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      5 Takeaways From Ohio’s Primary Elections

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      Donald Trump showed his enduring grip over Republican primaries for Senate, and establishment Democrats won a House rematch against a progressive challenger.It was an early night in Ohio.Despite questions about turnout amid bad weather, the results of the state’s primary elections on Tuesday didn’t produce many surprises.In the night’s biggest race, J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who remade himself as a die-hard supporter of Donald J. Trump, won the closely watched Republican Senate primary after his struggling campaign was lifted by a crucial endorsement from the former president last month.Here are a few key takeaways from one of the first major primary nights of the 2022 midterm cycle:It was a good night for Donald Trump, and not just because of Vance.Mr. Vance’s victory over a crowded field, in which he consolidated support the day of the vote, was unequivocally good news for Mr. Trump. The former president’s endorsement on April 15 came when Mr. Vance had been all but left for dead. Instead, with help from Mr. Trump and allies including Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Vance turned his campaign around.“If Trump supports Vance, then we know he will be good,” said Kurt Oster, 59, a voter in Eaton, Ohio.Trailing Mr. Vance by a relatively wide margin were Josh Mandel, a former Ohio treasurer who had run as a hard-right Trump loyalist — and, like Mr. Vance, faced criticism for contorting himself in doing so — and Matt Dolan, a state senator who sought more moderate voters. Mr. Dolan had seemed to gain ground during early voting, and other campaigns had closely monitored his apparent rise.Josh Mandel giving a concession speech on Tuesday night in Cleveland.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesBut the fact that Mr. Vance and Mr. Mandel received more than 50 percent of the vote combined running as pro-Trump candidates spoke to the former president’s enduring grip over certain races — particularly Senate primary elections, in which voters are sending people to fight for them in Washington as opposed to run their states.In the general election, Mr. Vance, who improved as a campaigner over the course of the primary, will face Representative Tim Ryan, a moderate Democrat who also claims to understand the concerns of Ohio’s white working class. Part of Mr. Trump’s rationale in endorsing Mr. Vance was his belief that Mr. Ryan would be a strong candidate, and that Mr. Vance was best positioned to take him on, according to a Republican briefed on the endorsement.Mr. Vance speaking to supporters Tuesday night in Cincinnati after his victory.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIt’s not clear how much Mr. Vance’s message will change for the general election in a state that has become increasingly hostile for Democrats. Mr. Ryan, who is trying to win back blue-collar workers for his party, has signaled that he will try to paint Mr. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate and venture capitalist, as a creature of the cocktail party circuit and Silicon Valley. But he faces an uphill battle in Ohio.For governor, Republican voters in Ohio preferred a familiar face.The night did not completely belong to Mr. Trump and Trumpism.Gov. Mike DeWine easily won the Republican nomination for another term despite angering many in the Trump wing of the party for what they saw as his heavy hand in controlling the pandemic. Last month, Mr. DeWine said that he could not attend a Trump rally in his state because he was committed to celebrating Ulysses S. Grant’s 200th birthday.Gov. Mike DeWine and his wife, Fran, after voting on Tuesday in Cedarville, Ohio.Paul Vernon/Associated PressHis main opponent, Jim Renacci, sought out Mr. Trump’s endorsement but did not secure it, in large part because he was never a serious threat. Mr. Renacci’s “Ohio First” campaign was clearly an echo of Mr. Trump’s presidential bids, yet he never gained traction.A Trump ally rose, as a Republican who backed impeachment departs.One of Mr. Trump’s other victories in Ohio was that of Max Miller, a young former aide who worked for him in the White House.With Mr. Trump’s encouragement, Mr. Miller ran for Congress in a state where his family has deep ties, initially as an attempt to take out a House Republican who had voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Capitol riot. That congressman, Anthony Gonzalez, dropped out. But when the seats were redrawn during redistricting, Mr. Miller ran in a different district, and won his primary on Tuesday night.Despite some ugly headlines — Mr. Miller was accused of domestic violence by an ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Grisham, one of Mr. Trump’s press secretaries, an allegation that he denied before suing for defamation — he is expected to carry the safely conservative district easily in November.And if he does win, another House member whose candidacy began as a vengeance play will owe his political rise to the former president.It’s better to be the only Trump acolyte than the only establishment Republican in a race.Splitting the pro-Trump vote didn’t save Mr. Dolan’s candidacy in the Senate primary, but splitting the establishment Republican vote handed a pro-Trump candidate a surprising victory in Northwest Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District.J.R. Majewski, a burly businessman who painted his vast back lawn into one huge Trump sign in 2020, earned the right to challenge Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat who has served in Congress for decades. Her district was redrawn by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to try to thwart her bid for a 21st term.The new boundaries attracted two G.O.P. state lawmakers, State Senator Theresa Gavarone and State Representative Craig Riedel, to enter the primary. Then, almost as an afterthought, came Mr. Majewski, who ran ads showing him carrying an assault-style rifle, posted a “Let’s Go Brandon” rap on his website and earned a somewhat incoherent acknowledgment from Mr. Trump at an Ohio rally.The battle between Ms. Gavarone and Mr. Riedel, however, appeared to let Mr. Majewski squeeze through — though Ms. Kaptur may get the last laugh.Ohio Democrats showed little appetite for adding a new ‘squad’ member.Last August, Shontel Brown, a little-known chairwoman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, seemingly came from nowhere to win a House special election in Cleveland against Nina Turner, a former co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and a hero of the activist left.In Washington, the Democratic establishment had dearly wanted to keep Ms. Turner away from the House. She had made something of a career of bashing centrist Democrats, and planned