J.D. Vance, Tim Ryan hit campaign trail as Ohio’s U.S. Senate race heats up

Paul Simon-Tim Ryan

Singer Paul Simon jokes with U.S. Senate candidate Tim Ryan, a Mahoning Valley Democrat, during a campaign stop in Gahanna, a Columbus suburb, on Saturday, Sept. 24. (Andrew J. Tobias, cleveland.com)

LOVELAND, Ohio – Tim Ryan and J.D. Vance both told their supporters on Saturday that they’re leading in the polls for Ohio’s U.S. Senate race.

But they also said they’re not taking anything for granted.

“This race is going to come down to thousands of votes,” Ryan, a Youngstown-area congressman, told an afternoon crowd at an Ohio Democratic Party event in Columbus. “And I have so much faith in you. We have a choice to make.”

Vance sent the same message.

“The numbers have us in the lead,” Vance said at a local Republican Party event in the Cincinnati area. “I don’t trust those numbers if they had us behind or ahead. But let’s be honest, you’d rather be ahead. We’re going to win this race if we do the work.”

Ryan and Vance are hitting the trail with fewer than 50 days to go until the Nov. 8 election. Although Republicans have dominated in Ohio in recent elections, the Senate race has been closer than expected, in part because of Vance’s fundraising woes that prevented him from airing TV ads through the summer.

But thanks to nearly $30 million from a national Republican group tied to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Vance is airing ads and is on equal footing with Ryan when it comes to ads through Election Day. Polls, which have a recent track record of undermeasuring Republican support in Ohio, functionally show a tie race, with Vance leading some and Ryan others.

On Saturday morning, the author and investor spoke in deep-red Clermont County, outside Cincinnati. He addressed a crowd of a few hundred people who drank coffee, munched on pancakes and listened to other Republicans running for statewide office speak. The event is an annual one in the Cincinnati area, and it is a major one on the local political calendar.

Vance, in classic political terms, is trying to make the race a referendum on the policies of Democratic President Joe Biden, who has a low approval rating in Ohio. The race, Vance said, is about high inflation, rising crime levels, border security and a political left that “has gone crazy in this country.”

He also said Ryan, who has geared his campaign commercials toward center-right voters, is not the political moderate he portrays himself to be.

“Let people know that the problems in this country are caused by bad leadership, and to fix those problems, we need better leaders,” Vance told the crowd. “And that’s all this race is about.”

Also among the speakers at the event were Justice Pat DeWine, Pat Fischer and Sharon Kennedy, the three Republican Ohio Supreme Court candidates running to remain on the court. And during his speech, Lt. Gov. Jon Husted gave a pep talk to Republicans while touting the string of splashy economic development projects Gov. Mike DeWine has announced recently, including General Motors’ Friday announcement that it would spend $800 million to upgrade its Toledo transmission plant to make electric-vehicle drive systems.

“Ohio is on the rise,” Husted said.

J.D. Vance

J.D. Vance speaks on Saturday to Clermont County Republicans. (Andrew J. Tobias, cleveland.com)

The event’s emcee, Union Township Trustee Michael Logue, said in an interview the event sold 425 tickets in just a couple months.

“That tells me that members, the Americans that are in our cities, our townships, our jurisdictions, they’re energized to be able to impact and change the direction of what’s going on in the country right now,” Logue said. “What you see right now is madness.

“Unfortunately, the administration that’s currently in office has lived up to every expectation that we talked about two years ago. We’ve got increased taxes on everyone. We’ve got higher inflation. And we’ve got issues at the border.”

Greg Simpson, a local representative on the Ohio Republican Party Central Committee, said in an interview he feels good about DeWine’s re-election chances.

But with Vance, he said that he sees cause for concern.

Simpson said he recently visited Delaware County, a suburban, traditionally Republican county near Columbus that has trended Democratic in recent year.

“When I was up in Delaware County, a couple of women told me they were strong Republicans, and they don’t like the Supreme Court stepping in and telling them what they can do and can’t do. What’s next, you know?” Simpson said.

Simpson also said he still would like to see Vance campaign more actively, a common complaint about Vance from local Republican leaders over the summer.

“I think he can win, but I think he’s gotta be more aggressive in his approach and how he’s campaigning,” Simpson said.

Rather than a referendum on Biden, Ryan is trying to make voters view the race as a choice between him and Vance. He’s cast Vance as a far-right extremist, tying him to Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who endorsed Vance during the primary election and campaigned with him.

On Saturday afternoon, Ryan told around 50 supporters who met him for a canvassing event in a leafy neighborhood in suburban Columbus that he was in the lead, but the race is close.

“We’re really at a critical stage in the history of this country. We saw what happened in Youngstown a couple days ago with the rally,” Ryan said, referencing ex-President Donald Trump’s rally last weekend, where organizers played a song strikingly similar to a song associated with QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory movement, days after Trump shared a photoshopped image of himself wearing a “Q” pin on his social media platform. “We see how extreme people are getting.”

Asked later whether he was painting Trump voters as extreme as he also sought their vote, Ryan told reporters that many aren’t.

“There’s a lot of Trump voters who aren’t extreme, who voted for Trump because of China, because of trade, because of economic policies. We want those people to know they absolutely have a soft landing in our campaign,” he said. “…But when you start getting into the conspiracies and tinfoil hat stuff, I think that’s dangerous. When you are blatantly saying an election was stolen, you are undermining our democracy.”

At the canvassing event, Ryan was joined by Paul Simon, the legendary folk singer. Simon was in Ohio to appear at some functions for Ryan, including a Friday fundraiser in Youngstown, and that included an impromptu front-yard performance of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” with a borrowed guitar.

Simon said in an interview he was connected to Ryan through a friend, Wynton Marsalis, a jazz trumpeter.

“I would not venture my political opinion about Ohio politics, cities, counties, towns,” Simon said. “I’m not well-informed enough about that.

“But I am concerned and informed about how our future senator here thinks about some of the larger issues in the country. So I’m here with the added pleasure of just being able to meet people in the street.”

Tina Maharath, a Democratic state senator who represents Gahanna, said she regularly hears about inflation and abortion rights from voters as she has campaigned for re-election.

Maharath said Ryan has needed to mend fences with Asian-Americans and progressives over an anti-China ad that ran earlier this year. But, she said, the Democratic base will turn out for Ryan, and said he’s polling well in her district, which Hillary Clinton won it by 2 points in 2016, and President Joe Biden won by 8 points in 2020.

“They love Tim Ryan,” Maharath said.

Asked about DeWine’s re-election chances, Maharath said women voters she talks to, including abortion-rights supporters, still reference “Wine with DeWine,” the term that emerged to describe DeWine’s daily statewide afternoon news briefings during the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, she said Nan Whaley, the Democrat who’s challenging DeWine, still is struggling to get her name out there.

“We are in a state senate district that did see Mike DeWine on TV every single day for I want to say like a year and a half because of the global pandemic,” Maharath said. “But they don’t see Nan Whaley on TV.”

During a speech later at the Ohio Democratic Party event in Columbus, Whaley excoriated DeWine, saying DeWine, who opposes abortion, will criminalize the practice following the November election.

Speaking with reporters afterwards, Whaley said DeWine over time showed he wouldn’t “stand up to radicals” in the state legislature on issues like abortion, gun control and gerrymandering.

“On abortion, we see just how extreme he is,” Whaley said. “He’s waited his entire life to be as aggressive as possible to take away a women’s right to her health care decisions. And I think Ohio voters are seeing that every day. We’re definitely feeling that on the ground.”

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