SWANTON, Ohio – Third time’s the charm.
Or at least Vice President JD Vance hopes so, as he makes his closing argument in the midterms in his home state of Ohio, where the Senate seat he vacated two years ago to join the Trump administration is in jeopardy.
Vance, who owns a home in Cincinnati, made his third trip to Ohio in less than a month on Nov. 2, the eve of the midterm election that will decide whether the GOP gets to keep its majority in the House and Senate for the final two years of he and President Donald Trump’s term.
The battle for control of the upper chamber runs through Ohio, where former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who lost his reelection bid two years ago, is angling to make a political comeback against Vance replacement and
former Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted.
"It's definitely personal to me, and hopefully he's going to pull it out. I feel good about it," Vance told USA TODAY of Husted on the Joint Base Andrews tarmac.
Brown is in a tight race against Husted, who was appointed by the state’s Republican governor last year to fill Vance's seat until a special election could be held. The two candidates are duking it out in the contest that will decide who gets to serve out the remaining two years of the Senate seat's current term.
“This is a bare knuckle brawl in Ohio,” said Ken Blackwell, a former Trump campaign adviser and Cincinnati mayor who served as state treasurer and ran for governor.
The race is rated a toss-up by the nonpartisan elections handicapper the Cook Political Report, and a New York Times/Siena poll released on Nov. 2 had Husted at 44% and Brown at 49% in the Senate race that's viewed by strategists of both political parties as a bellwether.
That view was underscored by Vance’s afternoon rally in Swanton, a suburb of Toledo that sits just across the border from Michigan.
“I am closing out this campaign right where it all started for me, the great state of Ohio, because I know you’re going to choose right tomorrow,” Vance said.
Former President Barack Obama won the state twice, in 2008 and 2012, before Trump claimed it three times in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections.
In 2024, Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno defeated Brown with 50% of the vote, besting Brown’s 46%. Two years earlier, in 2022, Vance won with 53% of the vote against his Democratic opponent, former GOP Rep. Tim Ryan, who received the support of 47% of the electorate.
Swanton is also part of a battleground congressional district. The seat that’s been represented by Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the longest serving woman in Congress, since 1983 is a potential pickup opportunity for Republicans in an otherwise difficult cycle.
Controversial ad splits GOP
Democratic hopes inside the state have been buoyed in recent days by blowback to an attack ad that Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ran against his Democratic opponent, former state health director Amy Acton.
The ad that was yanked in the final days of the race featured Acton’s estranged mother calling her daughter a liar.
Acton was removed from her mother’s custody after she accused her stepfather of sexually abusing her when she was a child. Acton’s stepfather was indicted in the case but fled the state before he could be taken into custody.
The ad came under widespread criticism, including from Republicans. Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling” and pushed Ramaswamy to take it down. Former Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich said it’s "completely inappropriate." Husted said he wouldn’t have run it.
Democrats say it could help boost enthusiasm for their candidates up and down the ballot.
Aaron Pickrell, a Democrat who ran former Ohio Gov. Ted. Strickland’s campaign said the advertisement shifted the conversation away from what Republicans wanted to talk about in the final days of the race to an issue that no one wanted to touch.
Pickrell, who was Obama’s state director in Ohio during his campaigns, said it caused a “split within the Republican candidates in the final days of the effort as opposed to everybody sort of singing from the same hymnal.”
Vance came out swinging against the Republicans who criticized the advertisement earlier this month. He said on Oct. 21 that Republicans critiquing the spot should focus their energy on beating Democrats running for office.
"I have to admit that I'm a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America," Vance said at an Ohio event.
Trump soon followed suit. He called the ad “fair game” and advised Ramaswamy to leave it up.
A Suffolk University poll taken in conjunction with the USA TODAY network in Ohio suggested that the ad may have hurt Ramaswamy more than it helped him. But the survey results also showed that 72% of Ohioans had not seen or heard of the controversial commercial.
To the extent that the ad has a “minor effect” on the election, it will be in the gubernatorial race, former Ohio deputy attorney general and crisis communications expert Mark Weaver assessed.
“I don't think the Ramaswamy ad has any effect in the Senate race,” Weaver said.
