As the ad opens, an elderly woman looks with sad eyes into the camera and says, "My name is Donna Arthur, and I'm Amy Acton's mother."
Over the next minute, she calls Ohio's Democratic nominee for governor—her own daughter—a "liar," disputes her account of being homeless as a child and urges Ohioans to vote against her.
This stunning intervention—on behalf of Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy—surfaced online late Monday with no sponsor named. Taken at face value, it is the kind of ad that instinctively feels like it could swing an election.
But, quickly, a series of facts emerged that cast the video, and the Ramaswamy campaign, in a whole new, unedifying light.
Acton has said her stepfather sexually abused her and that her mother sided with him. Court records show the stepfather was charged in 1978 with raping Acton, then 12. He was indicted, skipped a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981. Never convicted, he has since died.
Arthur lost custody of her children, and Acton says she has not seen her since they shared a courtroom that year. The ad asks voters to take that mother's word over her daughter's. Few, it seems, are buying it. Many people are appalled.
Yet, by Tuesday night, Ramaswamy's campaign had claimed the ad and said it would spend $4 million promoting it, doubling down despite the fierce backlash.
The ad has drawn condemnation from Democrats and, more tellingly, from the right. Meghan McCain called it "dastardly" and cast "shame" on those who made it. Mary Katharine Ham said it seemed "crazy" to assume the ad would "work and not backfire."
Lydia Mihalik, appointed by Republican Governor Mike DeWine to run the state's Development Department, wrote that it crossed a line. Casey Putsch, who ran against Ramaswamy in the GOP primary, said he would now vote for Acton.
The Ramaswamy campaign is unrepentant. "This is a campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton," its manager, Jonathan Ewing, told Axios.
But if the morality of the ad isn't giving Ramaswamy and his team second thoughts, perhaps its real-world political value should, if history is anything to go by.
A Newsweek review of House, Senate and governor's races found 13 cases, across 12 contests going back to 2000, in which one side used the other candidate's relatives against them: estranged and former spouses, siblings, an aunt, a cousin and now a mother.
The outcomes are more instructive than the ads. In the 10 cases where the votes have been counted, the side that reached for the family lost seven times. If this was Ramaswamy's Hail Mary, the early evidence says it is being picked off.
In Maryland in 2000, a Republican named John Kimble made Representative Albert Wynn's estranged wife, Jessie Wynn, chair of his campaign. She recorded phone messages attacking her husband. Wynn won 87 percent of the vote.
"I now think that Jessie Wynn wasted a whole lot of my time," Kimble said afterward.
In New Jersey in 2005, Republican Doug Forrester closed his race for governor with an ad quoting Jon Corzine's ex-wife, who said the Democrat had let his family down and would "probably let New Jersey down, too." Corzine won with 53 percent.
In 2018, six of Arizona Representative Paul Gosar's siblings appeared in ads for his Democratic challenger. Gosar took more than two-thirds of the vote.
Georgia has seen the move from both directions. Republicans aired police body-camera footage of Raphael Warnock's then-wife accusing him of running over her foot, a claim he denied and for which he was never charged, before his January 2021 runoff and again in 2022. He won both times.
In 2022, Warnock's own campaign ran an ad on claims that Herschel Walker had threatened to kill his ex-wife. Walker lost.
This year, Senator John Cornyn's campaign ran an ad declaring that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had cheated on his wife, an accusation she made when she filed for divorce. Paxton beat Cornyn 64 percent to 36 percent in the Texas Republican Senate runoff.
None of this proves that dragging in a rival's family loses elections. The sample is small, and the arrow may point the other way. Campaigns reach for desperate measures when they are already losing.
Kimble and Gosar's challenger were long shots, and a Quinnipiac poll had Forrester 12 points behind the week his ad ran. But that is the point. The tactic is less a strategy than a symptom, a tell that a campaign has run short of better arguments.
The three exceptions are revealing, too. In Wisconsin and Nevada, the relatives were mostly endorsing the other candidate. In Georgia, Warnock's ad leaned on violence Walker had acknowledged in broad terms. None asked voters to believe a relative over a court file.
Ramaswamy needed a play. Marist's latest Ohio poll, conducted October 15-18, before the ad surfaced, had Acton ahead 50 percent to 43 percent among likely voters and leading independents by 19 points. More than 676,000 Ohioans had already voted by Tuesday.
Prediction markets pushed his odds to new lows within a day. And Acton's campaign has already run the ball back, cutting a response ad in which her younger brother, Philip Stearns, says she took the worst of the abuse to protect him.
People close to the Ramaswamy campaign say it tested well with persuadable voters, and Acton's honesty has been a Republican target for months. A spokesperson called her a "serial fabulist" this week.
Ohio gave Donald Trump an 11-point win in 2024, and Republicans have held the governorship since 2011.
Not every poll has Ramaswamy behind. A Co/efficient survey this month had him up by 2 points, and an ActiVote poll released Monday had him narrowly ahead. Even Marist found more likely voters expecting him to win than her.
Outrage among commentators is not the same as movement among voters. But it's hard to imagine much voter appetite for this kind of mudslinging given what we now know about the reasons behind Acton's estrangement from her mother.
The proof is in the pudding. If polls taken after the ad show Ramaswamy gaining, especially among the independents Marist found breaking for Acton, it will have worked, despite the disgust among many observers.
Moreover, if he wins on November 3, he will join the short list of campaigns that went after a rival's family and won anyway. The history doesn't preclude that outcome. But it certainly doesn't favor it either.