The Republican candidate for Ohio governor is airing an ad featuring his opponent’s estranged mother despite bipartisan pushback.
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The bombshell campaign ad that Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy intended as an October surprise against Democrat Amy Acton has indeed exploded. Early indications are that it did so in Ramaswamy’s own face.
Ramaswamy, who narrowly trails Acton in polls, is undeterred. He said Tuesday he is putting $4 million behind a 60-second advertisement that features video of Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar and urging Ohioans: “Don’t let her become your governor.”
Acton, 60, has not had contact with her mother since she was 12 years old. She and her brother were removed from Arthur’s home after a grand jury indicted Arthur’s second husband on a charge of raping Acton.
The stepfather, Cledith Arthur, who pleaded not guilty, moved away and eluded authorities who issued multiple warrants over the years for his arrest. He and Donna Arthur remained married until his death in 2004.
The MAGA faithful, including Donald Trump Jr., have given an approving signal boost to Ramaswamy’s ad, which began hitting the airwaves Tuesday, across social media. But it has drawn condemnation from other Republicans.
Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley tangled with Ramaswamy in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, when he mentioned during a debate that Haley’s adult daughter was posting on TikTok app — then owned by China — which Haley had chided Ramaswamy for using. At the time, Haley had referred to Ramaswamy as “just scum” for bringing her daughter into the debate.
Posting Tuesday night on the social media platform X, Haley wrote: “Just seeing what we tried to tell everyone back then. He’s a bad guy. It’s a shame he continues to get away with it.”
Republican Lydia Mihalik, director of the Ohio Department of Development and former mayor of Findlay, wrote on X: “I don’t have to agree with Amy Acton’s politics to believe that exploiting someone’s childhood trauma is wrong. … There is a difference between fighting for your principles and abandoning them to win.”
The Columbus Dispatch, which endorsed Acton on Wednesday, called Ramaswamy’s ad “revolting and unsettling.”
“It should go without saying that sexual violence against children should not be politicized or taken as lightly as Ramaswamy appears to take it,” the Dispatch’s editorial board wrote.
Meanwhile, more details were coming to light regarding the ad’s origins of the ad, which were mysterious at first.
Liberal Ohio blogger D.J. Byrnes, who writes as “The Rooster,” had warned last week that something of this nature was being developed by Ramaswamy’s campaign, and started the firestorm Monday night, when he posted the video featuring Acton’s mother on X. At the time, it had no disclosure explaining who produced it.
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On Wednesday, Byrnes wrote on his Substack that “a trusted, high-ranking Cleveland-area Republican sent me a screen recording of a push poll from messaging firm Dynata.” The use of such a “push poll” — that is, a negative campaign tactic in which an attack masquerades as an opinion poll — would suggest that Ramaswamy’s operation was gauging responses before disseminating it more widely as an advertisement.
At the time, Acton’s campaign was also on alert.
The campaign had compiled court documents from the late 1970s that corroborated Acton’s version of the abuse she suffered, as well as the squalor in which she said the family was living, which her mother denied.
Within hours of the video becoming public, Acton’s campaign also blasted out a statement from her brother, in which Philip Stearns said: “It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at 12 years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point.”
Stearns added: “This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core — a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.”
By late Tuesday afternoon, the Acton campaign also released an ad featuring Stearns recalling that his older sister had been his protector in an abusive household. “Shame on Vivek,” he said in the ad.
Both sides were aware that Acton’s mother carried a grudge against her daughter. Donna Arthur had aired her grievances previously in a 2020 interview with the antiabortion organization Operation Rescue when Acton was Ohio’s health commissioner, leading the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic with Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.
Ramaswamy’s campaign has described Acton as “a fabulist.” MAGA influencers — among them, Vice President JD Vance — have also spread unsubstantiated suggestions that the Democratic nominee is mentally unbalanced and an alcoholic.
The episode involving Acton’s mother prompted Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s (D) wife, MK Pritzer, to announce a $500,000 donation to Acton.
“Bad men gain power when we refuse to stand up and fight,” she wrote in a statement that was reposted by her husband, a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
Vance, campaigning Wednesday in Sharonville, Ohio, tried to shrug off questions about Ramaswamy’s ad.
“The media and the Democrats in the state of Ohio are obsessed because — guess what? — Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,” Vance said.
To some, however, the ad appeared to be a desperate move on the part of a candidate who sees he is losing. Former Republican strategist Mike Murphy, who is now a prominent MAGA critic, wrote on X: “This Ramaswamy ad in OH is looking more and more like political suicide.”
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Dan Merica and Natalie Allison contributed to this report.