As goes Ohio, so goes the nation
Another challenge Husted has had to confront: A quarter of voters believe Brown is the incumbent.
In a Bowling Green State University survey published in September, 25% of voters said they thought Brown was still in office.
The last time Husted competed on his own statewide was in 2014, when he ran for reelection as secretary of state.
Democrats have capitalized on that gap, running ads tying Husted, who was the vice president of business and economic development for the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, to the tech community. A Brown ad labeled Husted the "face of data centers in Ohio.”
In a statement on the race, Brown spokeswoman Lauren Chou said Husted “led the charge” to bring hundreds of data centers to Ohio. The attack refers to the estimated $2.5 billion tax breaks the DeWine administration gave companies for data center development.
As a senator, Husted sponsored a bipartisan bill that intended to bring down energy costs associated with data centers for average Americans.
The legislation that encouraged states to make data center companies take on more of the costs overwhelmingly passed the House before it was blocked just before an election-timed recess by Democrats in the Senate, who said it did not go far enough to hold tech companies accountable.
Brown spokeswoman Chou also hit Husted for votes in the Senate against resolutions that attempted to end the war in Iran. She said the war had sent the “costs of gas and diesel to record highs."
Republicans in the state are defaulting to their long history of successfully turning out voters, as recent statewide victories have demonstrated. The last Republican to lose a gubernatorial race in Ohio was Blackwell, who was defeated by Strickland in 2006.
Blackwell said that Republicans in the state had leaned in harder to early and mail-in voting over the last decade and invested more heavily in their voter turnout operation.
According to AdImpact, spending in the race has exceeded $510 million, with more of the money coming from GOP groups.
Trump’s Ohio focus: Husted’s rear end
Trump has gotten plenty of attention on Husted by making flattering comments about his rear end.
Husted played college football at the University of Dayton in the 1980s, a biographic detail on which Trump has repeatedly zeroed in.
"I don't do this with men very often," Trump said on Oct. 12 in Youngstown, Ohio. "I started examining his body, because I didn't know he was a great athlete.”
As the story goes, Trump said he “watched up and down” and looked at Husted’s fit behind.
"I looked at his ass and then I looked at his legs," Trump said of Husted's buttocks at a Greenville, North Carolina, rally on Oct. 20. "I said his ass ‒ it's like a pile of muscle."
In conversations about the race, several Republicans who spoke to USA TODAY said Trump’s comments could help Husted boost his image with MAGA.
But other strategists and politicians in both parties questioned the unusual tactic.
Strickland called the remarks, “Totally bizarre.” They probably did not hurt Husted, but they did not help him, Strickland said.
Blackwell said that although he and Trump are usually on the same page on policy, the president does things, “in terms of language use and behaviors, that at least raise eyebrows,” especially with evangelicals.
“Those sorts of things are not helpful with that part of his base. It means I have to go out and work double time showing the difference on the life issue and a whole host of other social issues that could be a slam dunk for Jon,” Blackwell said, referring to abortion rights. “But the president's president.”
Husted, for his part, has said he and his wife have a “good sense of humor” about Trump’s assessment.
His campaign said in a statement to USA TODAY that the senator was excited to welcome Vance back to his home state on the eve of the election. The campaign also said that Husted was proud to work alongside Trump and Vance to eliminate taxes on tips and overtime and cut down on illegal migration.
Vance cashes in as Ohio’s favorite son
The president campaigned for Husted in Ohio three times over the last month.
But with Trump, who’s been growing hoarse on the trail, curtailing his travel, it fell to the vice president to seek last-minute votes in the state at the end of the election.
Vance is highly influential in the state, Blackwell said. “It doesn't surprise me that JD has come home and made sure people understand that he's moving all of his chips to the center of the table on Jon,” Blackwell added.
If the GOP were to lose the seat, “it would be and it should be embarrassing” to the vice president, Strickland said.
Vance won his Senate seat after he wrote a bestselling memoir about childhood that became a major motion picture.
“I'm sure that the Republicans take some pride in him being a native son and vice president, but I suspect that Vance's popularity in Ohio is not much higher than Donald Trump's right now,” Strickland assessed.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Vance gave up this Ohio Senate seat. It could decide who wins the chamber