to be a brash voice in the expanding “squad” of progressive members of Congress. Ms. Brown was seen by many on the left as the establishment’s creation.Representative Shontel Brown at her watch party in Cleveland on Tuesday night.John Kuntz/Cleveland.com, via Associated PressMs. Turner surprised no one when she challenged Ms. Brown to a rematch in this year’s Democratic primary.Her pitch was that this year would be different. Crossover Republicans from the Cleveland suburbs who had helped Ms. Brown in the special election would not be available this time, because they would be voting in the Republican primary. A redrawn district, still overwhelmingly Democratic, was more concentrated in and around Cleveland, Ms. Turner’s home base.But Ms. Brown ran this year not as an unknown but as an incumbent, who could point to her vote for the bipartisan infrastructure law. The Congressional Progressive Caucus endorsed her, blunting any boost Ms. Turner might have received from Mr. Sanders’s endorsement and late support from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.And in a disheartening blow for Ms. Turner and the activist left, Ms. Brown easily won the rematch.Kevin Williams More

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      J.D. Vance’s Rise From ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Author to Senate Nominee

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      Before the 2016 election, J.D. Vance called Donald J. Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”On Tuesday, Mr. Vance’s triumph in a crowded Republican field for Senate in Ohio was thanks largely to an endorsement, late in the race, from the former president he once denounced.The conversion of Mr. Vance, an author and venture capitalist, from Trump skeptic to full-on Trump ally might fill a second memoir, a sequel to his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s story of growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio. When that book was published in 2016, it was devoured by the “coastal elites” he now rails against as a means for them to decode white working-class support for Mr. Trump.Mr. Vance’s book pointed inward to explain the woes of his community: He blamed a personal “lack of agency” for drug abuse, welfare dependency and chaotic lives. But as a politician, he has pointed the finger outward, at external enemies, just as Mr. Trump did.On the campaign trail, Mr. Vance blamed corporations for shipping jobs to China and accused liberals of opening borders to cheap labor and opioid traffickers. The intimate voice of “Hillbilly Elegy” yielded to a darker tone and language. He castigated “idiots” in Washington and “scumbags” in the news media.Mr. Vance announced his campaign for the Senate last year in Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.Jeffrey Dean/Associated PressHis critics, including Republican rivals in Ohio, said he had turned himself inside-out to mimic Mr. Trump’s bellicosity in pursuit of votes. Opponents spent millions on attack ads to remind voters that Mr. Vance had once called himself “a Never Trump guy” and had said some voters backed Mr. Trump “for racist reasons.”Mr. Vance, on a slog across Ohio he called the “No B.S. Town Hall Tour,” explained to modest crowds that he had undergone a political evolution, recognizing that Mr. Trump was right on issue after issue.“I was like, ‘Man, you know, when Trump says the elites are fundamentally corrupt, they don’t care about the country that has made them who they are, he was actually telling the truth,’” he told a conservative podcaster last year.Today, Mr. Vance, who graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University and went on to Yale Law School, has found a political home with the movement known as national conservatism, an effort to add an intellectual framework to Trumpism. National conservatives lean right on issues like diversity and immigration restrictions but lean left on economics, opposing unfettered free trade, especially with China.Mr. Vance at a rally hosted by Mr. Trump in Delaware, Ohio, last month, after his endorsement.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Vance, 37, grew up in Middletown, Ohio, where a grandfather had moved from Kentucky for a steel mill job. In the years after J.D. Vance was born in 1984, the city hollowed out as blue-collar jobs left, opioids arrived, marriages dissolved and much of the industrial Midwest became “a hub of misery” for the white working class, he wrote in his memoir.Mr. Vance’s mother, Bev, struggled with drug addiction. He was raised largely by his maternal grandparents, particularly the grandmother he called Mamaw, who “loved the Lord,” “loved the F-word” and owned 19 handguns, he said on the campaign trail.Out of high school, Mr. Vance enlisted in the Marines and served in Iraq as a public affairs officer. He returned home a man in a hurry, sailing through Ohio State in under two years.At Yale, he met a fellow student he would marry, Usha Chilukuri, who went on to clerk for an appeals court judge, Brett M. Kavanaugh. Democrats’ fierce opposition to Mr. Trump’s nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018 appeared to be a turning point in Mr. Vance’s political transformation.“Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” he recalled in 2019.Mr. Vance went to work as a venture capitalist in San Francisco for Peter Thiel, a billionaire founder of PayPal, whom he had heard speak at Yale. Mr. Thiel, a Silicon Valley conservative, also influenced Mr. Vance’s politics, especially his opposition to China and to immigration.Mr. Vance with Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, at Allen & Company’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2017.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesWhen Mr. Vance moved his family, which now includes three children, back to Ohio, he raised money from Mr. Thiel for a venture capital fund of his own — and followed the Thiel tradition by naming the business, Narya Capital, with a “Lord of the Rings” reference.Mr. Thiel poured $13.5 million into a political action committee to support Mr. Vance’s race.As a candidate, Mr. Vance had struggled to translate celebrity as an author into broad recognition and support from the Republican base. He was perpetually running behind his rivals in polling, and Mr. Thiel’s millions were nearly gone.But all that turned around with Mr. Trump’s endorsement on April 15. Most of the Republican field had aggressively auditioned for the former president’s seal of approval. Mr. Vance first pitched Mr. Trump at a meeting at Mar-a-Lago brokered by Mr. Thiel. Donald Trump Jr. and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson also lobbied for Mr. Vance.“J.D. Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice, “but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades.” More

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      Tim Ryan Will be the Democrats’ Nominee for Senate in Ohio

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      Representative Tim Ryan cruised to victory in the Democratic primary election for Senate in his state, running in a moderate lane focused on tackling jobs, manufacturing and taking on China.Mr. Ryan’s victory, called by The Associated Press, came as little surprise. He had long been considered the clear front-runner in the contest for the seat of Senator Rob Portman, an establishment Republican who is retiring.But Mr. Ryan faced a challenger to his left in Morgan Harper, a progressive lawyer. She attacked him over his donations from energy companies and championed policies like “Medicare for All” and an overhaul of the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.Mr. Ryan, a onetime presidential candidate who has long sought to appeal to blue-collar workers in northeastern Ohio, visited all 88 counties in the state in a bet that voters of all leanings were tired of far-right and far-left positions in American politics. He sought to appeal to the “exhausted majority,” a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked.He has been waiting in the wings, as a crowded Republican campaign has at times turned ugly. The candidates aggressively pursued Donald J. Trump’s endorsement before the former president threw his support to J.D. Vance, and they took aim at undocumented immigrants, transgender youths’ participation in sports and teachings on race and gender in schools.Yet Mr. Ryan also drew criticism for fear-mongering in some of his messaging, including in his first television commercial. It centered on the nation’s fight to beat China on manufacturing, but some Asian advocacy groups and elected officials described the ad as racist and called on him to take it down.Mr. Ryan condemned anti-Asian violence but did not back down, saying that he had been speaking specifically about government policies under the Chinese Communist Party that have hurt Ohio workers.His chances of success in the general election in the fall are considered relatively low, given a national political environment that is unfriendly to his party and the increasingly conservative tilt of Ohio, which voted for Mr. Trump in the last two presidential elections.But an upset victory by Mr. Ryan could carry lessons for national Democrats in the Midwest on how to counter the appeal of Trumpism and win back white working-class voters who used to form a large part of the Democratic base in the industrial heart of the country. More

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      Overnight, Midterms Get a White-Hot New Focus: Abortion

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      Exultant Republicans planned new bans. Democrats, who have struggled to rally around abortion rights, hoped a bruising Supreme Court loss could jolt their voters into action.A leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade instantly propelled the debate over abortion into the white-hot center of American politics, emboldening Republicans across the country and leaving Democrats scrambling to jolt their voters into action six months before the midterm elections.Although the Supreme Court on Tuesday stressed that the draft opinion was not final, the prospect that the nation’s highest court was on the cusp of invalidating the constitutional right to abortion was a crowning moment for Republicans who are already enjoying momentum in the fight for control of Congress, statehouses and governor’s offices. Republican state leaders on Tuesday announced plans to further tighten restrictions on the procedure — or outlaw it outright — once the final ruling lands in the coming months.Democrats, reeling from the blow and divided over whom to blame, hoped the news would serve as a painful reality check for voters who have often taken abortion rights for granted and struggled to mobilize on the issue with the passion of abortion rights opponents. They said they planned to drive home the stakes in the fall, particularly in state races, putting abortion rights on the November ballot in key contests in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and other battlegrounds.“People were concerned about the lack of energy for voters in the midterms and not coming out to vote — well, the Supreme Court has just handed us a reason for people to vote,” said Representative Susan Wild, a Pennsylvania Democrat who faces a competitive re-election.“At one time I would have said they’re never going to take away right to contraception. But I don’t believe that anymore,” she said.Independent voters have overwhelmingly soured on President Biden, and many core Democratic constituencies have shown signs of trouble. Some party strategists privately cautioned against the idea that even something as seismic as overturning Roe would surpass the importance of the economy and inflation with many voters, something Republicans argued publicly.“Conventional wisdom right now is this helps Democrats because it will spur turnout, but it also could certainly spur turnout for base Republicans,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican strategist. “Generally most voters focus on the economy, for instance, and right now of course, inflation is dominant.”A woman writing a message supporting abortion rights before a protest on Tuesday in Manhattan.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesAn anti-abortion protester on Tuesday outside the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Miss.Rory Doyle for The New York TimesBut polling also shows that Americans strongly oppose completely overturning Roe v. Wade — 54 percent of Americans think the Roe decision should be upheld while 28 percent believe it should be overturned, a new Washington Post-ABC poll found. Democrats argue that many voters have long believed it was not truly in danger of being gutted. The draft opinion may change their calculus in meaningful ways, especially with suburban women and disillusioned base voters, those strategists say.“It hasn’t ever been that voters don’t care about it,” said Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster and strategist, and the president of Impact Research. “It’s been concluded that it’s less effective because voters don’t believe that it could actually go away. And so with what the Supreme Court is signaling they’re about to do, is completely change and eliminate that sort of theory of the mobilizing power of abortion.”Understand the Challenge to Roe v. WadeThe Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could be the most consequential to women’s access to abortion since 1973.The Arguments: After hearing arguments in December, the court appeared poised to uphold the Mississippi law at the center of the case that could overturn Roe v. Wade.Under Scrutiny: In overturning Roe v. Wade, would the justices be following their oath to uphold the Constitution or be engaging in political activism? Here is what legal scholars think.An America Without Roe: The changes created by the end of abortion rights at the federal level would mostly be felt by poor women in Republican states.An Extraordinary Breach: The leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade suggests an internal disarray at odds with the decorum prized by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.Familiar Arguments: The draft opinion, by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., draws on two decades-old conservative critiques of the Roe v. Wade decision.Legislative Activity: Some Republican-led state legislatures have already moved to advance abortion restrictions ahead of the court’s decision. Here is a look at those efforts.Without the court’s protection for abortion rights, states would be free to enforce their own restrictions or protections. That patchwork system is likely to shift the focus to governor’s races, where a state’s executive could have an outsize role in determining whether abortion is legal.Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and a candidate for governor, said he would veto any legislation restricting access to abortions.Matt Rourke/Associated PressIn Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, the state attorney general and Democratic candidate for governor, signaled that he planned to seize on the looming threat to Roe to cast himself as a one-man firewall against abortion rights opponents in his state. On Tuesday, he pledged to veto any legislation from the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature that would restrict abortion access.“Every Pennsylvanian should be able to raise a family on their own terms,” Mr. Shapiro said. “And that means deciding if and when and how they want to do that.”But for all the talk from Democrats about abortion being on the ballot this fall, Mr. Shapiro’s race is the exception. Far more states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Texas and Wisconsin, all have laws on the books effectively banning abortion that would go into effect once Roe is invalidated. The November elections are unlikely to give Democrats the numbers to reverse those.In Wisconsin, for example, an 1849 law made performing an abortion a felony unless the pregnancy endangered the life of the mother. That law remains on the books, though several of the state’s Republican candidates for governor have endorsed proposals to eliminate any exceptions to the ban.On Tuesday afternoon, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin sent a letter, signed by 15 fellow Democratic governors, urging Congress to enact federal abortion protections — a plea that is almost certain to go unmet.Although Mr. Evers won’t be able to make the case that he can save abortion protections in Wisconsin, he will argue that he can make other key decisions about how much the machinery of the state is used toward investigations and prosecutions of abortions, said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia played up a 2019 law that bans abortions in the state after six weeks.Alyssa Pointer/ReutersRepublicans were celebrating as they appeared on the cusp of victory. In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican facing stiff primary and general election challenges, took a victory lap Tuesday, playing up a 2019 state law that bans abortion in the state after six weeks. The law has been held up in a federal appeals court awaiting the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision.“We are the voice of all those people that are out there and have been in the trenches for decades doing this and we’re glad to be in the fight with them,” Mr. Kemp said during a radio interview Tuesday.In South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican believed to have presidential ambitions, said Tuesday that she would immediately call for a special session to outlaw abortion in her state. Attorney General Eric Schmitt of Missouri said a broad ban on abortions in the state was just a signature away from enactment if Roe is in fact overturned. The speaker of the Nebraska Legislature told colleagues to expect a special session on abortion following the Supreme Court’s decision.Democrats running for Senate renewed calls to put Roe’s abortion protections into federal law and change the Senate rules, if necessary, to do it. Although Democrats currently control the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote, they do not appear to have the votes to codify a woman’s right to an abortion, a major point of contention and blame-shifting among Democrats.Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia said Tuesday that he was still opposed to any changes to the filibuster, effectively ending any Democratic hopes of passing an abortion bill.Still, Democratic candidates signaled they planned to continue to promise to fight to codify Roe.“Democrats have to act quickly and get rid of the filibuster,” said Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who is running for Senate, to “finally codify Roe into law. We cannot afford to wait.”Kina Collins, a Democrat in a primary for a House seat in Chicago, called on the party’s leaders to “fight like our lives depend on it.”“There is no place in this party for Democrats who will not,” she said.Sensing the potential harm of yet another intraparty skirmish, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, warned against blaming fellow Democrats.“Focusing on what’s wrong with Democrats in the Senate or elsewhere is (another) circular firing squad,” Mr. Maloney wrote on Twitter. “We can only end the filibuster, pass real protections for choice IF WE WIN more power.”Trip Gabriel contributed reporting. More

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      What to Watch in Ohio and Indiana Primary Elections Tuesday

