In the waning minutes of his final public event before Ohio’s Republican primary, venture capitalist and Senate hopeful J.D. Vance offered voters some words of wisdom he had picked up on the campaign trail about how to choose the right politicians.
“Judge them by their enemies,” Vance said.
It was quite a remark, coming from a man who has spent the last two weeks trumpeting the endorsement of someone he himself once considered a political enemy: former President Donald Trump.
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It also captured the essence of a long, knives-out primary race, which for all its performative cynicism, insults, and angry outbursts still shows no clear frontrunner heading into Election Day on Tuesday.
And Ohio voters aren’t the only ones confused.
Vance’s prize backer, Trump, has also appeared indifferent, despite his “complete and total endorsement” of the Ivy League investor. At a rally over the weekend, Trump called Vance by his top opponent Josh Mandel’s last name—“J.D. Mandel.” And on Monday, when Trump tried a reset during a telerally shortly after the Vance event, he hedged again.
After touting his “unprecedented” endorsement record, Trump said “it took a lot of courage for all of us to get into this mess they have up in Ohio.”
“I actually like all of them,” Trump admitted.
But going by the polling, the truth is that voters appear to not really like any of them.
The race has seen several lead changes, and at least four candidates going into Tuesday have a fighting chance: Vance, Mandel, businessman Mike Gibbons, and the pack’s lone moderate, state senator Matt Dolan, who has seen his numbers pick up in recent weeks.
A Trafalgar poll released Monday put Vance in a slim lead, with 26.2 percent support. That’s about 4 points over Dolan, with Mandel polling a close third at 20 percent. It’s a significant shift. Until Trump’s endorsement, Vance had never led in outside polling. And the most consistent former frontrunner, Gibbons, no longer shows in the top three.
The choice, Vance said in the Monday telerally, was a “battle for the soul” of the Republican Party.
“Will we be the MAGA party,” he asked, or will the GOP “go back to 2004 and weakly do nothing to defend our country?”
Ohioans don’t seem to share that existential urgency.
For months, polls have consistently described an unsteady race, with every survey heavily qualified by the same caveat—undecided voters. A Fox News poll from March showed that two-thirds of Ohio voters who supported one of the top three candidates—at the time, Gibbons, Vance, and Mandel—said that they might still change their minds.
With so much in the air, many are looking to the skies.
“It’s going to rain tomorrow,” longtime Ohio GOP booster and Vance backer Linda Strater told The Daily Beast at the Vance event Monday night. “You know, that’s typically a good sign for Republicans, because we vote in the rain. But maybe not for this one, because Mandel, he’s got an underground movement. Very determined. Very determined. I know because I used to be one. But now I sound superstitious.”
The candidates have reacted differently to the uncertainty. Gibbons, who had already sunk more than $16 million into his campaign, has injected more than a million dollars since Trump put his stamp on Vance. Mandel, however, appears perhaps more cautious. He won’t even be holding an open primary night watch party, a senior staffer told The Daily Beast.
But Vance, his sagging campaign fattened with Trump’s last-minute endorsement, is putting on a show. His high-profile events have attracted media across the state. His rallies have featured race-baiting fire-breathers like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL), the president’s eldest adult child, Donald Trump Jr., and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who attended two events on Monday alongside Vance and right-wing media personality and conspiracy theorist Charlie Kirk.
But even Vance’s swagger was threaded with contradictory surprises. He closed his last campaign event to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop”—famously the theme song for Democrat Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. It wasn’t until the fourth track that things got properly Trumpy, with “YMCA.”
Those kinds of events, along with the company Vance has kept on the campaign trail, have turned off some Ohioans who have known Vance for a long time. He has morphed from a principled critic of Trump’s authoritarianism to a full-on “America First” sycophant, courting the likes of Greene, Gaetz, and Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson. He bashes big tech today, while over the last few years leveraged his big tech connections—like billionaire backer Peter Thiel—to boost Ohio small-business investment.
The result is a wishy-washy electorate, who Vance hopes to win over by the sheer force of Trump.
That might work. Trump is the party’s only true kingmaker. But about a half-hour away from Vance’s final event, Republicans in his hometown of Middletown didn’t display a passion for their famous son. Not only were there no Vance signs on some of the most travelled streets, there were no campaign signs at all—save for a few Republicans running for state office.
At the Swire Tavern on Main Street, four middle-aged Republican voters—two men and two women, all lifelong Middletown residents—told The Daily Beast on Monday night that they still didn’t know who they would vote for. But they weren’t taken with Vance.
“We’re still not sure,” said one woman, covering her mouth and giggling. She looked at her companions. “To be honest, we kind of like Mike Gibbons.”
“He’s not a politician,” her husband explained.
“Well, Vance isn’t either,” the other man pointed out.
“Yeah, but you know, the way he is,” the woman said, searching for the word. “He seems practiced, in a way that he seems like he’s a politician.”
The second man said he liked Gibbons better than Vance, too.
“He’s old,” he explained. “He’ll die. Then we can get him out and get someone else in.”
Not Mandel?
“He’s a politician,” the first man pointed out, nodding to Mandel’s years in the state legislature and helming the treasury. Same went for Dolan.
By the end of the conversation, however, any pretense had dropped. Vance, they said, was out.
“We love the book though,” said the second woman.
“The book and the movie,” the other woman clarified.
