Vivek Ramaswamy is unlikely to be remembered as a titan of American politics. The Ohio gubernatorial candidate has enjoyed immense professional success, becoming a billionaire before the age of 40 in the pharmaceutical and biotech sector.
His turn to politics has been less stellar. Ramaswamy ran against Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican primary, a candidacy that was seen by most as an attempt to secure himself a senior position in Trump’s administration, rather than a serious attempt to win the presidency.
At first, this seemed to work: Ramaswamy was named as the co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, alongside Elon Musk. But after breaking with the White House over the treatment of workers on skilled visas, he swiftly exited.
Now, Ramaswamy is running to become the governor of Ohio, a role held by Republicans since 2010, in a state Trump won by more than 11 points two years ago. This should be an easy race for any Republican to win, and Ramaswamy was personally endorsed by Trump in the primaries.
Despite this, the polls show he is three to five points behind Democratic candidate Amy Acton – and it seems like Ramaswamy is getting desperate indeed. With just two weeks left until polls close, Ramaswamy’s campaign launched a high-profile advert featuring a surprising figure: Acton’s biological mother. In the video, Donna Arthur claimed Acton has a “serious problem” and “is a liar”. “She says she grew up living in a tent, none of that is true,” Arthur claimed. “She’s lied her entire life.”
Acton has been estranged from her mother since the age of 12. She has spoken in detail of how she was physically and sexually abused as a child by her stepfather, and sheltered her younger brother from the worst of his abuse.
Her mother stood by her stepfather, who fled the state after being charged with raping Acton. Acton never got the chance to see her abuser convicted in court because he successfully remained a fugitive until his death in 2004. Acton and her brother were taken into care, and both have been long estranged from their mother. Acton’s abuse is extensively documented in court records and other official documents.
Her campaign provided the media with documents corroborating the account, set out in public records, showing her stepfather was charged with raping her, while her younger brother recorded a video supporting his sister, accusing Ramaswamy’s campaign of sinking to “a despicable low”.
For Ramaswamy to feature Acton’s mother in an attack ad on his rival’s character, then, is perhaps the most desperate Hail Mary pass in the history of American politics. The Republican Party of Donald Trump is hardly full of delicate flowers, or people who will shy away from a low blow, but this advert has proven too much even for many 2026-era Republicans.
Jon Husted, an Ohio senator battling for his own re-election, distanced himself from the Ramaswamy campaign, saying: “I would not have run that ad.” Ryan Smith, a former speaker of the Ohio House and a Republican, said, “Ohio deserves better than this”, while Casey Putsch – who challenged Ramaswamy in the Republican primary – said he would now be voting for Acton after seeing Ramaswamy’s advert.
Multiple other Ohio Republicans have refused to back Ramaswamy’s advert, days before critical elections. Even staunchly conservative and Republican-backing media outlets have lambasted the ad. The National Review called the advert “a staggering act of bad taste” from a candidate with “the stench of born-loserdom wafting off him”. It turns out that even in 2026, there is still a line that even Republicans won’t cross – or at least, that most of them won’t, as one prominent Ohio politician seems to still be lining up to support Ramaswamy.
That man is none other than Vice President JD Vance, a former senator for the state of Ohio. Vance said the advert was “not my concern”, before attacking Republicans who had criticised it, saying he was “a little bit disgusted” that they were “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 went even further, appearing to endorse the claims made by Acton’s mother in the advert. “Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is, and calls Amy Acton a liar,” Vance told a rally.
Vance is an ambitious man who is all but openly preparing to run as Trump’s successor in the 2028 Republican primaries, and he may have calculated that having an ally with pockets as deep as Ramaswamy’s could work out in his favour.
But the moral and political calculus might work against him. Ramaswamy was already not a popular figure within Republican circles, and Vance has just sided with him against Republicans who called out an advert platforming a woman accused of enabling the abuse of her own daughter.
More than that, Vance is America’s most prominent Catholic politician, and has made his newfound faith – Vance is an adult convert to Catholicism – a substantial part of his pitch to voters, even writing a book on the topic earlier this year. Given the church’s troubled history on the issue of abuse, Vance could easily find himself on a political precipice, just as the furore over the administration’s botched handling of the Epstein scandal was starting to die down.
The small mercy in an otherwise abhorrent political story is that Ramaswamy’s desperate stunt seems to have blown up in his own face, though we will only know that for sure once the votes have been counted in a few weeks’ time.
The appalled bipartisan reaction, and the speed with which the story is spreading, show there is still, just about, such a thing as “too low” in US politics – except, it seems, if you’re JD Vance.