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Columbus, OH — After months of failing to gain traction, J.D. Vance is so desperate to remain relevant, he is doing his best Josh Mandel impression and is now saying the 2020 presidential election was stolen. 

Josh Mandel has said that the 2020 election was stolen in forums and at campaign stops. At a forum in October, Mandel received applause for saying that lie. At one forum in November, every candidate on stage except for Matt Dolan and J.D. Vance applauded (at the 59-minute mark) Josh Mandel for saying the election was stolen. Even Jane Timken applauded, who Mandel says cannot stand him!  

With his falling position in the polls, Vance has now shifted to saying the election was stolen to keep his campaign on life support. This is new for Vance, who in October 2021 said Ohio’s elections were “pretty gold standard” and as Cincinnati.com noted, “Mandel’s opponents have shied away from claiming the election was stolen.” 

Vance isn’t the only candidate to arrive at this position after several months of failing to gain traction in this primary. Bernie Moreno tweeted that his conservative friends should accept the results of the election on November 7, 2020. Last month, Moreno flipped his position and started airing ads saying he believes the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. 

The Big Lie is the defining issue in Republican primary races around the country thanks to Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party. And all of the leading Senate candidates are desperately vying for Trump’s endorsement, willing to indulge in his most dangerous lies instead of talking about how to improve the lives of Ohioans. 

“Trump’s grip on this out-of-control primary keeps getting tighter with more candidates indulging in dangerous election lies to prove their loyalty to him instead of focusing on the issues that matter to Ohioans. Josh Mandel has dragged the Republican Senate field down another right-wing conspiracy rabbit hole and it seems only a matter of time before they all echo this dangerous lie,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party. 

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January 21, 2021

Happy Friday, and welcome to “Buckeye Brawl,” a weekly newsletter from the Ohio Democratic Party highlighting the nasty, chaotic, and expensive Republican primary for Senate. This out-of-control primary is making conservatives “deeply worried” about the prospects of Republicans losing this seat.

As the Republican Senate primary continues to sink lower and lower, these GOP candidates are injecting even more nasty personal attacks, more chaos, and more money into this race. We’re here to help you keep track of all of it.

This week, Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser said the race was “one of the most crowded and combustible GOP Senate primaries in the country.” And NBC News’ Henry Gomez said, “It’s a wild ride here in Ohio and the airwaves are already jam-packed.”

Here’s what you may have missed:

ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD. In an interview last weekend with Colleen Marshall, Josh Mandel said, “We have the people on our side. My opponents have all the money in the world. Folks who are watching tv are probably seeing ads for my opponents on tv, but they aren’t seeing ads for me. But we’re still winning.” He went on to say it more bluntly, “So our campaign is not based on money like other campaigns.” It’s a nice thought for him to have, but Josh is an out-of-touch millionaire just like the rest of the leading candidates.

WHO’S AN INSIDER? After the pro-Mandel Club for Growth attacked Timken for saying Anthony Gonzalez’s vote to impeach Trump was “rational,” it must be getting to Timken. She was asked about Mandel in an interview on WQKT and fired back, saying, “Well, we know that Josh is a 20-plus year politician who has quit and failed Ohioans. I’m the one that has rolled up her sleeves, who is listening to Ohioans…” Just to be clear, Jane Timken has been a political insider for several decades as a well-connected political donor so she’s just as much of an insider as Mandel.

NOBODY LIKES YOU, JOSH. On the Brandon Boxer Show, Bernie Moreno (presumably frustrated at his polling position), decided it would be fun to show just how Mean Girls this primary has become. In the interview, Moreno went after Josh Mandel doing his best Regina George impression, saying that 8 out of 10 people who know who Josh Mandel is don’t want him as a U.S. Senator. I mean do 8 out of 10 people even know who Bernie Moreno (Bernardo?) is?

FANCY THIS ANTI-TRUMP POLL? Firing back at Bernie Moreno’s poll, Mike Gibbons consultant Kory Wood reminded everyone that Bernie Moreno polled his followers asking if it was Trump or Adolf Hitler who attacked immigrants, silenced the press, and appeals to the darkest parts of human nature. He tweeted the poll out with the caption, “Did the [sic] mention the results of this flash poll?” It’s another reminder that these people will say and do anything to advance their own personal interests.

Thanks for reading along – that’s all for the Buckeye Brawl this week. If you have questions, my email is [email protected]. Have a great weekend!

Columbus, OH — It may be a new year, but the Ohio Republican U.S. Senate primary has found a way to be even more chaotic, expensive and extreme.

An expensive primary with well-funded candidates could mean a long, protracted primary fight that forces candidates to extreme positions and hobbles the eventual Republican nominee. Without positive records to run on for working families, the Republican U.S. Senate primary is already being called “Ohio’s ugliest ever,” and Fox News said the race was “fast becoming the most expensive and ugly GOP Senate contest” in the 2022 midterms.

Here’s what they are saying:

CHAOTIC:

• NBC News’ Henry Gomez: “It’s a wild ride here in Ohio and the airwaves are already jam-packed.”
• Vice Chairman Of The Ohio Republican Party Bryan Williams: “They’re trying to raise—the high dollar donations for the Republican candidates are not coming through as coordinated as they are on the Democratic side with a crowded field of 8 or more candidates on the Republican side. It’s not clear and large dollar donors don’t want to just invest in everybody or pick somebody who’s not going to win. They want a little bit clearer of a picture. So I think they’re kind of sitting on their donations.”
• Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser: “…one of the most crowded and combustible GOP Senate primaries in the country.”

EXPENSIVE:

• NBC News’ Chuck Todd: “It seems like a week doesn’t go by without some candidate writing a big check to go on TV.”
• Open Secrets’ Katherine Huggins: “While neither Democratic candidate in Ohio has self-financed at all, nearly every Republican candidate who has raised more $10,000 has in part self-financed their campaign…Self-financing is otherwise rampant among the Republicans as they prepare to face off in what is likely to be an extraordinarily competitive primary race.”
• Toledo Blade: “Courting the former president for an endorsement has not been a cheap endeavor for the candidates. Mr. Gibbons’ attack ad cost $550,000 to run and was part of a massive $10 million ad buy. Ms. Timken’s latest ad is another six-figure ad buy, according to her campaign.”
• Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser: “And in a primary race where all nearly all the major contenders have plenty of personal wealth, Dolan becomes the latest to spend big bucks to run ads.”

EXTREME:

• Cleveland.com: The Republican primary “will continue its cavalcade of intemperate, cruel, ill-judged, narrow-minded and explosive rhetoric designed to divide not unite.”
• Associated Press: “Barbara Comstock, a Trump critic and former GOP congresswoman from Virginia, warned Republicans risked nominating fringe candidates who would go on to lose in the general. ‘Republicans feel like they’re going to win no matter who’s on the ticket. And I don’t agree with that thesis,’ she said, pointing to Ohio, where Senate candidates have been trying to desperately out-Trump one another. ‘I think you really are taking a chance in blowing reliable races.’”

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Trump: “Mitch McConnell is a loser.” 

Columbus, OH — With Trump “watching Ohio very, very closely,” the GOP U.S. Senate candidates in Ohio are really in a pickle: do they go all out for Trump or support Mitch McConnell?

Just last week, Trump escalated his feud with McConnell by calling him a loser in an NPR interview. The Trump-McConnell feud creates another loyalty test to Trump and we all know Trump sure doesn’t like candidates who cross him.

Enter the Ohio GOP Senate candidates. Timken has “danced around” and “sidestepped” questions about whether she was supporting McConnell. On Vance’s “No B.S.” tour, he refused to say if he’d vote for McConnell, which sure seems like a b.s. answer.

The out-of-touch millionaires have had no problem sinking lower and lower every week to appease Trump, making this out-of-control primary “Ohio’s ugliest ever.” But when it comes to McConnell, every leading GOP Senate candidate has become tongue-tied in the hopes of keeping his network of wealthy special interest donors happy.

“GOP Senate candidates are stuck between a rock and a hard place: while they’re all scrambling to kiss Trump’s ring, they also need the financial backing of Mitch McConnell’s special interest friends to fund their campaigns. As always, in their efforts to keep Trump, McConnell and their wealthy special interest donors happy, every GOP Senate candidate is leaving the needs of working Ohioans behind,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.

