dictatorship. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
The podcast’s host, Jack Murphy, endorsed this sentiment, discussing possible “extra-constitutional” remedies to be taken “if we want to re-found the country.” (He told Vance he thought voting an “ineffectual” way to “rip out this leadership class.”)
Vance, who said he had been “radicalized” by the actions of “malevolent and evil” political opponents, described what “wild” actions he had in mind at another point in the podcast. He wants to “seize the institutions of the left” and purge political opponents with “de-Nazification, de-Ba’athification.”
Vance suggested that former president Donald Trump, once elected in 2024, should fire all civil servants and replace them with “our people,” defy court orders blocking such an illegal action, and then “do what Viktor Orban has done,” referring to the Hungarian dictator’s bans on certain topics from school curricula. Vance justified such “outside-the-box” authoritarian actions by reasoning that the United States is “far gone” and not “a real constitutional republic” anymore.
And Vance is just a pathetically weak candidate:
Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, Republican nominees for Senate in Arizona and Ohio, respectively, have two things in common. One is that they’re both terrible candidates—charisma-free voids, running on a slate of radical, unpopular policies. Another is that they’ve become Trumpworld favorites despite each having a history of MAGA heresies. Masters was in favor of unrestricted immigration before he was against it; Vance called Donald Trump “cultural heroin” and spent most of the 2016 election trying to position himself as a kinder, gentler Republican that the GOP could turn to after Trump got slaughtered in the general election. Whoops!
But they share another interesting commonality: The only reason that they’re candidates at all is because Peter Thiel—their former boss—backed both with substantial donations. Once they won Trump’s endorsement, their party’s nomination was basically secured. Now, unsurprisingly, both are struggling against Democratic rivals who have run relentless campaigns highlighting both their extremist policies and their shared history of working in the finance industry. Masters has consistently trailed against his Democratic opponent, former astronaut Mark Kelly, a popular Democrat who is running ahead of the venture capitalist in spite of the general incompetence of the state’s other senator, Democratic albatross Kyrsten Sinema. Vance, meanwhile, is running neck-and-neck with Tim Ryan, who is running a populist campaign and vastly outperforming expectations in a state that Trump won by more than eight points.
Not long ago, Republicans were looking at a favorable electoral map—and certain control of both houses of Congress. Now Democrats are surging, and the GOP only has itself—and Thiel and Trump who handpicked so many of its failing candidates—to blame.
And again, this was just painstakingly stupid:
Former president Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio, for Republican Senate candidate JD Vance.
There’s just one problem: The rally takes place at 7:00 pm, which is the the same time that the Ohio State University will play the University of Toledo.
That means many people will likely be watching the game in football-fanatic Ohio. ESPN put the Buckeyes as number three in their college football power rankings after their 21-10 victory against Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish.
Representative Tim Ryan, Mr Vance’s Democratic opponent, mocked the timing of the rally.
“Dude just doesn't get it,” Mr Ryan tweeted.
The rally comes amid concerns that Mr Vance, whom Mr Trump endorsed in the GOP primary for Senate, is missing in action in the state. Mr Vance shot to prominence after he wrote the bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy after his work for Peter Thiel’s firm Mithril Capital. The book’s release concurred with Mr Trump’s ascent within the Republican Party and seemed to explain his appeal to white-working class voters.
Mr Vance had previously criticised Mr Trump and speculated whether he was “America’s Hitler.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund plans to drop $28m in the race.
Health and Democracy are on the ballot this year and we need to get ready to flip Ohio Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with Ryan and his fellow Ohio Democrats campaigns: