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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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      Vance Wins Republican Senate Primary in Ohio After Nod From Trump

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      J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” won a G.O.P. race that saw nearly $80 million in television advertising. The author and venture capitalist parlayed an endorsement from Donald J. Trump into victory, beating out a crowded field of conservative challengers.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesCINCINNATI — J.D. Vance, the author whose memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about life in Appalachia became a best seller, decisively won the Ohio Senate primary on Tuesday after a late endorsement by Donald J. Trump helped him surge past his rivals in a crowded primary field.Casting himself as a fighter against the nation’s elites, Mr. Vance ran as a Trump-style pugilist and outsider who railed against the threats of drugs, Democrats and illegal immigration, while thoroughly backpedaling from his past criticisms of the former president.The contest, which saw nearly $80 million in television advertising, was one of the most anticipated of the 2022 primary season for its potential to provide an early signal of the direction of the Republican Party.The result delivered a strong affirmation of Mr. Trump’s continued grip on his party’s base. But a fuller assessment of Mr. Trump’s sway will come through a series of primaries in the next four weeks — in West Virginia, North Carolina, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Georgia.Mr. Vance had been trailing in most polls behind Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer who had also aggressively pursued Mr. Trump’s backing, until the former president’s mid-April endorsement helped vault Mr. Vance ahead. A third candidate, State Senator Matt Dolan, ran as a more traditional Republican, sometimes mocking his rivals for their unrelenting focus on the former president instead of Ohio issues and voters.Cheers went up at Mr. Vance’s Cincinnati election party when The Associated Press called the race shortly after 9:30 p.m.“The people who are caught between the corrupt political class of the left and the right, they need a voice,” Mr. Vance said in his victory speech. “They need a representative. And that’s going to be me.”Mr. Vance is an unlikely champion of the Trumpian mantle, after calling the former president “reprehensible” in 2016 and even “cultural heroin.” But he had changed his tune entirely by 2022, and Mr. Trump called to congratulate him on his victory on Tuesday evening, according to a person briefed on the call.With more than 80 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Vance was leading across almost the entire state. But the results also captured some of the tensions and demographic trade-offs of a Republican Party pulled in different directions as Mr. Dolan was strongest in the voter-rich cities of Cleveland and Columbus.Trump-style Republicans did not prevail in the other top contest on Tuesday. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a more traditional Republican who has held offices in the state for more than 40 years, finished far ahead of his multiple primary rivals after a strong right-wing challenge never gained traction despite some conservative backlash to Mr. DeWine’s early and assertive response to the coronavirus pandemic.Gov. Mike DeWine and his wife, Fran DeWine, greet their daughter Anna Bolton and grandson Calvin after voting in Cedarville, Ohio, on Tuesday.Paul Vernon/Associated PressMr. DeWine had almost double the votes of his closest rival, Jim Renacci, a former House member. In the fall, he will be running against Nan Whaley, the former mayor of Dayton, who won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, becoming the first woman in Ohio history to be nominated by a major party for governor.In the Senate race, Mr. Vance will now face Representative Tim Ryan, a 48-year-old Democrat from the Youngstown area who has positioned himself as a champion of blue-collar values and has not aligned with some of his party’s more progressive positions.If Mr. Vance prevails in the fall, the 37-year-old graduate of Yale Law School and investor would become the second-youngest member of the Senate, the chamber’s youngest Republican and a rare freshman who would arrive in Washington with a national profile.Mr. Vance’s metamorphosis from an outspoken “Never Trump” Republican in 2016 to a full-throated Make America Great Again warrior in 2022 echoes the ideological journey of much of the party in recent years. Republicans have moved closer and closer to the former president’s hard-line policy positions on issues like trade and immigration, and to his combative posture with Democrats and on cultural issues that divide the two parties. For some Republican voters, the primary was animated by fears that traditional family values and a white American culture were under attack by far-left Democrats, establishment Republicans and elites.Mr. Vance also won the endorsements of some of the Make America Great Again movement’s loudest firebrands, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, both of whom campaigned with him in the race’s final weekend, and Donald Trump Jr., who also traveled to the state. He also had a crucial financial benefactor: His former boss, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor who pledged $10 million to Mr. Vance even before he joined the contest and who added millions more in the final stretch to trumpet Mr. Trump’s endorsement.The Senate primary was unusual in the extent that it unfolded in two places at once. In Ohio, there was the typical fevered competition for votes, in town halls, debates and television ads. In Florida, there was the battle for Mr. Trump’s approval at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club, with public shows of fealty, lobbying by surrogates and shuttle diplomacy. In one episode last year, multiple Ohio candidates vied for Mr. Trump’s support in front of one another at an impromptu meeting at Mar-a-Lago.In a verbal flub that seemed almost fitting to how the candidates ran, Mr. Trump accidentally conjoined the names of two rivals over the weekend. “We’ve endorsed J.P., right?” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Nebraska. “J.D. Mandel.”Mr. Trump’s endorsement set off a frenzy among Ohio Republicans who questioned Mr. Vance’s Republican credentials, with rivals circulating fliers online and at a Trump rally accusing him of being a Democrat in disguise and resurrecting his past comments against Mr. Trump.The Senate candidate Josh Mandel, center, with supporters, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, left, in Columbus, Ohio, last week.Joshua A. Bickel/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Mandel had been the front-runner for much of the race, casting himself as the true pro-Trump candidate (“Pro-God. Pro-Guns. Pro-Trump” was the tagline in his TV ads). But that became an all-but-impossible argument to prosecute in the final weeks after Mr. Trump picked Mr. Vance.“If the whole issue in the campaign is who is most Trump-like, expect it to work against you when you don’t get the endorsement,” said Rex Elsass, an Ohio-based Republican strategist.At a restaurant in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood on Tuesday, more than a dozen Mandel supporters and campaign volunteers struck an optimistic tone at the start of the night, expressing confidence. But it was not too long before Mr. Mandel took the podium to deliver the news. Mr. Mandel told the crowd that he called Mr. Vance “to congratulate him on a hard-fought victory” and would do what he could to help get him elected. “The stakes are too high for this country to not support the nominee,” Mr. Mandel said to a round of applause in the room.Beyond Mr. Vance, Mr. Dolan and Mr. Mandel, the crowded race included a single female candidate, Jane Timken, a former Ohio Republican Party chair, who was backed by the retiring incumbent, Senator Rob Portman, as well as Mike Gibbons, a businessman who poured millions of his own money into the race and at one point had vaulted to the top of the polls.Mr. Dolan had toiled for most of the contest far behind the polling leaders, avoiding direct attacks from his rivals. But he tapped into his own fortune to fund more than $11 million in television ads as he cut a path separate from the rest of the Trump-focused field by refusing to amplify the falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged. At one debate, Mr. Dolan was the lone candidate to raise his hand to say the former president should stop talking about the 2020 election.State Senator Matt Dolan greets supporters at a library opening in Bay Village, Ohio, last week.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesThe contest was nasty and lengthy, with nothing capturing the intensity more than a near-physical confrontation between Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Mandel at one March debate, where they bumped bellies as they lobbed verbal threats at one another.Mr. Vance scolded them both. “Sit down. Come on,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”Much of the race was shaped by huge sums spent on television — nearly $80 million, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, with a lot of it coming from outside groups and out-of-state donors. The conservative Club for Growth spent more than $12 million on television ads aimed to boost Mr. Mandel or tear down his rivals. Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor, seeded a pro-Vance super PAC with $10 million in early 2021 — months before Mr. Vance even entered the race. Mr. Vance is one of two former Thiel employees — the other is Blake Masters in Arizona — running for Senate with Mr. Thiel’s hefty financial backing. Mr. Thiel had served as a key link between Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump, attending an introductory meeting between them in early 2021. The politics of Ohio have changed drastically in the Trump era. Once the quintessential presidential swing state, Ohio broke for Mr. Trump by 8 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020, ending a half-century streak of the state backing the national winner. Republicans have sharply run up their margins among working-class white voters and in more rural areas, offsetting the losses that the party has suffered in the state’s suburbs around cities like Columbus and Cleveland.Representative Tim Ryan, right, with Michael S. Regan of the Environmental Protection Agency in Youngstown, Ohio, where lead pipes will be replaced as part of new federal infrastructure spending.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesIn the Democratic primary, Mr. Ryan, who briefly ran for president in 2020, easily turned back a primary challenge from Morgan Harper, 38, a former adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who ran as a progressive, banking $5 million for the general election.Mr. Ryan has already run an anti-China ad that focuses on Ohio jobs and his opening ad of the general election has him tossing darts inside a bar and seeking to separate himself from the broader Democratic brand, lamenting those who have called for defunding the police.But Mr. Ryan faces an uphill race in a state that has trended Republican and in a year when his party is saddled with President Biden’s low approval ratings. Some Republicans see Mr. Ryan as formidable — Mr. Trump among them — but the general election is not seen by either party as among the half-dozen closest contests that will determine control of the Senate, now divided evenly 50-50.Shane Goldmacher reported from Cincinnati. Jazmine Ulloa reported from Beachwood, Ohio. 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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      The Don Jr. Road Show in Ohio Was No Joke

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      WEST CHESTER, OHIO — It’s a chilly, drizzly evening, but Donald Trump Jr. is putting on a red-hot show at Lori’s Roadhouse, a bar and music joint in a strip mall on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Pretending to be a befuddled, senile President Biden, Don Jr. staggers around the low stage, eyes unfocused, making confused gestures and blundering into the giant red-white-and-blue backdrop.The crowd, a couple of hundred MAGA fans and local Republican players, laps up the wickedness. This is Don Jr.’s last public appearance of the day on behalf of J.D. Vance, whose Senate candidacy was recently endorsed by Trump Sr. As at earlier stops, the audience whoops and laughs and hollers “Amen!” as Trump the Younger slashes at a series of targets: Democrats, the media, RINOs (Senator Mitt Romney is taking a serious beating), Big Tech, America’s “stupid” military leaders and so on.Don Jr. clearly inherited the family flair for showmanship. (Democrats would do well to keep an eye on his political development. In particular, the ladies here are gaga over him.) He deploys funny voices and goofy faces, his comic timing is spot on, and he has a vicious streak untempered by decency or accuracy. “The other side has literally taken the stance that it’s OK to be a groomer,” he charges, promoting the MAGAworld calumny that Democrats are pro-pedophile. Even on this dark topic he draws laughs by marveling that, in his younger days, “being antipedophile was something that we could all agree on!”Off to the side, chuckling awkwardly, hands jammed into his jeans pockets, stands Mr. Vance. Tall and burly, with carefully manicured facial hair, the candidate has already done his quick opening act and faded into the background like a good sidekick. He gazes attentively at the former president’s son, nodding appreciatively, clapping and grinning at all the appropriate (or, rather, inappropriate) moments. He takes out his phone to snap the occasional photo. Once or twice, he shoots a glance at the audience, as if to see how this show is playing. (Answer: very well.) Distinctly overshadowed, Mr. Vance is aware that, while his name may be on the yard signs and