“We’ve lost the plot,” a Republican strategist told time.com on Wednesday, capturing the stark dismay inside party ranks after a new campaign advertisement in Ohio’s gubernatorial race sparked intense bipartisan backlash. The controversy centers on Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s decision to feature his opponent’s estranged mother in a high-profile spot just two weeks before Election Day.
The October Surprise That Stunned the GOP
The ad spotlights the mother of Democratic nominee Amy Acton. The two women have not spoken since 1978, a estrangement that began when the mother defended Acton’s stepfather after he was indicted for raping Acton as a child. While Ramaswamy’s campaign committed $4 million to saturate airwaves and target undecided, persuadable voters, the strategy triggered immediate panic among old-guard Republicans in Ohio and Washington, time.com reported.
Privately, party operatives questioned the judgment of weaponizing a candidate’s childhood trauma. “We had a real good chance and then we do this two weeks out,” a second strategist remarked to time.com, while another warned bluntly that the party now deserves to lose the race. The fallout quickly scrambled campaigns up and down the ballot in a state where Donald Trump previously won three times by margins of at least eight points.
Republican Sen. Jon Husted, locked in an expensive and tight re-election battle against Sherrod Brown, distanced himself from the maneuver. “I would not have run that ad,” Husted told the Associated Press, according to time.com. Other state Republican insiders noted that the messaging carries immense risk, particularly among women voters.
Defiance and Condemnation Across Party Lines
Vice President J.D. Vance, campaigning in Cincinnati on Wednesday, treated the controversial spot as a decisive October surprise and mounted a public defense of the campaign. Vance argued that critics were losing focus on the broader stakes of controlling the state and federal government.
“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” Vance told reporters, as cited by time.com. He added, “So I would say to Ohio Republicans: do you actually think that Amy Acton is unfit to serve as Governor of the state of Ohio? I do.”
Vance’s defense isolated him from several prominent members of his own party. Lydia Mihalik, a cabinet member under Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, rebuked the tactic on social media. “I don’t have to agree with Amy Acton’s politics to believe that exploiting someone’s childhood trauma is wrong,” Mihalik wrote, as documented by time.com. Mike Murphy, a strategist who was in Sen. John McCain’s inner circle when he ran for President in 2000 and headed Gov. Jeb Bush’s super PAC in 2016, labeled the strategy “political suicide” on social media. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley offered an even harsher assessment, telling time.com, “He’s a bad guy. It’s a shame he continues to get away with it.”
The Acton Campaign Responds as Polls Shift
Editorial boards also weighed in forcefully. The Columbus Dispatch published an endorsement of Acton on Wednesday that condemned the spot, writing, according to time.com, “It should go without saying that sexual violence against children should not be politicized or taken as lightly as Ramaswamy appears to take it.”
Acton’s campaign countered with its own 30-second ad featuring her brother, Phil Stearns. In the spot, Stearns addresses the decision to dredge up family history from nearly half a century ago. “I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it,” Stearns says in the ad, reported time.com. “She continued to receive that abuse because she knew she had to protect me from that, and if she hadn’t done that, who knows where I would have ended up.” He concluded, “She was 11- and 12-years-old, and to think that that’s somehow a talking point—shame on Vivek. The contempt he has for Amy is the contempt he has for Ohio. He’s not fit to lead.”
Recent polling paints a volatile picture as the race enters its final fortnight. A Marist University poll released this week showed Acton leading Ramaswamy by seven points, positioning her to become the first Democratic governor elected in Ohio since 2007. With early voting underway and millions of dollars in television ads flooding the state, the coming days will determine whether Ramaswamy’s controversial bet pays off with persuadable voters or permanently fractures the state’s Republican coalition.
