Opponents are trying to exploit these old remarks, including Vance’s suggestion in 2016 that he could vote for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over Trump. Some Republican officials who worked to help the former president win Ohio then say they see Vance’s ratification as a betrayal, while Democratic generals say that if Vance goes to the polls, he will likely face a Democratic nominee. MP Tim Ryan, will seek to portray him as authentic. GOP senator Mike Gibbons, a businessman who has largely funded his campaign, said Trump’s decision to back Vance left other candidates with an opening that would not exist if the former president backed someone who was most loyal to his campaigns in 2016 and 2020.. “My first choice was to support me. Our second choice was to stay out. And our third choice was to support JD Vance,” Gibbons said in an interview. But Vance has only one thing that could matter most to Republicans voting in next week’s election: Trump’s pardon. “He’s the guy who said some bad words — about me. He did it,” Trump said at a rally last week at the Delaware County Exhibition Center north of Columbus. “But you know what? Each of the others did too. In fact, if I had followed that pattern, I do not think I would have ever supported anyone in the country.” Finally, Trump said: “I want to choose someone who will win and this man will win.” So far, Trump’s support seems to have translated into a boost for Vance. A Fox News poll released Tuesday found that it was ahead, with 23% support among GOP qualifiers, five points ahead of Mandel, who is campaigning with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over the weekend. the race. Gibbons followed with 13%, according to the survey. State Senator Matt Dolan, the only candidate who has not embraced Trump’s lies about widespread electoral fraud in 2020, with 11%. and former state GOP president Jane Timken at 6%. However, the primary battle is fluid: A quarter of those likely to vote in the Republican primary were undecided, according to the poll. Strategy analysts expect low turnout, in part because a delay in finalizing the reshuffle for the state legislature means Ohio has to hold two primaries this year. And Republicans leaning toward the establishment that support Governor Mike DeWine against a challenge from the right may not be inclined to follow Trump’s example. “Some voters do not yet know when the primaries will be and it will confuse the world,” said Steve Stivers, a former GOP lawmaker who resigned last year to lead the Ohio Chamber of Commerce in an interview Thursday. In the final weeks of the race, Stevers said Trump’s support offered an unquestionable boost to Vance. However, he said Vance remains an unknown figure to many Ohio voters because he has not run in the past and has spent years living outside the state. “He was not really a candidate before Trump was approved,” Stevers said. “He is a completely new figure. Many people do not know him because he has not been involved in party politics for a long time.”
“I can support him now”
While Vance hastened to boost Trump’s support through television commercials – a sign that he relies on the former president’s loyal supporters to pull him across the finish line – he hardly mentioned it at all during a polling station Wednesday in Grove City. At a luncheon of about 50 people in downtown Ohio, Vance devoted much more time to sharply criticizing President Joe Biden than to advertising his support for Trump. “What’s not going well with this country is rocket science,” Vance said. “It’s bad leadership.” His remarks also made it clear that he believes he still has to deal with continuing concerns about his previous criticism of Trump – which was boosted by millions of dollars in TV commercials from the Club for Growth in an effort to defeat Vance. (Club supports Mandel.) “I’m sure you’ve seen all these ads accusing me of being ‘Never Trump,’” Vance said in a closed room. “They did not love Donald Trump in 2016. The difference between me and them is that I had the honesty to admit that I was wrong.” He added, “Strange in politics, just admitting you were wrong is so simple.” The remarks sparked a round of applause, but several voters later said they were pleased that Vance had faced one of the biggest questions hanging over his candidacy. “I could not vote for him in good faith because of what he said against Trump,” said Bonnie Boyd of Columbus, who came to take action against Vance before voting next week. She said she was most offended by Vance’s comment in 2016 that she would consider voting for Clinton over Trump. “It probably hurt more,” Boyd said. But “when Trump approved,” he said, “I thought I could support him now.” For Trump, Vance’s approval offers one of the biggest tests to date for his dominance of the GOP base. Several Republicans who came to see Vance on Wednesday disagreed with Boyd, saying they intended to decide for themselves in the Ohio primary. “I do not make my decision based on Trump’s choice,” said Janet Riegel of Grove City, a retired librarian who is still undecided on the issue. “I base my decision on what JD Vance and all the candidates support.” Several Republican voters and party officials across Ohio said in interviews this week that Trump’s support undoubtedly overturned the race and gave Vance a lifeline in the final straight of the campaign. But the question remained whether it would be enough to deliver a victory. “He still has to show that he is his own man and can win this race,” a Republican-neutral Republican told CNN. “But for others it stung.” And that, said one of Vance’s advisers, is precisely why he is not sounding the trumpet as he continues to work to introduce himself to voters – as a “new generation Republican”. “This is the fight we are doing – not just defeating the Democrats, but what kind of Republican are we going to send to Washington?” Vance told Grove City. “The problem we have in Washington right now is that we have too many, too many weak Republicans who are too timid to counterattack on the left.”
Mediation battle in the direction of the GOP
While a super-funded PAC funded by pro-Trump mogul Peter Thiel supports Vance through TV commercials, the candidate is fully aligned with the world of Trump and his associates. He has held several events in recent days with the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and plans to campaign over the weekend qualifying with Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. The other top Republican candidates have their own deputies. Cruz is campaigning with Mandel, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has backed Gibbons. Timken has hired two of Trump’s top allies, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossi, as generals, and has appeared with Lewandowski at events. The most significant division is between Trump and David McIdo, the head of the Club for Growth, who has long been one of the biggest financial players in the GOP qualifiers and has largely backed Trump-backed candidates. In Ohio, the group’s political arm, the Club for Growth Action, aired ads highlighting Vance’s previous criticism of Trump, questioning whether Trump was fully aware of Vance’s words and even modifying the former President for his previous support for Mitt Romney’s candidacy for the Senate. Enraged by the ads, Trump ordered a middleman to send McIntosh a message last week that read, “You go — alone.” Vance’s most important recent stumbling block was his first remarks about Ukraine as Russia prepared to launch its invasion. “I have to be honest with you, I do not really care what happens in Ukraine, one way or another,” Vance said in a podcast by former Trump chief strategy officer Steve Bannon in February. Days later, when the gravity of the war in Ukraine became clearer, Vance backed down. It issued a lengthy statement saying Russia’s war was “unquestionably a tragedy, especially for innocent people trapped in the fire,” and opposed any US or NATO military intervention. Last week, Dolan highlighted Vance’s first comments about Ukraine in a digital video, noting that 80,000 people with ties to Ukraine live in Ohio. There are some indications in recent days that Dolan is emerging as a serious threat to Vance. The state senator whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians of baseball tried hard to stay above the battle. Most of the attention he received in the race was to dispel Trump’s lies about widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential race. But Dolan also often points out that, as a state legislator, he has helped set policies on his agenda. Trump. Appealing to the moderates and incumbent Republicans and avoiding Trumpism, Dolan has perhaps the clearest line in the disintegrated primary field. And Trump seems to recognize that. The former president in a statement this week attacked Dolan over the Guards’ decision last year to change their name from the Cleveland Indians. “Anyone who changes the name of the ‘historic’ Cleveland Indians (since 1916), an original baseball franchise, to the Cleveland Guardians, is not fit to serve in the United States Senate,” Trump said Tuesday. “Such is the case of Matt Dolan, whom I do not know, I have never met and he may be a very good guy, but the team will always remain for me the Cleveland Indians!”