stickers spread around the bar, he is not who most folks have come to see.Because Mr. Vance is no longer the star of his own race to win Tuesday’s Republican primary in Ohio for U.S. Senate. The moment he got the much-coveted Trump tap on April 15, the election became about one thing only: whether the former president has the juice to propel an unexceptional candidate to victory.Mark Peterson for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s kingmaking ability is, in fact, the Big Question facing the entire G.O.P. this election cycle. Ohio is just the first test, the first time voters go to the polls in a race where the former president has put his political credibility and influence so solidly on the ballot. Mr. Vance is arguably a perfect test case for Mr. Trump: weak enough to need a boost but with enough potential to make him a worthwhile risk. Anyone still hoping to see the Trumpified G.O.P. return to sanity any time soon should be rooting for Mr. Vance to fail.The contest to replace Senator Rob Portman, who is retiring, was already among this cycle’s rowdiest and most expensive. Multiple conservatives have been jockeying to present themselves as the most MAGA-rific, with party players and moneymen picking favorites. Among the many contenders, Jane Timken, a former state Republican Party chairwoman, has been endorsed by multiple senators (Mr. Portman, Shelley Moore Capito, Joni Ernst and Deb Fischer) and denizens of Trumpworld (Kellyanne Conway, David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski). Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer, is backed by Senator Ted Cruz, the Club for Growth and Ohio Value Voters.Until recently, Mr. Vance had not been doing so well. Best known as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” his 2016 memoir widely embraced as a blue-staters’ guide to red-state values and grievances, his past was a bit too checkered for some conservatives. He attended Yale Law. He worked as a venture capitalist. Most damning, he was an avowed Never Trumper during the 2016 presidential election — and we’re not talking gentle criticisms. He called Mr. Trump “noxious,” “reprehensible,” “an idiot” and “cultural heroin”; fretted over Trumpism’s racist elements; and privately suggested Mr. Trump was “America’s Hitler.”Like so much of the party, Mr. Vance has changed his tune, now prostrating himself before Mr. Trump with as much zeal as anyone. (Except maybe Kevin McCarthy. That level of sycophancy is something special.) Even so, rolling into April, Mr. Vance’s campaign chest was light (despite the generosity of his former boss, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel), and polls showed him lagging other conservatives, including Mr. Mandel, who has made his own dash to the hard right in recent years.Mr. Trump has said he chose to bless Mr. Vance because “we have to pick somebody that can win.” Why he decided Mr. Vance is that somebody has prompted head scratching. Certainly, there is nothing the former president enjoys as much as watching a former adversary grovel, and Mr. Vance has been happy to gush about how wrong he was in 2016 and what a great president Mr. Trump turned out to be. (Best of his lifetime!) Mr. Trump may have been swayed by Mr. Vance’s admirers, notably Don Jr., Tucker Carlson and Mr. Thiel, a megadonor to Mr. Trump as well as to Mr. Vance. Mr. Trump is said to have been put off by an ugly confrontation between Mr. Mandel and another candidate during a debate in March.Mr. Trump may also be taken with Mr. Vance’s quasi-fame and frequent TV appearances. The former president has a longstanding love affair with celebrities — and, perhaps better than anyone, grasps the value of celebrity in electoral politics.Whatever its roots, Mr. Trump’s endorsement hit the Ohio race like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, spreading chaos and carnage. Mr. Mandel’s supporters have taken it particularly hard, slagging Mr. Vance as an opportunist and Mr. Trump’s endorsement as, at best, ill informed.John Stover, the head of Ohio Value Voters, “firmly” believes the decision was heavily influenced by Mr. Thiel. Mr. Stover speculated to me recently: Who knows what exactly “came up” during the billionaire money man’s pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago?Before the former president and Mr. Vance appeared together at a rally in central Ohio a week ago Saturday, Mr. Stover’s group called on supporters to boycott the event. Alternatively, attendees were encouraged to boo when Mr. Vance was introduced. The group’s call to arms included a laundry list of the candidate’s past criticisms of Mr. Trump.The Club for Growth also finds itself feuding with Mr. Trump over its refusal to abandon Mr. Mandel. One of the group’s ads spotlighting Mr. Vance’s past attacks on Mr. Trump prompted the former president to have an aide fire off an obscene text to the group’s president, David McIntosh. The organization has doubled down with even more ad spending.Team Vance’s mission has been to hawk his status as “the only Trump-endorsed candidate” in the race. This is the verbatim message of a new TV ad running in the state, and it was one of the first things out of Don Jr.’s mouth at Lori’s Roadhouse.Even Mr. Vance seems to understand that what is at stake here has little to do with him.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      In Trump’s Shadow, Republicans Campaign Ahead of Ohio Primary

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      Donald Trump’s endorsement of the author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance has shaken up the Republican race for the first major Senate midterm election.COLUMBUS, Ohio — Josh Mandel’s wager was simple: No one would outflank him in mirroring Donald J. Trump, either on hard-right America First positions or the bellicose, come-at-me style of the former president.So, Mr. Mandel said of Black Lives Matter activists, “They are the racists, not us.” He stirred animosity toward migrants, including refugees from Afghanistan, and falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. The Jewish grandson of a Holocaust survivor whose website features a Christian cross, Mr. Mandel stumped mostly in evangelical churches, claiming “there’s no such thing” as separation of church and state.For a long time, it worked. Mr. Mandel was the presumed front-runner in the crowded Republican field for U.S. senator from Ohio.But two weeks ago, the one person he sought most to impress — the former president himself — spurned Mr. Mandel, a former state treasurer, and bestowed his coveted endorsement on J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author, remaking the race overnight.Mr. Vance, who had been trailing in polls and running low on money, has seen a surge in donations and support since Mr. Trump’s embrace, as the first major Senate midterm primary election entered its final weekend before Tuesday’s voting.And around the state, Republicans including Mr. Mandel; Mr. Vance; Mike Gibbons, a self-funded businessman; and State Senator Matt Dolan fanned out in a preview of national G.O.P. politics to come — different moons circling Mr. Trump’s sun.On Saturday, Mr. Vance campaigned with two far-right members of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Mr. Mandel hopscotched across the state’s big cities — Toledo, Columbus and Cincinnati — with a conservative ally of his own, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.To longtime acquaintances and observers of Mr. Mandel, 44, who early in his career promoted civility and bipartisanship, his unrequited embrace of Trumpism and divisiveness suggested there was a price on political calculation.