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You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore.
Hello and happy Saturday. I have to say, I had been surprised by the seeming lack of national attention to the governor’s race here in Ohio. Democratic nominee Amy Acton might not have a huge profile outside of my home state, where she is best known for her stint as Ohio’s director of public health and Gov. Mike DeWine’s right-hand woman during the early stages of the COVID pandemic, but Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy is prominent in the MAGA universe and ran for president in 2024 before dropping out and endorsing Donald Trump. That all changed this week when Ramaswamy dropped an ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother.
The ad, in which Donna Arthur accuses her daughter of being a liar and needing help, was leaked to social media by an Ohio political blogger Monday night. The ad didn’t mention what Acton had allegedly lied about, but Acton has spoken for years about growing up in poverty and enduring sexual abuse as a child. It took the internet approximately milliseconds to find contemporaneous reports of Arthur’s husband being charged with sexual conduct with a minor under the age of 13 in 1978 and showing that Acton and her brother had been removed from their mother’s custody at the same time. Arthur and her husband fled Ohio, she remained married to him until his death, and Acton has not spoken to her mother in nearly 50 years.
The ad, which included no disclosure as to who paid for it, faced immediate criticism as it spread more widely on Tuesday. But instead of distancing himself from it, Ramaswamy clarified that his campaign had indeed made the ad and slammed Acton for refusing to debate him. A campaign spokeswoman issued a statement saying, “Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of.” The campaign also announced it would spend $4 million on the ad campaign.
On Wednesday, Vice President J.D. Vance appeared with Ramaswamy and Senate nominee John Husted at a campaign event in the Cincinnati area and praised Ramaswamy for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”
That prompted Nick Catoggio, in Boiling Frogs, to observe: “Not every Republican from Ohio is sleazy, but all of the sleaziest Republicans (not named ‘Ken Paxton,’ anyway) are from Ohio.” But he was also unsurprised by Ramaswamy’s defense of the ad.
With the genie out of the bottle, Team Vivek was forced to do damage control. And in a mostly red state, with the left and its media allies baying for his blood, and with Ramaswamy already burdened by suspicions among the Republican base that he’s not “one of us,” the best way to minimize the political damage was to impress that base by doing what Trump would do. Be ruthless. Never apologize. Double down.
Ramaswamy has mostly trailed Acton in the polls since spring, though the RealClearPolitics average had Acton ahead only 47.3 to 47.0 percent in August. A stark personal attack like the Arthur ad is a sign of desperation, but it seems to have backfired. Republicans such as 2024 GOP candidate Nikki Haley, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, and former Ohio Rep. James Renacci all condemned the ad. DeWine, who endorsed Ramaswamy, called on him to take it down.
Such a stark and personal attack ad is a sign of desperation, and Ramaswamy’s gamble appears to have backfired. Before the ad, the Polymarket prediction market had given Acton a 71 percent chance of winning the race. As of Friday, it now has her with an 82 percent chance. In a year in which many are predicting a blue wave for Democrats, he’s hardly the only one in a tough spot. Which brings us to Michael Warren’s newsletter, Next Right.
Mike attended a Trump rally in North Carolina on Tuesday, where a question immediately popped into his head. Three, actually: “Why, two weeks before Election Day, is Trump campaigning in a state where both parties appear to have already written off the Senate race as a Democratic win? Why, the day before, was he in Kansas, which last had a Democratic senator during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration? And why, on Wednesday, is the president heading to ruby-red South Carolina to campaign for struggling Republican Senate nepo-nominee Darline Graham?”
He notes that Trump is also doing rallies in some key battleground states, but he also wonders whether, given the president’s low approval ratings and an economy held back by tariffs and the Iran war, any of that will matter. And he writes that Republicans are worried about what comes after Trump:
It’s not just the subpar Senate candidates Trump has backed–-from [Michael] Whatley to Ken Paxton in Texas to Mike Collins in Georgia—though it is certainly that.
It’s also the slow crumbling of GOP infrastructure and institutional memory as old party hands have fallen away or been actively turned out from local committees in favor of more loyal, but less experienced, Trump fans. For years, GOP operatives have fretted to me about how volunteers and activists show a lot less interest in the grunt work of winning campaigns, like phone banking and door-knocking, in non-presidential years. Another operative recently complained to me that this loss of expertise at the precinct level is having long-term effects on the future of viable Republican candidates.
We’re finally into the home stretch of the campaign season, with the election less than two weeks away. Check out John McCormack’s interview with independent Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn to see which questions Osborn tried to dodge, The Morning Dispatch on whether and how Trump might try to meddle with the election, and Carroll Doherty’s retrospective on the 1994 Republican Revolution. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend.
People here in the Rio Grande Valley are very pissed off about the price of diesel and gasoline, and milk, and eggs, and hamburger, and lumber, so Texas Republicans predictably are leaning into the crazy and the smears and the conspiracy kookery and the overall Trump-era GOP weirdness. If the Democrats have a secret weapon in 2026, it is that economic pain and the all-drama-all-the-time character of the Trump administration have forced them, in spite of themselves, to turn their attention to a constituency that they seemed to have forgotten about for a few years there: normal people.
On February 1, 2021, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram Live to open up about her experience of hiding in her office bathroom during the January 6 Capitol riot. She opted to speak about how it triggered traumatic memories of being sexually abused years ago. One commentator complained that “participating in the emotional and communicative channels opened up to her and her generation by trauma culture and social media, she made her own story the center of the events on January 6, 2021.” These comments are found in the introduction of a new book about the excesses of left-wing “trauma culture” published not by a conservative press like Penguin Random House’s Sentinel or Regnery Publishing, but by the lefty Verso Books. And its author is the self-identified Marxist Catherine Liu, who has made a name for herself with her sharp critiques of the left’s turn from class-based politics to “woke” identitarianism.
Throughout the course of a four-and-a-half-year war he cannot win yet cannot walk away from, Vladimir Putin has gone through some half a million men killed and around 1 million wounded or missing, and he continues to lose between 30,000 and 34,000 soldiers every month. Casualties may soon exceed the number of draftees and volunteers Putin is able to scare up. Just as important, Putin’s implied social contract with his subjects—support the war and I’ll protect you from its consequences—is beginning to wobble. Ukraine’s submission to the Munich II diktat would be deeply gratifying to Xi. Apart from geostrategic reasons, including implications for the annexation of Taiwan, such an outcome would be a momentous vindication of Xi’s ideological verity: the inexorable attrition and eventual demise of the world’s capitalist democracies, Kyiv’s main supporters. As for Trump, who plays the role of Chamberlain in this emergent historical script, he too lusts after the image of a hero who brings about what the British prime minister called “peace for our time.” Yet when it comes to the war in Ukraine, Trump’s repeated instances of moral turpitude and studied ignorance have by now far exceeded Chamberlain’s description of the Sudetenland crisis as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
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Add Us as a Preferred SourceRachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.