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Inside Washington
In the past two days, near-universal condemnation of an attack ad featuring Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and her estranged mother has brought the governor’s race to national attention. But even before that, this race was full of personal attacks. Why voter issues seem to have taken a back seat in this race is a mystery, especially in a year when people seem extra eager for politicians to speak to their substantive policy concerns.
“This has definitely been a race that has been more about the character of the candidates than it has been about policy issues themselves,” said Dominic Wells, a professor of political science at Bowling Green State University. The candidates will not meet on the debate stage (Acton declined a debate invitation, while Republican Vivek Ramaswamy accepted). So much of the race has played out through campaign ads where the candidates portray each other as unfit for office. “Anti-Ramaswamy campaign ads have linked him to profiting off of [and] backing ineffective prescription drugs,” Wells said. “So they’re painting him as corrupt and dishonest.”
Ramaswamy’s campaign has tried to use Acton’s time as director of Ohio’s Department of Health to tap into conservative frustration over Covid-19 shutdowns and vaccination policies. “This isn’t a message that seems to be sticking with Ohioans as much. Ohioans generally don’t want to hear about Covid anymore,” Wells said. David Jackson, also a professor of political science at Bowling Green State University, agrees: “The people who are still mad about masks and still mad about vaccines were probably never going to vote for a Democrat anyway,” he said.
The ad circulated on Tuesday, which featured Acton’s estranged mother, however, represented a major escalation. In the ad, Acton’s mother calls her daughter “a liar” and tells voters: “Don’t let her become your governor. If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself.” Acton has been estranged from her mother since she was 12 years old, after her mother stayed in a relationship with Acton’s stepfather, who sexually abused Acton between the ages of 9 and 12 (and then, when facing criminal charges for it, skipped town). Despite immediate blowback against the ad, the Ramaswamy campaign is planning to spend $4 million to air it on television.
Several Republicans have since denounced the ad. Republican Senator Jon Husted, who is running a tough race for Senate in Ohio, seems to be engaged in a difficult, and maybe physically impossible, balancing act on the topic. “Jon Husted is trying to present himself as a normal, mainline Republican, trying to get some independents to vote for him,” Jackson explained. In Ohio, where the governor’s race and Senate race have been somewhat linked in voters’ minds, the ad puts Husted in a challenging position.
“I would not have run that ad,” Husted said on Wednesday to The Associated Press. But also on Wednesday, he appeared at a rally with Vice President JD Vance and Ramaswamy. At the rally, Vance said he was “disgusted”—not by the ad itself, but by Republicans who criticized it.
When asked about the ad and the substantive debates that seem to be falling by the wayside in this race, Acton spokesperson Addie Bullock said: “Dr. Acton is going to every corner of Ohio to listen deeply to voters and share her plans to lower costs, fully fund public schools, end the corruption in our Statehouse, and ensure that every Ohioan has the opportunity to succeed. Her vision for Ohio stands in stark contrast with her opponent, billionaire scam artist Vivek Ramaswamy, who has spent his campaign spewing repulsive lies from the seat of the private jet he insists on taking everywhere.”
Contrary to the impression given by headlines from this race, there are plenty of policy issues that Ohioans care about this year. As in Ohio’s Senate race, data centers have become a standout issue forcing Republicans to play defense. Acton has called for a “conditional moratorium” under which data centers must use union labor, cover their own utility costs, and follow environmental standards. Ramaswamy, who used to speak positively about data centers, has backtracked somewhat and now says that they should only be built on abandoned industrial sites, must comply with environmental rules, and should provide free electricity for the closest 100,000 residential homes.
All evidence suggests that voters care even more about affordability. Acton’s campaign has put out a detailed affordability plan that includes proposals for working-class family tax cuts and lowering energy bills, among other things. Ramaswamy, meanwhile, has called for cutting property taxes and phasing out state income tax—moves that some experts say could decimate municipal services like police, firefighters, and libraries.
Education is another critical issue in the state. In 1997, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s method for funding public education was unconstitutional. Since then, politicians have tried and failed to reform the education system. The state spent more than $1 billion on voucher programs in the 2026 fiscal year. Acton opposes the voucher programs, and Ramaswamy would like to see them expanded.
