DeWine, who endorsed Ramaswamy, calls spot ‘wrong to run’
The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino opened her midterm analysis — written for The Stakes 2026, the paper’s newsletter about the elections — with a campaign moment she said she could not stop thinking about. At a campaign event on a farm in Wharton, Ohio, Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor, was speaking to a group of supporters when a woman asked: “Can I give you a hug?” “Of course you can,” the candidate replied, walking over and allowing herself to be embraced. After watching the ad, the woman told Acton: “All I wanted to do was cry and hug you and tell you it’ll be OK.”
Gambino described the scene as “a small moment of humanity in what has otherwise been a particularly vicious campaign season, even by the standards of the Trump era.” After weeks of wondering “how much lower can they go,” particularly on the right, she wrote, Ramaswamy had “pulled out a shovel and dug deeper.”
Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor, released the ad against Acton, his Democratic opponent. In it, Acton’s mother accuses her daughter of lying and tells Ohioans not to vote for her. Acton, 60, says she has not spoken to her mother since she was 12, when she and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody after their stepfather was arrested and charged with raping her. Acton says she last saw her mother at the courthouse, where her mother came to support her husband as her daughter testified against him.
On Thursday, amid mounting pressure and polling that found the ad backfiring, Ramaswamy said his campaign had discontinued it. Many Republicans, including Ohio’s outgoing governor, Mike DeWine, have condemned the ad alongside Acton. “It’s wrong to run this ad,” said DeWine, who has endorsed Ramaswamy. Trump and Vance both defended the ad. “Stop whining,” Vance told Republicans who had called for the ad to come down. Gambino described Ramaswamy — a billionaire entrepreneur who, in her words, has “embraced the president’s never-back-down, politics-as-blood-sport ethos” — as defiant.
Gambino wrote that the ad’s reception took her by surprise. Trump, she wrote, has crossed so many red lines since he emerged as a presidential candidate in 2015 — “gleefully breaking political, legal and constitutional norms,” in her words — that it can be hard to tell what the rules of engagement are anymore. She cited his mockery of world leaders, flattery of dictators, disparagement of political opponents as the “enemy within,” encouragement of violence against protesters, his calling a female journalist “piggy,” and his declaration that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country. “So it took me by surprise that the Ramaswamy ad was met with such strong bipartisan condemnation – the rare red line in deeply cynical times,” she wrote.
Gambino noted that attack ads have long been a tool of political combat. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign pulled the so-called “Daisy” ad from TV amid fierce public criticism over its suggestion that the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, would wage nuclear war if elected. From the vantage point of 2026 — a year in which the US president threatened to “annihilate” Iran in a speech before the United Nations general assembly — the Daisy ad “seems almost quaint now,” she wrote.
She wrote that it has been “a particularly brutal cycle for attack ads.” In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate, has faced a barrage of ads attacking his religion — he is Muslim — and claiming ties to Islamic terrorist organizations, claims Gambino described as baseless. She wrote that Trump, barnstorming the country trying to salvage Republicans’ majorities in Congress, has hurled Islamophobic invectives at El-Sayed. In Texas, Gambino wrote, Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton and his allies have pumped out controversial ads — many of them AI-generated — that attack his opponent James Talarico as effeminate and misstate his position on transgender rights. She wrote that Vance doubled down on that line of attack, musing that Talarico was gay — a suggestion she described as baseless.
The ad aired in Ohio, a one-time presidential battleground that has shifted toward Republicans in recent election cycles but is home this year to several competitive races, Gambino wrote. She asked whether it would have a “blast radius” that hurts other Republicans in the state, like Jon Husted, the incumbent Ohio senator. Former President Barack Obama campaigned for Ohio Democratic candidates in Cleveland on Saturday.
Gambino wrote that Acton must have known when she decided to run that the campaign would be ugly. Acton first rose to prominence in early 2020 as the director of the Ohio department of health, becoming an early face of the pandemic response. In the beginning, Gambino wrote, Acton was roundly praised for her clearly communicated daily briefings, which inspired bobblehead dolls and little girls’ Halloween costumes. But as backlash brewed against the state’s lockdown measures, she became a high-profile target of armed protests outside her home, antisemitic slurs — Acton is Jewish — and misinformation campaigns. At a campaign event earlier this fall, an armed man was arrested after lunging at Acton as she spoke at a county fair. She was not injured, and Acton, a physician, stayed on site to treat one of the onlookers injured in the episode.
Gambino wrote that for many disgusted voters in Ohio, the choice on Tuesday is now between a woman who at 12 took the stand in court to testify against her mother’s husband — the man charged with raping her, while her mother stood by his side — and a man who allowed that dark story to be twisted into a political attack ad. “Maybe after Tuesday, it’s Ramaswamy who will need consoling,” she wrote.
Elsewhere in the newsletter, The Guardian’s Rachel Leingang was recently in Kansas — a state that has not elected a Democrat to the US Senate in nearly 100 years — to catch Adam Hamilton on the campaign trail. Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor and a former Republican who had considered running as an independent, is challenging the Republican incumbent, Senator Roger Marshall, who was elected in 2020. Hamilton regularly points to one of his state’s most famous residents, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Recalling a visit he made to Liberal, Kansas, and its Oz museum, he asks the audience to recall what Dorothy’s companions on her journey need: the lion needed courage, the scarecrow a brain and the tin man a heart. Washington needs more of all three, he likes to say, and he can deliver it.
In Arizona, Stan Barnes, a political consultant and former Republican state senator, said of his party’s eroding support in the suburbs around Maricopa county — which has powered a slate of Democratic victories in the years since Trump was first elected to the White House — “We’re watching a bit of a political revolution play out in slow motion.” Arizona Democrats believe they can finally flip congressional district 1, where Democrat Amish Shah, an emergency room doctor who narrowly lost the seat in 2024, and Republican Jay Feely, a former National Football League kicker backed by Trump, are battling for the House seat left open by Republican congressman David Schweikert.