“I see the desperation there these last few months,” said Matt Cox, a former Republican operative who was an early adviser to Mr. Mandel before a falling-out. “I think his strategy was: All right, Trump won Ohio by eight points twice. All I have to do to become the nominee is to become the most like Trump.”The candidate most left on the sidelines since Mr. Trump’s nod at Mr. Vance, according to polls, has been Jane Timken. The only woman running, Ms. Timken was endorsed by Ohio’s retiring senator, Rob Portman, a center-right throwback to an earlier Ohio G.O.P. who voted with Senate Democrats for the bipartisan infrastructure bill.The Senate candidate and former Republican state chair, Jane Timken, has been endorsed by Senator Rob Portman, who is vacating his seat. Gaelen Morse/ReutersMs. Timken has solid Trump-era credentials — she chaired the state party while Mr. Trump was in office — but she does not mimic the former president’s aggrieved style, which has been a key to unlocking the most fervent Republican voters. She has set herself apart from rivals who she says seek every day to get themselves “canceled on Twitter” with their statements and antics.In a debate in March, Mr. Mandel nearly got into a physical confrontation with Mr. Gibbons.At a Baptist church in Columbus on Saturday, Mr. Mandel took aim at popular targets of the right, including transgender people, Republicans with “jelly knees” like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and the “liberal media in the back of the room” (just minutes after greeting reporters amicably by name in a private room).Fitting the setting, the largely older crowd in the pews called out encouraging “amens!” or groaned audibly when Mr. Mandel named enemies.“The reason that we’re going to win on Tuesday is because we have this army of Christian warriors throughout the state,’’ he pledged.One pastor present, Dan Wolvin, said he “felt sorry” for Mr. Trump over the Vance endorsement, saying he was “listening to the wrong people.” Still, Mr. Wolvin predicted the Trump nod would gain Mr. Vance “about five points” on Election Day, while conceding, “it’s a lot for Josh to make up.”Spurned or not, Mr. Mandel was still flying the Trump flag.“I supported President Trump yesterday. I support him today, and I’ll continue to support him tomorrow,” he said. He predicted the former president would return to the White House, “and I look forward to working with him.”The candidates, to varying degrees, all concur. Here are snapshots from around Ohio in the last weekend of campaigning.J.D. Vance in Newark, OhioJ.D. Vance campaigned with two far-right members of Congress, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesJ.D. Vance, the author and venture capitalist, bounded onto the stage at the Trout Club in Newark, Ohio, with the confidence of the nominal front-runner, a status bestowed by Mr. Trump’s endorsement on April 15.The crowd of about 75 in the bar and restaurant of a well-manicured country club had been warmed up by Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Greene, who ticked through the talking points of the fringe right: “medical tyranny,” “open borders,” “gender pediatric clinics” turning boys into girls, men in women’s bathrooms and women’s sports, The Walt Disney Company “grooming” children into homosexuals and transgender people.Mr. Vance breezed through some of the same themes, but he appeared more intent on previewing the larger issues he planned to argue in the general election to come.He castigated both parties for free trade agreements that he said had sent Ohio manufacturing to Mexico and China, for the “bipartisan decision to allow American Wall Street firms to get rich off the growth of China and not off the growth of the American middle class.” He also accused financial firms of allowing “the Chinese into this country, buying up our farmland, buying up our single-family homes, making it impossible for young families to buy a home, to own a stake in their own country.”“That is the game they play, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate to go and play a different game, a game where we put our citizens and the people in this room first,” he said to cheers.The people in that room — just off a verdant golf course, far away from the illegal immigrant, drug-infested cities that Mr. Vance speaks of on the stump — were hardly the down-and-out white workers central to his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” But an unspoken truth is, his audience is the true core of the pro-Trump vote in Ohio. The one income group that President Biden won in this state in 2020 was that of voters who earn less than $50,000. More affluent voters went for Mr. Trump.But economic themes in general — and the China threat in particular — resonated.“That’s in the DNA in Ohio,” said Representative Tim Ryan, the likely Democratic nominee for the coming Senate race.Mr. Vance was asked by a reporter why he invited Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz to barnstorm through Ohio with him on the closing weekend of the primary campaign.“There is nothing more disgusting in politics than the way that leadership asks you to stab your friends in the back,” he said before heading with them to West Chester, outside Cincinnati. He added for emphasis, “I’m not going to disavow them because some scumbag who doesn’t have the best interest of Ohio at heart wants me to.”Jonathan WeismanMike Gibbons in Dublin, OhioMike Gibbons pumped nearly $17 million of his own money into the race. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMr. Gibbons likes to sport a navy blue suit coat and red tie reminiscent of Mr. Trump. He has a habit of reminding voters that he is a businessman, not a politician. And he speaks often of how, in 1989, he started his investment banking and financial advisory firm in a small Cleveland office with nothing but a desk and a phone.But imitation did not win Mr. Gibbons the endorsement of the former president he so sought to emulate, and he is closing out the final stretch of the primary much the way he started: with his own gumption and personal wealth.In an interview on his campaign bus Saturday, Mr. Gibbons emphasized his lifelong Ohio roots and business credentials as the best fit for Ohio voters.“I was shocked,” Mr. Gibbons said of Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Vance, referring to his opponent as someone who “flew in from the West Coast.” He added: “Ohioans should be insulted.”Outside, a couple of volunteers mingled in a grocery store parking lot near Columbus, picking up Gibbons swag and eating pizza, before fanning out to knock on doors.Mr. Gibbons grew up in Parma, a working-class suburb outside of Cleveland. He was a one-time professional football player, and at 37, he founded Brown Gibbons Lang & Company. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2018, and this time has pumped roughly $17 million into his campaign, making him the largest self-funder in the race.He drew some scrutiny in March for comments he made in 2013 on China and Asian people that used offensive stereotypes and was later criticized for the heated debate stage encounter with Mr. Mandel.Mr. Gibbons served as Mr. Trump’s Ohio fundraising co-chair in 2016. But in one crucial way, his supporters say, his path has sharply diverged from Mr. Trump’s: Mr. Gibbons did not receive a multimillion-dollar loan from his father to launch his business empire.“I like that he is from Parma, Ohio — real down-to-earth kind of guy who worked hard for everything he has in life and earned his way,” said Michael Palcisko, 54, a schoolteacher and military veteran in Cleveland.Jazmine Ulloa and Kevin WilliamsMatt Dolan in North Royalton, Ohio Unlike the other leading Republican candidates in the race, State Senator Matt Dolan acknowledges President Biden is the nation’s legitimate leader.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesOn an overcast Saturday morning, Mr. Dolan knocked on doors in an affluent suburb just south of Cleveland. He was making a last-minute push to get voters to the polls, and on his target list were registered Republicans who had yet to cast a ballot. But on his route, he was just as likely to encounter Democrats and independents who were backing his candidacy — or simply cheering him on.“If it has to be a Republican, I hope it is you,” Rich Evans, 69, a retired educator, told him, as he stopped manicuring his lawn to shake hands.From the beginning, Mr. Dolan, who has served in the statehouse since 2017 and whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, has been walking in his own lonely lane. He is the only Republican candidate who supports Mr. Trump but has attempted to put some distance between himself and Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump “did a lot of good things for Ohio,” Mr. Dolan said. But he said he wanted his own campaign to remain focused on Ohio. He wanted to get back to discussing policy, and he certainly did not want to re-litigate the last election.“I am not looking backwards,” he said.Like the other Republicans in the race, he said he wants to secure the border, cut the flow of fentanyl into the state and tackle inflation. But he also said he could do more than his competitors to bring workers to the state and put together a unique economic development agenda.He’s hardly a never Trumper. He said he voted for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election, opposed both impeachment cases against him and has said he would support the former president should he become the 2024 Republican nominee.But on Jan. 6, Mr. Dolan did not shy away from criticizing Mr. Trump for spreading lies about the results of the November 2020 election, writing on Twitter, “Real leaders lead not manipulate.” Unlike the other leading Republican candidates in the race, he also acknowledges President Biden is the nation’s legitimate leader.It was a stance that Pat Ryan, 64, said he respected. Standing at his front door, Ryan, who considers himself a Democrat, said he planned to vote in the Republican primary this year because of Mr. Dolan. “I looked at all the candidates, and he’s the most honest one,” he said.Jazmine Ulloa More

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      Ahead of Senate Primary Election, Ohio Republicans Embrace the Bombast

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      The slugfest for the Republican nomination for Ohio’s open Senate seat has buried the brand of good-natured, country-club conservatism that was once a hallmark of the state.COLUMBUS, Ohio — Republicans running for the seat of Ohio’s retiring senator, Rob Portman, appear determined to bury the soft-spoken country-club bonhomie that was once a hallmark of the party in this state, and replace it with the pugilistic brand of conservatism owned by Donald J. Trump and now amplified by the new band of Buckeye bomb throwers.The race descended into a brutal slugfest as the leading candidates, the author-turned-venture capitalist J.D. Vance, the former state treasurer Josh Mandel and a self-funded businessman, Mike Gibbons, entered the final weekend before Tuesday’s primaries accusing one another of being insufficiently right-wing or disloyal to the man in Mar-a-Lago.Ohio used to be known for the quiet conservatism of the state’s celebrated former senator George Voinovich and its current governor, Mike DeWine; for the Merlot-swilling happy-warrior days of the former House speaker John A. Boehner; for the moderation of John Kasich, a two-term governor; and for the free-trade, free-market ideology of Mr. Portman himself.Instead, affections for such Ohio leaders are now being weaponized — in broadsides from the candidates and advertisements by their allies — as evidence that rivals are paying only lip service to Mr. Trump and his angry populism.“Josh Mandel: Another failed career politician squish,” a new ad from a super PAC supporting Mr. Vance blared on Ohio television sets on Friday, calling Mr. Mandel, who is mounting his third Senate run, a “two-time loser” and “a moderate for the moderates.”After so much vitriol, Ohio’s primary will begin to shed light on just how much power the former president can still wield from his exile. But in the final days of campaigning, the leading contenders left no doubt about his ideological hold on the party.At an evangelical church near Dayton on Friday, Mr. Mandel campaigned with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who sought to blunt the impact of Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Vance two weeks ago. “At the end of the day, it’s not going to come down to who endorsed whom,” Mr. Cruz said before he and Mr. Mandel brought an older crowd to its feet with stem-winding paeans to conservatism and criticism of Democrats.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Some in the crowd of more than 100 worried that the endorsement of Mr. Vance had significantly lowered Mr. Mandel’s odds of victory. “I think it went down quite a bit,” said Paul Markowski, a retired police officer in a Trump 2020 cap. He said he had not forgiven Mr. Vance for comments he made in 2016 denouncing Mr. Trump and saying that some of his support was driven by racism.