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Columbus, OH — According to a new report from The Daily Beast, U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, who flip-flopped on opposing Donald Trump, also believed in white privilege.  

Now, Vance has “gone so far against white privilege” even though he “had a very different take” on white privilege not so long ago. Silicon Valley Vance’s political evolution is just the latest example of him doing or saying anything in order to be competitive in this crowded primary. 

“The only consistent thing about Silicon Valley Vance is that he will do the bidding of his wealthy Big Tech donors and sell out Ohioans in order to further his own ambition,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party. 

Daily Beast: Take a Trip Back in Time and Meet Woke J.D. Vance

Roger Sollenberger 

January 14, 2022

• Multimillionaire venture capitalist J.D. Vance has put issues of race and white privilege front and center in his Senate campaign. In fact, he’s gone so far against white privilege that he’s claimed people should be able to sue businesses that tell people they need to “deconstruct their privilege, or they need to sacrifice or repent of their whiteness.”
• But—like Vance’s flip-flop on his past criticism of Donald Trump—the Silicon Valley veteran had a very different take on white privilege not so long ago.
• In a 2017 interview published two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Vance told Ezra Klein that there are “obviously still advantages to being white” and that “there are still disadvantages to being black.”
• Vance was replying to Klein’s question about how Vance’s much-ballyhooed book, Hillbilly Elegy, addressed the notion of white privilege. Specifically, Klein wanted to know what Vance’s response would be to white people who, confronted with this idea of privilege, might respond, as Klein put it: “Fuck you. Nothing about my community says to me that I’m privileged and should be at the back of the line for getting some help here.”
• After pointing out the disproportionate support Trump received from the Scots-Irish community, Vance addressed the issue.
• “But to connect it to the conversation about white privilege, I think it’s always important to note that there are obviously still advantages to being white, there are still disadvantages to being black, even when you control completely for class, income, and so forth,” he said.
• Vance later added in his response that he understood that “most of the people” making arguments about white privilege are not being “reductive,” but “a lot more sophisticated in what they’re saying [about] how privilege operates along different dimensions in our society.”
• Vance’s problem, he said, was that it “appears reductive” to other people—specifically white people, perhaps less worldly than himself—who lack the “cognition” to process the concept that Black Americans are historically disadvantaged in a number of ways that white Americans are not.
• Notably, Vance—who left his blue-collar Ohio hometown for Yale Law School and then San Francisco investment firms—made it clear that, unlike his hypothetical coal miner’s son, he himself had the brains to navigate this issue.
• Vance even once acknowledged the very example he gave in that interview—that the Obama family, who made it all the way to the White House, first had to overcome hardships predicated specifically on race, while the Trumps did not. In 2016, the self-styled champion of Appalachian poor “liked” a Twitter photo mocking Melania Trump’s famously plagiarized GOP convention speech, captioned, “It wasn’t easy growing up a black woman in Chicago, but I believe the world is safer for my 2 girls, Sasha & Malia.”
• But Vance’s own words today paint a very different portrait of a race-baiting pugilist, who discusses white privilege with little, if any, admission of nuance or sympathy for minorities.
• Last March, as the Silicon Valley veteran began dusting off his blue-collar bona fides, he gave a Breitbart interview that resulted in the headline, “J.D. Vance: Narrative of ‘White Privilege’ Is ‘Disgusting.’” Vance inverted the failure to grasp the nuances of the privilege debate, criticizing liberals for the same failure that had evoked his sympathy when applied to the West Virginia kid.
• “There is a narrative in our country, right now, that if you’re white, you’re privileged, and the idea that there is a family that is white, that is working-class, that is struggling in ways that are identifiable to a lot of non-white Americans—and a lot of white Americans, too—is just not something the current cultural zeitgeist is comfortable with,” Vance said.
• He also blamed this ideology for the milquetoast reception given the movie adaptation of his book. “That’s not what [those] people want to hear,” Vance said. “This moment met the identity politics—the hyper-woke white privilege moment—and the movie suffered from that, too.”
• In another interview over the summer—in which the author again complained that criticism of white privilege harmed the reception of his movie—Vance bemoaned that “the liberal narrative” is “to assume every black person is disadvantaged and every white person is privileged.”

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