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      Ohio’s primary elections almost weren’t going to happen Tuesday. A heated and confusing legal battle over the redrawing of congressional districts kept voters waiting for a final map. And in last-hour negotiations, elections officials took all of the statehouse races off the May 3 primary ballot, leaving them to be decided at a later date.But all eyes remain on the state, with one marquee matchup at the top of the list: the crowded, heated and expensive Republican Senate primary.More so than many other contests across the nation, the Ohio Senate race to replace Rob Portman, an establishment Republican who is retiring, will test former President Donald J. Trump’s influence on his party, and whether Republican voters have an appetite for hard-right, anti-establishment figures in his mold — or only for those with his seal of approval. The results could also give Democrats a better idea of their chances to secure the open seat in November.Once considered a national bellwether in the industrial heart of the country, Ohio has tilted Republican in the last two presidential elections, and Republicans control all levels of government. Senate candidates from both parties have been aggressively courting the white working-class voters who have left the Democratic Party in droves since Mr. Trump was first on the ballot in 2016.The campaign has been at times contentious and ugly. It has also been high-priced. Cash has poured into the race — from major super PACs and from candidates’ personal coffers — making it one of the most expensive of this election cycle. Major donors include the Protect Ohio Values PAC, largely funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, who is supporting Mr. Vance, and the Buckeye Leadership Fund, which is backing Matt Dolan, a former Ohio state senator whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team.Indiana’s primary also features some notable elections with implications for the direction of the Republican Party. This year, more incumbents at the state level are facing primary challengers from the right than in at least a decade, according to a review by The Indianapolis Star, potentially resulting in an even more conservative legislative supermajority.North of Indianapolis, in Hamilton County, the re-election campaign of the prosecutor D. Lee Buckingham against Greg Garrison, a conservative talk-show host, is garnering outsize attention: Mr. Garrison has the support of former Vice President Mike Pence.Former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Delware, Ohio last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesTrump’s role as kingmakerMr. Trump rocked the Senate race landscape in Ohio last month when he threw his highly coveted endorsement behind J.D. Vance. A venture capitalist and the author of the best-selling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance has been heavily backed by Mr. Thiel, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr.On the campaign trail, Mr. Vance has sought to atone for his past negative comments about Mr. Trump. Polls have shown a significant bump for Mr. Vance, but no clear front-runner has emerged.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The 2022 election season is underway. See the full primary calendar and a detailed state-by-state breakdown.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.David McIntosh’s anti-tax Club for Growth, which had first opposed Mr. Trump’s 2016 before supporting him, is pitching for a battle. The G.O.P. group has put its support behind Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer, who went from reluctant Trump supporter in 2016 to one of the nation’s most ardent backers of Trumpism.Other Republican Senate hopefuls include Jane Timken, a former chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party, who has been endorsed by Mr. Portman and has campaigned with the former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, and Mike Gibbons, a financier who has outspent all of the candidates in the race. He has at times been at the top of the polls with a sales pitch similar to Mr. Trump’s, reminding audiences he is not a politician but a businessman.Still, Ohio voters might decide they do not want a Trump-centered candidate at all. The only Republican running in this lonely lane has been Mr. Dolan, who says he supports Mr. Trump but has made him less of a focus in the campaign. Unlike the top candidates in the race, he recognizes President Biden as the nation’s legitimate leader.Is there an ‘exhausted majority’?On the Democratic side of the Senate race, Representative Tim Ryan is considered the front-runner. He faces a challenge from the left by Morgan Harper, a progressive lawyer and a senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under former President Barack Obama.Mr. Ryan has been visiting with voters across the state in a bet that they have had enough of the extremism in American politics and might be willing to elect a Democrat to a seat formerly held by a Republican. He is seeking to appeal to the “exhausted majority,” a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked.It will be interesting to see if such an electorate manifests itself in Ohio — and if it goes for Mr. Ryan or for Mr. Dolan on the other side of the aisle.Success for Mr. Ryan in the fall could carry lessons for Democrats across the Midwest on how to counter the appeal of Trumpism and the erosion of support for the party among the white working-class — voters who once formed a loyal part of the Democratic base.Representative Shontel Brown with supporters in Lakewood, Ohio.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesNina Turner speaks with children during a campaign event in South Euclid, Ohio.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesThe rematch between Nina Turner and Shontel BrownRepresentative Shontel Brown narrowly defeated Nina Turner, a former state senator and a top surrogate for Bernie Sanders, in a Democratic primary last year that was seen as somewhat of a proxy battle between the party’s progressive and establishment wings.The two were vying for a seat vacated by Marcia L. Fudge after President Biden appointed her as the secretary of housing and urban development. The race attracted big Democratic names and millions of dollars, with Ms. Brown, then a Cuyahoga County councilwoman, drawing support from Hillary Clinton and the highest-ranking Black member of the House, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina.This year, major establishment figures have once more endorsed Ms. Brown, including President Biden and Mr. Clyburn. She now also has the backing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC.Ms. Turner previously was attacked for taking anti-Israel positions — and for using language that some said echoed anti-Semitic tropes — as well as for a crass denunciation of President Biden. This time around, she has aggressively courted Jewish voters. She has the ground-game support of Our Revolution, a progressive political action organization that emerged from Mr. Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. The group’s 150 volunteers have centered on building support for Ms. Turner through one-on-one conversations with voters.Will Ohio have a shot at a female governor?The former congressman Jim Renacci is one of several Republican candidates who are trying to seize on their party’s internal divisions to unseat G.O.P. governors. But Mr. Renacci seems to be gaining little traction against Gov. Mike DeWine, a longtime Ohio politician who has been working to attract the support of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters.In the Democratic primary, two former mayors — John Cranley of Cincinnati and Nan Whaley of Dayton — are facing off, with Ms. Whaley seeking to become the first woman elected governor in the state. More