“I could get over him not supporting Trump,” Mr. Markowski said. “But when he bad-mouthed us, the voters, that pissed me off.”Mr. Vance, for his part, pressed his attack on Mr. Mandel, who had vied for the former president’s endorsement with ads calling himself “pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.” Mr. Vance’s spokeswoman, Taylor Van Kirk, called Mr. Mandel “a phony, fraud and sellout, who claims to be ‘anti-establishment’ in public, but throws President Trump and the entire MAGA movement under the bus to the establishment behind closed doors.”Josh Mandel, a former Ohio treasurer, insists he is the true standard-bearer for Mr. Trump’s “America First” movement.Dustin Franz/Getty ImagesIn turn, the one Republican who has said the party needs to move on from the former president, State Senator Matt Dolan, castigated Mr. Vance for bringing members of the party’s extremist wing, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, into the state on Saturday — not because of their extreme positions, but because they are “outsiders” who are “telling Ohioans how they should vote.”In the rush to the right, Mr. Gibbons, who had styled himself a businessman in Mr. Trump’s mold and was once the front-runner in the Senate contest, pledged his fealty to a right-wing movement, called the Convention of States, to rewrite the Constitution to restrain federal power.All of the major candidates in the Republican Senate primary have insisted they are the true conservatives in the race, but only one, Mr. Vance, has the official imprimatur of the former president. That means the judgment that Republican voters render on Tuesday will go a long way to show whether even conservative candidates like Mr. Mandel and Mr. Gibbons can overcome a cold shoulder from Mar-a-Lago.“President Trump is a major factor in this state,” said Alex Triantafilou, the longtime chairman of the Hamilton County Republican Party, which includes Cincinnati. “He just is. He still motivates our base in a way that some people think is waning, but it’s not from my perspective.”Still, to call Tuesday’s Republican primary a referendum on the future of Trumpism — in Ohio and beyond — would go too far. The state’s low-key Republican governor, Mr. DeWine, does not appear to be threatened in his quest for re-election by a primary challenger, Jim Renacci, whose “Putting Ohio First” campaign adopted MAGA themes in its attack on Mr. DeWine’s pandemic-control efforts. Mr. Trump declined to endorse Mr. Renacci, seeing no prospect for victory.The former president’s attacks did chase the one Ohio Republican who voted to impeach him, Representative Anthony Gonzalez, into retirement, and he buoyed a former White House aide, Max Miller, who is running for an Ohio House seat, despite an accusation from one of Mr. Trump’s press secretaries, Stephanie Grisham, that he had physically abused her.But in other contests, such as a heated Republican primary in northwest Ohio, mainstream Republicans are expected to prevail against conservative showmen like J.R. Majewski, who painted his vast backyard into a 19,000-square-foot Trump election sign and posted a video of himself walking through a shuttered factory with an assault-style rifle.In the bellwether Senate race here, however, Mr. Trump’s influence is undeniable. The state was once a reliable birthing ground of center-right Republicans, such as Mr. Portman, Mr. Boehner and Mr. DeWine, who has been in Republican politics for 45 years, as a House member, senator, lieutenant governor, attorney general and governor.But the free-trade, free-market and pro-legal immigration sentiments that were once hallmarks of the party have been washed away by Trumpism.And the Ohio primary will kick off a four-week period that will reveal much about Mr. Trump’s sway with the party — and just how transferable his continued popularity is to others. After Ohio, his preferred picks in Nebraska, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia will all be tested in heated primaries.Mike Gibbons, who styled himself as a businessman in Mr. Trump’s mold, was an early front-runner in the Senate race.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesMr. Vance, buoyed by the endorsement bump and leading in a Fox News poll, is scarcely tacking to the center, confident in the support of the Republican base. On Saturday, he will barnstorm through Ohio with two figures from the right fringe of the party, Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz. On Sunday and Monday, he will be joined on the campaign trail by two other figures firmly in the former president’s camp, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Charlie Kirk, the bombastic leader of the far-right Turning Point USA.But after trailing in the primary contest for months, Mr. Vance enters the final stretch as something of a front-runner, with the other candidates training their fire on him. Providing air cover for Mr. Mandel, the business-backed political action committee the Club for Growth is broadcasting an advertisement repeating attacks that Mr. Vance made in 2016 against Mr. Trump and his supporters, suggesting the former president made a mistake with his endorsement.A pro-Vance super PAC, heavily funded by Peter Thiel, the Trump-aligned financier that Mr. Vance works for, fired back Friday with an ad running in Columbus, Dayton and Cleveland that portrays Mr. Mandel as a “squish.” Mr. Mandel’s embrace by the Republican nominees for the presidency in 2008 and 2012, John McCain and Mitt Romney, are treated in the advertisement like a scarlet letter, and kind words from Mr. Kasich might as well have come from Nancy Pelosi.“Josh Mandel, he’s for them, not us,” the narrator intones, a clear message that Tuesday’s primary is geared toward the Republican extremes, not the sort of voters who once backed Mr. Kasich and Mr. Romney.Mr. Gibbons, still in the hunt for the nomination, will trot out yet another Trump ally, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, on Monday to attest to his conservative bona fides. In a series of statements on Friday seemingly issued to appeal to the far right, Mr. Gibbons declared that a “dire need of real change” meant he would support a convention to rewrite the Constitution, and said that a new effort by the Department of Homeland Security to combat disinformation would be “a de facto ‘Ministry of Truth’” to crush dissent.Jonathan Weisman reported from Columbus, Ohio, and Trip Gabriel from Dayton. More

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      Ohio Senate Race Pits Trump and Son Against Big G.O.P. Group

