Trump Endorsement Delivers for Ohio Republican

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Score one for former President Donald Trump: The candidate he endorsed, author and investor J.D. Vance, won the Republican primary for a vacant Ohio Senate seat on Tuesday. Trump's late choice probably did make the difference; Vance wound up winning by eight percentage points after being just one of the pack in polls taken before Trump's announcement. The candidate Trump opposed, State Senator Matt Dolan, wound up finishing third behind another Trump-friendly candidate, former State Treasurer Josh Mandel.

Let's not overstate the Trump effect. This was the kind of election where a high-profile endorsement is most likely to have some impact: a large field of well-funded candidates with none of them an obvious choice for voters looking for the “real” conservative. In that kind of contest, a great ad, a debate gaffe, clever attacks or endorsements that drive press coverage can move lots of voters quickly.

What matters most isn't what actually happened; it's what Republican party actors, including politicians, believe happened. And there's little question that it will be Trump's endorsement, and not (say) the heavy funding on Vance's behalf from the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel or any of Vance's personal qualities or performances that will get the heaviest coverage.

Ohio isn't quite a safe Republican seat, and Vance isn't likely to be as strong a general election candidate in November as Dolan or former state Republican Party leader Jane Timken, who was endorsed by retiring Republican Senator Rob Portman, would have been. The Democrats have a likely solid candidate in U.S. Representative Tim Ryan, a congressional veteran with a moderate reputation who won the nomination easily.

However, Republicans are united behind Vance, and Ohio is a solid Republican state; Trump won it by about eight percentage points in both 2016 and 2020. So even if President Joe Biden's approval ratings improve, it's a tough state for Democrats, and with a national tide running for Republicans it could easily be a blowout. That said, Vance is a first-time political candidates whose entire nomination campaign consisted of appeals to Trump, the Fox News provocateur Tucker Carlson and other radicals. There's no particular reason to believe he'll be a failure at campaigning to the rest of the electorate, or that he'll otherwise have large problems in the fall campaign, but he'll have to do it.

Ryan briefly ran for president in 2020. Well, for 2020; he dropped out in October 2019 after failing to make much of an impact as one of a handful of candidates pushing for a more moderate party. Ryan thus becomes one of two presidential candidates (along with former U.S. Representative Beto O'Rourke in Texas) to win a statewide nomination after a go-nowhere presidential campaign. O'Rourke, now the Democratic nominee for Texas governor, had already run statewide for Senate, but like Ryan he had won nothing bigger than a House district.

Both the 2016 Republican presidential nomination battle and the Democrats' version in 2020 had enormous candidate fields. So far, the only one seemingly helped by running and losing was Vice President Kamala Harris; none of the hopeless candidates appeared to get much of anything out of it. So Ryan, and to some extent O'Rourke, are a bit of evidence in the other direction — and again, what matters is what future potential candidates think of as the pros and cons of entering without much chance of winning.

Meanwhile, if anyone is looking for further evidence of the difference between the parties, a pair of Ohio House primaries is as good an example as any. On the Democratic side, incumbent Shontel Brown faced a rematch against Bernie Sanders supporter Nina Turner, who most party politicians considered ill-suited for office. Brown had defeated Turner narrowly in a special election in November 2021 to win the seat; this time, she crushed Turner by over 30 percentage points.

Over on the Republican side? In a district encompassing parts of Cleveland and Akron, a candidate whose main claim to fame seems to have been that he painted his lawn for Trump upset two better-known state legislators. Both parties attract radicals at times, but Democrats work pretty hard to marginalize theirs, while Republicans not only nominate them, but — as the one-time never-Trumper Vance did — reinvent themselves to emulate party extremists.

Democrats nominate plenty of candidates who are very liberal in their policy positions. There's nothing wrong with having some very liberal (or very conservative) members of Congress, as long as they're willing and able to cut deals with those who are more moderate. What is a problem are election officials who have no interest in governing, oppose compromise in principle and see elected office mainly as a stepping stone to fame they can cash in on quickly. And too many Republican nominees, unfortunately, fit into one or more of those categories.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.