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      In Ohio Senate Fight, G.O.P. Shows Strains of Its Identity Crisis

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      CLEVELAND — The homestretch of Ohio’s contentious Republican Senate primary has revealed a party united in its conviction that American values, indeed the nation’s way of life, are under attack, but divided on whether to embrace a strict isolationism to address its mounting misgivings about global interconnectedness and American leadership abroad.That divide has played out in policy differences — some subtle, others glaring — in the candidates’ approach to the economy, immigration and foreign policy. The strains reflect the broader splits in a party undergoing something of an identity crisis, with ideological conservatives, the old Republican establishment of big business, and the Trump-inspired newer rank and file all pulling in different directions.At the same time, Republicans have been searching for ways to relate to former President Donald J. Trump himself: a few by taking tentative steps away from him, others by falling in line with him wholeheartedly.All of the candidates competing in the primary on Tuesday appear united in their fierce opposition to the Biden administration, as they have sought to paint a nation grappling with rising food and energy prices, a “radical” Democratic Party overreaching on issues of race and gender, and what they describe as apocalyptic conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border.But the world beyond Mexico may be the brightest dividing line in the Republican Party, with conservatives split on what to do about Russian aggression, how far to distance the United States from its traditional alliances, and above all what to do about China, at once the nation’s biggest competitor and one of its largest economic partners.Over the past weeks, Josh Mandel, Ohio’s former treasurer and the onetime front-runner in the Senate primary, attacked a rival, Mike Gibbons, for making money off investments in China. J.D. Vance, the author and venture capital executive, attacked Mr. Mandel for accepting the help of the Club for Growth, the business-backed political group which he said supported business relations with China. And the sole woman in the race, Jane Timken, shares her last name with a company that is synonymous with Ohio manufacturing might — and that includes vast operations out of Shanghai.Whoever wins Tuesday will have to deal with those divisions in the coming general election campaign, especially since the presumed Democratic candidate, Representative Tim Ryan, has no qualms about blasting China while backing U.S. involvement elsewhere.“Voters don’t always have long memories here, especially after a primary campaign, but certainly the anti-China feelings are going to resonate for a long time,” said Paul Beck, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University and a longtime Ohio politics watcher. “They are hard-wired.”Divisions over the border are not so stark. Anger at Mexican criminal organizations that are distributing fentanyl to the north has become particularly salient in a state that has been ground zero for the national opioid crisis and experienced some of the country’s highest overdose rates over the past three years.The fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in Sasabe, Ariz.Rebecca Noble/ReutersMr. Vance, who won Mr. Trump’s coveted endorsement, has even suggested, with a straight face but no evidence, that President Biden was intentionally allowing fentanyl into the country because of its potential to kill Republican voters, bringing the issue back to his mother, who as a nurse became addicted to pain medication. Fentanyl deaths did rise sharply in 2021, but they rose sharply in 2020 as well.“My family was very affected and is still very affected by the fentanyl that comes across the U.S. southern border into Ohio and into all parts of our country,” he told an audience in Newark, Ohio, on Saturday. “I believe that if the poison coming across the Mexican border today had been coming across 10 years ago, I would have lost my mother.”Much of the debate and bluster on the border has been lacking in substance and filled with conjecture, with candidates proposing few policy solutions, conflating immigration and crime and resorting to language that dehumanizes unauthorized immigrants.But beneath the hard-right rhetoric, subtle differences can be seen between the pro-business, establishment Republicans of the past and the ascendant hard right.In stump speeches and a much-criticized campaign ad, Mr. Vance has falsely declared that people are entering the country to vote for Democrats. He has said he is in favor of an immigration process that creates legal paths to entering the country based on merit, rather than on familial ties, long a key feature of the nation’s immigration system. And he opposes H-1B visas that allow employers to temporarily hire immigrant workers in various industries.At the other end of the issue is Matt Dolan, an Ohio state senator who has sought to put some distance between himself and the former president. Mr. Dolan, too, talks tough on immigration and the need to stop the flow of fentanyl. But he is just as concerned about economic development, supporting tax cuts, training for workers and reduced regulations for small businesses. And he favors the immigrant work visas, saying businesses rely on them.“We have to secure the border first — that has to be number one,” Mr. Dolan said in an interview last week. “And then improve our legal immigration.”State Senator Matt Dolan met supporters last week at a library opening in Bay Village, Ohio.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesPerhaps the most glaring examples in Ohio of the forces warring within the Republican Party have unfolded over competition with China, the war in Ukraine and American leadership abroad. Again setting himself apart, Mr. Vance has argued against deepening American involvement on Ukraine’s behalf — despite what many see as the gravest threat to world order in decades.Mr. Vance opposed the establishment of a European-led no-fly zone over Ukraine, and has drawn criticism for a statement he made in February in which he said he did not “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” He has since sought to assure audiences he feels Ukrainians’ pain, but has doubled down on his stance against U.S. intervention.“At the end of the day, however tragic we find these images of what is going on in Ukraine, this is not our fight,” Mr. Vance said in a debate last month.The distinctions could also be seen in the surrogates the Ohio candidates brought in to campaign with them in the final stretch.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas campaigning last week in Kettering, Ohio, on behalf of Josh Mandel, a Senate candidate.