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      The Club for Growth has lined up behind Josh Mandel. Donald J. Trump and his eldest son, Donald Jr., are backing J.D. Vance. Tuesday’s outcome will be a crucial test of the former president’s sway.Not long after Donald J. Trump was elected president, the Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group that had opposed his 2016 campaign, reinvented itself as a reliable supporter, with the group’s president, David McIntosh, providing frequent counsel to Mr. Trump on important races nationwide.But this spring, as Mr. Trump faces critical tests of the power of his endorsements, an ugly fight over the Ohio Senate primary is threatening what had been a significant alliance with one of the most influential groups in the country.The dispute broke into plain view days ago when in support of Josh Mandel, the former Ohio state treasurer, for the Republican Senate race, the Club for Growth ran a television commercial showing the candidate Mr. Trump has endorsed, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, repeatedly denouncing Mr. Trump in 2016.Mr. Trump’s response was brutish: He had an assistant send Mr. McIntosh a short text message telling him off in the most vulgar terms. The group, one of the few that actually spends heavily in primary races, responded by saying it would increase its spending on the ad.That escalation drew an angry response from Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, who had spent months urging his father to support Mr. Vance and has invested his own energy and influence on Mr. Vance’s behalf.The standoff over the Ohio primary encapsulates some of the critical open questions within the Republican Party. Mr. Trump has held enormous sway despite being less visible since leaving office, but other power centers and G.O.P.-aligned groups over which he used to exert a stranglehold are asserting themselves more. And his ability to influence the thinking of Republican voters on behalf of other candidates is about to be tested at the ballot box.Until now, even after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to keep him in office, many Republican candidates have fallen over themselves to court Mr. Trump’s endorsement. That’s proven especially true in Ohio, where the primary for the Senate has been dominated by candidates like Mr. Mandel and Mr. Vance, who have emulated Mr. Trump’s reactionary politics.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.The Ohio contest has also divided Mr. Trump’s own circle, as rival candidates have hired various formal and informal advisers to the former president in hopes of influencing his eventual endorsement.Much like Mr. Vance, Mr. McIntosh and the Club for Growth opposed Mr. Trump in 2016, but the group then recast itself as closely aligned with him.By the time Mr. Trump left office, Mr. McIntosh was frequently speaking with him by phone and visiting him at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida, according to an aide to Mr. McIntosh. His frequent attempts to sway Mr. Trump’s thinking on politics reached the point that it rankled others in Mr. Trump’s circle, which is constantly in flux and populated by people seeking influence.In a brief interview after receiving the text message from Mr. Trump’s aide last week, Mr. McIntosh minimized the dispute over Ohio, noting that the former president and the Club for Growth had both endorsed Representative Ted Budd, a Republican in North Carolina running for the Senate, a race on which the group has spent heavily.“I very much view this as one race where we’re not aligned, we’re on opposite sides, which doesn’t happen very often,” Mr. McIntosh said of the clash over Ohio.Still, the Club for Growth also stuck with Representative Mo Brooks in Alabama’s Senate primary after Mr. Trump withdrew his own endorsement.The dispute over the group’s attack on Mr. Vance touched a nerve with both Mr. Trump and his eldest son.The former president has long taken special delight in bringing to heel Republicans who, having criticized him, are forced to acknowledge his supremacy in the party and bow and scrape for his approval. That was the case with Mr. McIntosh, and also with Mr. Vance, who courted the former president with the help of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the billionaire Peter Thiel, as well as that of Donald Trump Jr.All of which explains why the Club for Growth’s ad showing Mr. Vance expressing scorn for Mr. Trump in 2016 aggravated not only the former president, but also his son.The younger Mr. Trump, who is trying to flex his own political muscle within the Republican Party, treated the tiff between his father and Mr. McIntosh as an opening to attack the group and also to try to tear down Mr. Mandel.When he visited Ohio this week on Mr. Vance’s behalf, the younger Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Mandel by name for his support for a no-fly zone in Ukraine, and also criticized the Club for Growth, saying, “They spent $10 million in 2016 to fight Donald Trump,” and suggesting the group was “soft on China.”The Senate candidate J.D. Vance is ahead in private polling, according to strategists — a fact that Mr. Trump can point to even if another candidate ultimately wins, experts said.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesThe younger Mr. Trump also said he might oppose candidates newly endorsed by the Club for Growth unless it stops running the ads about Mr. Vance and removes Mr. McIntosh from the group’s board, according to an adviser who spoke anonymously.Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist and former top aide at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that while Mr. Trump’s approach with his endorsements has been fairly random in recent months, the Vance endorsement is different because of the composition of the primary. “This is the first time Trump’s political might has been tested on a level playing field among broadly acceptable candidates,” Mr. Donovan said.In both Ohio and North Carolina, Mr. Donovan said, “the Trump nod may lift his picks from the middle of the pack to victory over established favorites with lengthy statewide resumes. That would be an objectively impressive display of power.”Mr. Trump’s backing has elevated Mr. Vance’s standing in the primary, according to a Fox News survey released on Tuesday evening. Mr. Vance received 23 percent of the primary vote, an increase of 12 percentage points from the last survey, overtaking Mr. Mandel, who received 18 percent. Some 25 percent of voters remain undecided, the poll found.Mr. Trump had been advised that he could have the most effect by giving his endorsement in mid-April, as early voting was set to begin in the state.There is always the chance that the Club for Growth emerges successful in the fight in Ohio. Mr. McIntosh said he believed that Mr. Mandel was the most conservative, pro-Trump candidate in the field.Still, Republican strategists said a late surge by Mr. Vance, even if he does not win, would give Mr. Trump renewed bragging rights.David Kochel, a Republican strategist who has advised past presidential nominees, said that Mr. Trump appears “to have breathed life into a campaign most people assumed was dead,” adding, “even if Vance loses, Trump will be able to argue that he turned his campaign around.” More

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      Trump Endorses J.D. Vance in Republican Primary for Senate in Ohio