The new attack ad against Acton, and the fallout from it, may not change the race, which has already been marked by negativity and personal attacks. Early voting has already started, and voters have been inundated with ads for months. But there’s always a chance that it could make a last-minute difference. “The common thought in Ohio politics is that the state tends to break towards Republicans in the final weeks of the campaign,” Jackson said. “Ramaswamy may have given up that built-in advantage in the last couple weeks here with this backlash.”
—Emma Janssen
Outside Washington
Protesters, community leaders, family members, and local news reporters in Senatobia, Mississippi, have been trying for months to get answers and keep the spotlight on the horrifying case of one-year-old Kohen Wiley, who was killed by police in June. Now, the story may finally be gaining national traction. On Monday, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch announced her department’s finding that “use of force was justified” when police shot the one-year-old in his mother’s arms during a confrontation in a Walmart parking lot over a report of diaper shoplifting.
Outrage over the finding is growing now that body cam and surveillance footage published by Darkhorse Press, and subsequently verified by The New York Times, has shown police officers running and pulling their guns en masse at a car that, at the time, was traveling in reverse, away from them. You can read the Times’s analysis of the video, which then shows the sedan moving forward and at least one officer firing into it, here. In July, Mississippi Today reported that the officer involved had previously been accused of “exaggerating the risks that a vehicle posed to officers during another parking lot confrontation that escalated into violence in 2019.” (He has also been named in one other misconduct complaint and has been accused of racist speech toward a co-worker.)
Fitch, a Republican, is running for governor in 2027. The Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus (MLBC) on Tuesday, prior to the new video emerging, condemned Fitch’s finding and called for the release of evidence and an independent review. “Kohen Wiley was a baby. He posed no threat,” MLBC Chairman and Mississippi Representative Kabir Karriem, a Democrat, said. On Tuesday, Mississippi’s Democratic Party leadership also issued a statement calling for a release of evidence, an independent review, “direct, respectful communication with Kohen’s family” (who reportedly first heard about Fitch’s finding via Facebook), and “strong safeguards governing the use of gunfire against moving vehicles.” The Intercept noted this week that Senatobia police in the past two years have “[jailed] a 10-year-old boy for public urination,” forcefully arrested two teenage sisters while the then-police chief told them to “get your Black ass out of the road,” and “on Mother’s Day 2025 — in the same Walmart parking lot where Kohen Wiley would be shot dead … forced a woman out of her car in front of her young children for sitting in a handicapped parking space.”
Elsewhere:
- The Bush family increasingly seems to be backing James Talarico against Ken Paxton in Texas’s Senate race. Hot on the heels of last week’s news that Barbara Bush donated to Talarico’s super PAC, George W. Bush’s brother Neil Bush announced on Tuesday that he voted for Talarico, praising the candidate’s character. “I have been deeply troubled by Paxton’s conduct as Texas Attorney General,” he wrote, adding “I believe Donald Trump and those who have enabled him have done enormous damage to the Republican Party.” Last week, Trump called Texas GOP pillars John Cornyn and Karl Rove “WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks” for refusing to back Paxton, so… start your clocks.
—Heather Souvaine Horn
The Ideas Factory
As the lawsuit against Cornell University and seven fraternity members over a gang rape continues to make headlines, Data for Progress releases a new survey that found that a majority of voters don’t trust “college administrations, elected officials, or fraternities and sororities to appropriately respond to sexual assault claims,” and they think fraternities and sororities are bad for campus life.
On Thursday at 4 p.m., University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute, in conjunction with Third Act and the Better Futures Project, will host an online conversation between Bill McKibben, Michael Ash, James K. Boyce, and Joel Tickner on “Environmental Policies that Work for Working Americans.” It’s part of “an eight-week series this fall, highlighting policy proposals developed by more than 40 experts on the [university’s] Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America, team.”
—Heather Souvaine Horn
In Closing
Here’s Why That’s B.S.
The Trump administration is escalating its “investigation” into Representative Ilhan Omar over whether the age that her now-deceased father put on her immigration application more than 25 years ago was accurate. Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted make the case that this is really about the midterms.
Political Trivia Question of the Day
With Rob Sand apparently poised to win Iowa’s gubernatorial race: When did the Hawkeye State last elect a Democratic governor?
(Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)
—Michael Tomasky