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesMr. Mandel chose as his wingman for the final weekend Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who in 2016 was Mr. Trump’s biggest threat and remains fiercely conservative in ways the former president never was. Mr. Cruz has consistently attacked Mr. Biden as weak on foreign policy, going so far as to blame him for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And Mr. Cruz, like Republican congressional leaders, has shied away from some of Mr. Trump’s broader attacks on corporate America — especially the pharmaceutical industry — which often echoed Democratic talking points.Mr. Vance, by contrast, stumped over the weekend with two of the most polarizing figures of the far right: Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Ms. Greene railed against the “forever wars” started under George W. Bush and talked up what she called “the civil war in the G.O.P.,” while Mr. Gaetz blasted the leaders of his own party and said he and Ms. Greene needed backup in Washington — backup that Mr. Vance would provide.J.D. Vance, a Senate candidate from Ohio, campaigned last week with Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Gibbons, for his part, campaigned with Senator Rand Paul, the Kentuckian who espouses small government, low taxes and the avoidance of foreign entanglements at all cost. And Mr. Gibbons embraced a fringe movement to hold a constitutional convention aimed at curbing federal power, and mocked the Department of Homeland Security’s new effort to counter disinformation as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.One area in which there is broad agreement among the party’s Senate candidates is on the conservative values many Ohio Republicans say they hold dear, from old standbys like support for gun rights and opposition to abortion, to current causes like preventing transgender women from playing women’s sports and giving parents greater control over how race and gender are taught in schools.On those issues, consensus among the candidates was so fully realized that voters at events in Cleveland seemed widely split over whom to support, and many were still undecided.In Port Clinton, where Ms. Timken, Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Dolan all worked the crowd at a Knights of Columbus chicken barbecue lunch, Lisa Slobodzian said she was still sifting through her direct mail and studying the candidates’ positions.“I want power back to the people,” said Ms. Slobodzian, 57, a retired national parks ranger and law enforcement specialist, digging into her plate. “They should decide what their kids are taught in schools, and not some government agency.” More

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      How Ohio’s Map Will Test J.D. Vance’s Political Allure

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      Behind the wild language, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author’s bid for a Senate seat follows a traditional Republican playbook.Theodore Roosevelt, a renowned political animal and polymath, once said, “I think there is only one thing in the world I can’t understand, and that is Ohio politics.”It is indeed a complicated place, shaped by its history as America’s first frontier state. Since the country’s founding, Ohio has been settled over the years by various ethnic groups searching for prosperity west of the Appalachian Mountains. Once a bellwether in American politics, Ohio is losing that status as its population grows older, whiter and more culturally conservative. But its patchwork of wildly different regions makes it a fascinating state to watch regardless.“Ohio is one of those places whose narrative is more often told from the outside rather than from within,” said David Giffels, the author of “Barnstorming Ohio,” a book on the state’s political and cultural geography.“We are the boring middle of American politics,” Giffels added. “And I do mean that in a loving way.”Ohio’s major population centers form a diagonal axis that slashes across the state from Cleveland in the northeast through Columbus down to Cincinnati in the southwest, along the I-71 corridor. There are as many as 12 media markets in the state, whose population of 11.8 million people sprawls across nearly 45,000 square miles.As a result, said Kyle Kondik, an election forecaster and author of a book about Ohio politics, “there’s not really a strong center to the vote in the state.”Ohio is holding primary elections on Tuesday that will give us the first major electoral test of Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party since he left office. By endorsing J.D. Vance in the state’s Republican Senate primary, Trump has single-handedly vaulted Mr. Vance, the venture capitalist and celebrity author, to the front of a crowded field.A forecast for low turnoutBut Vance’s victory in the primary is no sure thing. Although the candidates have spent nearly $70 million bludgeoning one another on television, voters don’t seem to be especially motivated by the chance to pick a replacement for Senator Rob Portman, who is retiring. Turnout in the race is expected to be low.“With Trump not on the ballot, I don’t think this race is top of mind for most voters,” said Thomas Sutton, the director of the Community Research Institute at Baldwin Wallace University, which conducts polls of Ohio voters.That could help Matt Dolan, a traditional Republican who is likely to draw support from party regulars and upper-income voters in the suburbs. Under this theory, casual voters who may be swayed by Trump’s late endorsement of Vance are less likely to show up.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The 2022 election season is underway. See the full primary calendar and a detailed state-by-state breakdown.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Dolan allies suggest, too, that because the other candidates will divide the hard-core Trump vote among themselves, Dolan, a state senator whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians, has an opportunity to eke out a plurality of the vote by scooping up more casual Trump fans. They also speculate that Gov. Mike DeWine’s strength in the primary for governor could lift Dolan among rank-and-file Republicans.Mike Murphy, a former Republican consultant, said that because Dolan hadn’t been the subject of many attack ads, “he’s become the fresh face in the closing moments after the rest have a ton of damage, both self-inflicted and from paid media.”Trump held a rally last month in Delaware, Ohio, a city north of Columbus.