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      The move amounts to a major bet on Mr. Vance’s ability to prevail over a crowded field, and on the former president’s power to alter the course of key congressional races.Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday endorsed the author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance in the Republican primary election for Senate in Ohio, aiming to give the candidate a needed boost in a crowded race that will test Mr. Trump’s potency as a kingmaker in key congressional contests.Calling Mr. Vance “our best chance for victory in what could be a very tough race,” Mr. Trump said in a statement that the candidate was “strong on the Border, tough on Crime, understands how to use Taxes and Tariffs to hold China accountable, will fight to break up Big Tech, and has been a warrior on the Rigged and Stolen Presidential Election.”The move amounted to a major bet on Mr. Vance and on Mr. Trump’s influence over Republican primary voters in conservative-leaning Ohio, where several high-profile candidates are facing off in a contentious and at times nasty campaign to replace Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who is retiring.With the May 3 primary less than three weeks away, limited polling has shown Mr. Vance struggling to break through against rivals including Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer; Jane Timken, a former chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party; and Mike Gibbons, a financier. No one has emerged as a clear front-runner.The highly coveted endorsement came after weeks in which the race’s top candidates veered increasingly to the right in pursuit of Mr. Trump’s support, with tension and anticipation rising ahead of a planned visit to the state by the former president on April 23. In recent days, as news reports trickled out that Mr. Vance was likely to win Mr. Trump’s backing, supporters of other candidates engaged in last-ditch efforts to prevent the endorsement.More than three dozen Republican county and state committee leaders urged the former president in a letter not to endorse Mr. Vance, questioning his Republican credentials and noting that he had repeatedly denounced Mr. Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.Mr. Trump’s move carries significant risks, with candidates he has backed in other key races around the country sometimes struggling to emerge as favorites for the Republican nomination.Veasey Conway for The New York TimesBut Mr. Trump had all but decided days earlier to support Mr. Vance, according to four Republicans familiar with his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.Mr. Trump called Mr. Vance to alert him to the endorsement before it became public. In his statement on Friday, Mr. Trump said, “J.D. Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades.”According to one of the Republicans familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking, he was swayed by several factors, including video clips of a Republican primary debate in which two of the candidates, Mr. Mandel and Mr. Gibbons, nearly came to blows. The incident ended any chance that Mr. Trump, who credits the 2016 presidential debates for his victory that year, might have endorsed either of them, the Republican said. Mr. Trump was also impressed by Mr. Vance’s performance in the last debate.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Mr. Trump has also told allies that he believes the leading Democratic candidate, Representative Tim Ryan, will be a difficult opponent in the general election and that he thinks Mr. Vance can beat him. Mr. Trump has been increasingly looking toward a prospective 2024 presidential campaign of his own, and he is said to see Mr. Vance as a reliable ally in the Senate on issues he cares about, like trade and immigration.And a last-minute effort to stop Mr. Trump’s endorsement that included releasing an internal Mandel campaign poll appears to have backfired. The survey suggested that Mr. Trump’s endorsement would give Mr. Vance only a five-percentage-point bump in support, which Mr. Trump took as an affront, the Republican familiar with the former president’s thinking said.Mr. Trump was lobbied heavily by supporters of Mr. Vance, including the billionaire Peter Thiel, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and his own son, Donald Trump Jr.Still, the move carries significant risks for Mr. Trump, whose endorsements in other marquee races across the country have not yet proven decisive. In Georgia, his attempt to fuel David Perdue’s Republican primary challenge to Gov. Brian Kemp has largely been seen as underwhelming.In one of his biggest gambles, Mr. Trump recently gave his backing in the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania to the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, despite a concerted effort by supporters of the other leading candidate, David McCormick, to persuade Mr. Trump to stay neutral. Mr. McCormick and Mr. Mandel use the same consulting firm, run by the strategist Jeff Roe.Few races across the country have captured Mr. Trump’s effect in Republican primaries in the way that Ohio’s Republican Senate campaign has, with candidates seeking to model themselves after the former president. Most of the contenders have railed against undocumented immigrants, and only one has recognized President Biden as the nation’s legitimate leader.Ahead of the endorsement, many Republican county party leaders expressed frustration that Mr. Trump might select Mr. Vance, the author of the best-selling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” They noted that he had spent much of his life in San Francisco and had been critical of Mr. Trump even as they worked to elect him.“He is the guy who worked against Trump and spoke against Trump and told everybody he didn’t vote for Trump,” said David Johnson, the chairman of the Columbiana County Republican Party, who has endorsed Ms. Timken. Mr. Johnson helped circulate the letter from Republican leaders in Ohio, which stated that Mr. Vance was not a registered Republican and provided Mr. Trump with a list of negative comments that Mr. Vance had made against him, including calling him “another opioid” in 2016.“While we were working hard in Ohio to support you and Make America Great Again, J.D. Vance was actively working against your candidacy,” the letter says. “He referred to your supporters as ‘racists.’”Asked for comment, including about the accusation that Mr. Vance is not a registered Republican, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for the Vance campaign, said: “When he has voted in primaries, J.D. has always voted in Republican ones. He has a long public history of supporting Republican candidates, including Donald Trump in 2020.”The campaign also pointed to polling that showed Mr. Vance in second place behind Mr. Mandel, as well as a tweet from one Republican Party county chairman denying that he had signed the letter, and another tweet from the anti-abortion group Ohio Right to Life PAC that expressed support for a Trump endorsement of Mr. Vance.In the tweet, the group’s chairman, Marshal Pitchford, said that the former president would be making “a fantastic choice” in backing Mr. Vance, adding that he was 100 percent “pro-life without exceptions” and would continue Mr. Trump’s “pro-life victories” in the Senate.In stump speeches, Mr. Vance has been quick to address the criticism that he has not always been a Trump loyalist, often saying that the best policy is honesty.“I didn’t like Trump six years ago,” he told supporters this week at a brewery in Hilliard. “I did not think he was going to be a good president. I was very happy to be proven wrong.”He added, “I was very proud to support the president over the past several years.” More