Josh Mandel May Be Trolling The GOP. He Could Be Ohio’s Next Senator.

TOLEDO, Ohio — Jason Kander says he met Josh Mandel back when he wasn’t Josh Mandel.

In Kander’s telling, Mandel called him up out of the blue a decade or so ago to pitch a project. It made sense why. The two men had similar profiles: Jewish combat veterans in their early 30s. New statewide officeholders in the Midwest. Rising stars in their respective parties — Kander as a Democrat and Mandel as a Republican.

That was the pitch. Mandel told Kander he wanted to collaborate on something like a cable news segment or show, as opposing “moderates” from the Heartland.

Kander ultimately wasn’t into it and passed. Since then, he “hasn’t kept in touch with the guy at all,” he told HuffPost in December.

Now Kander can hardly believe the Josh Mandel who’s running for U.S. Senate in Ohio.

“I’ve watched his performance over the past few years, and it’s a very different guy than the guy I briefly met over the phone,” said Kander, who was Missouri secretary of state when Mandel was Ohio treasurer. “I’ve seen clips of him where he sounds like he’s running in a Republican primary in southwest Missouri. I’ve been to Ohio. I know that’s not what it sounds like,” he said. Kander, who has his own Midwestern drawl, was referring to clips of Mandel, a Cleveland native, adopting a fake Southern accent. “I don’t know who that’s for, but it’s so strange.”

Mandel seems to know exactly who it’s for. After two other attempts at the Senate, Mandel has been heavily courting the evangelical “Make America Great Again” vote in this pivotal primary to replace Republican Rob Portman.

And he’s willing to pretty much do anything to win it. No position is too extreme — Mandel edges right up to the line of open racism and radicalizing against democracy. All immigrants are “illegals,” all Black Lives Matter activists are “thugs,” all non-Trump-loving Republicans are “RINOs” (Republican in Name Only, the worst GOP-on-GOP burn), all Democrats are “socialists” trying to destroy the country. Among his rivals, Mandel is the loudest proponent of the “big lie” that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. He says he wants the House select committee that’s investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by extremist Trump supporters replaced with a “Nov. 3 commission” to probe what was, by all expert accounts, a free and fair election.

Mandel’s tweets can read like a deranged bot trying to imitate Trump.

Dec. 15: “In Joe Biden’s America, you’ll be arrested for trying to enter a Cheesecake Factory without your papers. This is not a free country.”

Jan. 10: “Separation of money and state, not separation of church and state. #bitcoin.”

Jan. 11: “Freedom over Fauci. Bibles over Biden.”

Last year, Mandel filmed himself lighting up a face mask with the caption “Freedom.” Then he posted a photo with a waitress whom he praised for reportedly showing up to work sick, and he doubled down after massive blowback.

If that strikes you as Mandel doing his best to channel Trump, I’ve been unwillingly included in Mandel’s Trump act in the course of reporting on him. He had no problem going after me at a pseudo-MAGA rally with hundreds of Republicans. It was just more evidence of the measures he’s willing to take to ingratiate himself with the base.

To better understand Mandel’s political evolution, I interviewed more than a dozen political insiders and personal contacts of Mandel’s, going back to when he was student government president at Ohio State University in the late 1990s through his last campaign for Senate in 2018, which was cut short after he abruptly dropped out.

I kept hearing the same things: that Mandel, a former golden child of the GOP, used to be perceived as more moderate before evolving into a staunch conservative and then veering hard right as a Trump acolyte; that he’s obsessively hardworking and ambitious; that he scares and embarrasses some members of his own party. To the degree it’s possible to discern anyone’s true political motivations, people following Mandel don’t completely buy that any of this is genuine. That Mandel, a practicing Jew, is running his campaign through Ohio’s evangelical churches, feels to some like a move calculated for strategic political exposure to the MAGA base.

“Many of these people who have been involved [in politics] a long time, they’re realizing that Josh is a phony,” said Ralph King, a former “tea party” organizer and Trump delegate from northeast Ohio. “The new people, they like him because they believe his bullshit. That’s all it is, is bullshit.”

It’s not hard to find people in Ohio politics who are completely horrified by Mandel. “He’s a really disturbing person,” said David Pepper, the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, who added that Mandel is like far-right Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) but “worse.” A longtime GOP operative thinks “the ambition has consumed” Mandel and said watching Ohio’s GOP primary unfold makes him “want to vomit.” Another Republican, who has known Mandel for decades and is secretly rooting for one of his opponents, said it’s “mind blowing” that Mandel has somehow managed to get support from both the Jewish and evangelical Christian communities, which tend to both support Israel. “The first thing you have to do when you deal with evangelicals is you have to at least believe in Christ. Like, that’s sort of what it takes to get in the door,” the person said.

Republicans requested anonymity to discuss Mandel for fear of alienating the party’s future Senate nominee. After all, they still want to win the seat.

“Josh kind of built his career on being a practical, center-right Republican,” said a former county GOP chair who has known Mandel since he was in college. “He did not come up through the ranks being a bomb-throwing, provocative divider.”

Morgan Harper, a progressive underdog running for the Democratic nomination opposite Mandel, summed up the impression he tends to leave on Democrats.

“I am scared as a woman, as a Black person, as a daughter who has a mother who lives off of a monthly pension, of getting this guy anywhere near a seat of power in the United States Senate,” Harper said during a recent debate with Mandel, who that same night had argued there should be no separation of church and state.

Democrats especially have good reason to be worried — because whatever Mandel is doing is working.

The limited polling that’s been done on the race has shown Mandel with a steady lead in a six-way GOP primary. Among his challengers — which include a famous author, an investment banker, a luxury car dealer, a former state GOP chair and a state senator — Mandel is the only candidate who has won statewide, which is assumed to be what’s giving him an edge. And in what’s looking more and more like a red wave election year, whoever wins the GOP nomination is well-positioned to win the general election in a state Trump carried twice by 8 percentage points.

That means Mandel could soon join Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Hawley in the far-right corner of the Senate, alongside lawmakers who objected to certifying the 2020 election and who could do it again in 2024.

Pepper said the man who, as a young city councilman and state treasurer, boasted about wearing out his shoes campaigning door-to-door would have no problem now objecting in Congress to a fair election. (Mandel’s spokesperson confirms that had Mandel been in Congress in 2021 he would have voted with the senators who objected to certifying some electoral college votes.)

“His big source of pride was not ring-wing anything; it was mainly about how hard he worked,” Pepper said. “And he does work hard, I’ll give him credit.”

Pepper said he finds it most troubling that Mandel is capable of changing up his political persona so dramatically based on political expediency.

“To me, the people who are truly dangerous are the ones who will do or say anything, depending on the moment,” he said. “They’re not about anything in the end except their own quest for power. That’s Mandel.”

It wasn’t easy to get a minute with Mandel after his debate last month with Harper, the Senate race’s lone progressive. Held at a Baptist church in Columbus, the meeting was conceived as a publicity stunt for both candidates — low stakes and good headline fodder. But Harper’s team came armed with more supporters. Afterward, one of them approached Mandel to confront him about calling BLM activists “thugs,” the line that seemed to get the most attention that night.

Julian Mack, a 37-year-old racial justice organizer from Toledo, asked Mandel to stop using what he…