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesThe five states of OhioMost analysts of Ohio divide the state into five regions: Northeast, around Cleveland; Northwest, including Toledo and the prosperous farmlands around it; Central, the booming areas in and around Columbus; Southeast, the Appalachian part of the state; and Southwest, dominated by Cincinnati and its suburbs.The Northeast is Ohio’s Democratic stronghold, the most populous, most industrialized and most diverse part of the state. But it’s also home to tens of thousands of Republican voters, so the candidates have all campaigned and advertised heavily in the region.The Southwest, which includes Vance’s hometown, Middletown, is the traditional center of Republican politics in Ohio. More Southern in perspective, it is full of bedrock Republican voters: conventional in their cultural outlook, they tend to favor free enterprise and worry about issues like crime, drugs and immigration. Vance, who now lives in Cincinnati, is holding his election night party in the city.The Southeast has been a swing area in Ohio politics, though it is also the least diverse at nearly 95 percent white. Hobbled by job losses and buffeted by the forces of globalization and economic modernization, with a lower percentage of people with college degrees, Ohio’s Appalachian region is full of “people who are angry at the world,” said John C. Green, the emeritus director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron.As a result, Green said, the region has a “much higher tolerance for the rough and tumble of politics” — and could gravitate toward Josh Mandel, who has campaigned as much on attitude as he has on any particular conservative ideas. A super PAC backing Mandel has been running ads on rural radio stations in the area attacking Vance as “a fraud.”In the 2016 Republican presidential primary, the Ohio map divided sharply between John Kasich, who was the sitting governor at the time, and Trump, who would of course go on to win the Republican nomination and the presidency. Kasich won Ohio’s most populous counties on his way to carrying the state, while Trump cleaned up in the Appalachian communities along the Ohio River.Vance’s balancing actOne question on the minds of many Ohio watchers: How will college-educated Republicans respond to Vance?Will they flock to the Yale-educated, worldly investor lurking inside the angry MAGA warrior Vance has become? Or will they be repelled by how far right he has moved to court Trump’s base?Vance’s schedule and ad spending in the last few days of the race show a focus on suburban and small-town areas. Since Saturday, he has visited Circleville, a city south of Columbus; Cuyahoga Falls, a city north of Akron; Westlake, a suburb west of Cleveland; Dublin, a northwestern suburb of Columbus; and Mason, a northeastern suburb of Cincinnati.A super PAC supporting Vance, Protect American Values, has spent heavily on TV advertisements in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, as well as Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown.“On the surface, it looks like the campaign is pursuing middle-of-the-road Republican voters,” Green said.It’s a deceptively conventional strategy that you would hardly expect from the protagonist of “Hillbilly Elegy” — a story of rural communities wracked by poverty, drug addiction and what he called “learned helplessness.” Back in 2016, Vance was urging Americans to seize their own destiny, as he did by transcending his troubled childhood.“We’re no longer a country that believes in human agency, and as a formerly poor person, I find it incredibly insulting,” he said in one interview.In this campaign, Vance has courted the support of far-right characters who traffic in conspiracy theories and invective like Steve Bannon and Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. In recent days, he has accused President Biden of deliberately flooding Ohio with fentanyl, a preposterous charge without evidence.“In a way,” Giffels said, “he’s kind of selling the victimhood he railed against in the book.”What to readFrom Columbus, Ohio, our colleague Trip Gabriel reports on what’s next for Josh Mandel, a Republican whose Senate campaign has been defined by his support of Donald Trump, now that Trump has endorsed someone else.A second woman has publicly accused Charles Herbster, a Republican candidate for governor in Nebraska who has Trump’s backing, of groping her.Even as Biden enjoyed high approval ratings early in his presidency, his lead pollster warned that immigration and inflation could cost him support.With six months until the midterms, Democrats are deeply divided over how to connect with voters and brighten the party’s prospects, Katie Glueck reports.how they runSenator Joe Manchin, left, with Representative David McKinley last year in Morgantown, W.Va.Michael Swensen/Getty ImagesManchin wades into a G.O.P. primary in West VirginiaIt’s not often that you see a Democrat endorse a Republican candidate. But the usual political bets are off in West Virginia.Republicans hold all three of the state’s House seats. But after West Virginia lost a district in the once-a-decade reapportionment process, there’s room for only two of them in the next Congress. That has left two Republican congressmen, Alex Mooney and David McKinley, fighting for the new Second District.Over the weekend, Senator Joe Manchin, the nation’s most famous right-leaning Democrat, announced in an ad that he was supporting McKinley, a longtime West Virginia politician and engineer by trade who was first elected to Congress in 2010. The primary is May 10.The endorsement adds another layer to an incumbent-on-incumbent race that has already become a proxy war of sorts. Donald Trump endorsed Mooney, while his former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, endorsed McKinley. Manchin joins Gov. Jim Justice — a Republican who left the Democratic Party after Trump was elected — in endorsing McKinley. Mooney, notably, is seen as a potential Senate challenger to Manchin in 2024.Mooney has a similar résumé to McKinley’s, although across state lines. He spent a decade in Maryland’s Legislature before leading its state Republican Party, history that has provided McKinley with alliterative fodder in his attack ads against “Maryland Mooney.”Both men are campaigning on typical Republican talking points, like immigration and gun rights. But they’ve dedicated most of their television ads to attacking each other, trading accusations of working with Democrats and betraying Trump.Perhaps twisting the knife for his Democratic critics, Manchin praised McKinley in his ad for rejecting what was once the centerpiece of President Biden’s social policy agenda — an agenda, of course, that was doomed in part by Manchin’s opposition.“For Alex Mooney and his out-of-state supporters to suggest David McKinley supported Build Back Better is an outright lie,” Manchin says to the camera.At the same time, Manchin is supporting one of the few Republicans who supported the Biden administration’s signature legislative achievement. McKinley was one of just a dozen Republicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure legislation last year.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More