With mudslinging in all directions, Ohio’s Republican Senate candidates head for the big

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Candidates in Ohio’s already hotly contested U.S. Senate race are turning up the heat even further, launching attacks against each other in all directions in the final days before the May 3 primary.

A profane confrontation between Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel last month that nearly turned physical. Comments Gibbons made during a podcast last October that suggested the middle class doesn’t pay its “fair share” of taxes. JD Vance attacking Mandel for hiding behind his Marine service. Jane Timken trying to steer the conversation toward her general election viability against Democrats. And Matt Dolan continuing to bill himself as above the fray.

In total, the candidates have created a hodgepodge of continuing controversy with just two weeks of voting left to pick the Republican nominee to replace retiring GOP Sen. Rob Portman.

Despite the vitriol, the candidates themselves are not far apart regarding the issues, including red-meat topics like guns and abortion, with so much of their attention turned toward courting the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump. Vance scored the endorsement on Friday, putting to end months of speculation and deflating local Republicans’ last-minute effort to block the endorsement.

Vance might be the most significant outlier as the lone candidate who has said he does not care what happens to Ukraine – a position the other candidates have attacked him for plenty.

New campaign ads and interviews the candidates have given over the past week with Hugh Hewitt and Steve Bannon, two conservative media figures with dramatically different world views, help reveal what the candidates are focusing on as they hit the final days before the May 3 election.

The candidates also have spent time mudslinging in all directions and continuing their attention-grabbing antics, illustrating what appears to be a fluid race in which four or five candidates appear to have a realistic chance of winning.

Mandel tried to make a splash last week when he rolled out an ad showing him walking across a bridge in Selma, Ala., made famous in 1965 as the site of a march in which Civil Rights Movement activists were violently attacked by police.

Mandel invoked Martin Luther King Jr. while adding that it’s not “racist” to care about critical race theory, the popular punching bag for conservative media and politicians.

“I didn’t do two tours in Anbar Province, fighting alongside Marines of every color, to come home and be called a racist,” Mandel says in the ad.

In announcing the ad, Mandel also instigated a social-media confrontation with Bernice King, the famous civil rights leader’s daughter, by tagging her in a post. Mandel touted the ad in an interview afterward with Bannon, who said the ad was “perhaps the most controversial” so far of the 2022 election cycle.

Mandel bragged that the ad caused him to get attacked on social media by “all these Ivy League liberals” and “woke white professors.”

“The racist ones, the intolerant ones are the Ivy League liberals, it’s these blue checks on Twitter, it’s the folks who stand up there gratuitously at the Academy Awards and the Grammys, and they go up there and lecture people in the heartland in places like Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown,” Mandel said.

In various interviews over the past week, Mandel also has rolled out a new talking point that puts a slightly friendlier face on what’s generally been a far-right, flame-throwing campaign of grievance: the other candidates are not “bad” people but aren’t senator material.

Meanwhile, Mandel led a new poll released Friday by Trafalgar Group, a Republican pollster. it showed Mandel leading the field with 28%, followed by Vance, with Gibbons and Dolan polling in the double-digits and Timken fifth. But other internal polls, including Mandel’s, Gibbons’ and Timken’s show the candidates flipped, with Timken higher and Vance last. While it’s unclear what specific effect Trump’s endorsement of Vance will have on the race, the Trafalgar poll found 55% of respondents said they’d be more likely to vote for a Trump-endorsed candidate.

In a Wednesday interview with Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host and Ohio native with a national program, Mandel bashed other leading candidates in the race while saying he’s trying to get Trump’s endorsement.

“All of us are doing everything we can to earn his support and earn his endorsement,” Mandel said. “I think JD Vance and Jane Timken are two of the candidates who would still lose the race even if they did get the endorsement because they’re so far behind in the polls.”

Similar to Mandel, Vance launched a campaign ad focusing on racial grievance the same day that Mandel’s ad was released. The ad, titled “Am I a Racist,” says it’s not racist to want to close the border between the United States and Mexico. The ad prompted predictable backlash from left-leaning Twitter users, which made its way into media coverage.

On Bannon’s podcast, Vance said the point of the ad was to provoke criticism.

“I wrote that copy myself because the thing I hate that the Democrats do is they weaponize people’s compassion against them,” he said. “… The media went absolutely insane because I cut an ad saying the border is not about racism. The border is about security and prosperity for our people. They took the bait and made it all about race, which proved the necessity of running that ad, to begin with.”

Vance, who has tacked far to the right since his 2016 days as a memoirist and anti-Trump conservative commentator, said he is the candidate with mass appeal “on the right and in the center” during the podcast interview.

At least on the right, he has made some moves. Ohio Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, recently backed Vance in the primary. And Trump endorsed him on Friday while referencing Vance’s extensive past of publicly criticizing Trump.

“Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades. He is our best chance for victory in what could be a very tough race,” Trump said in a statement.

In an appearance on the Hugh Hewitt Show on Monday, days before Trump’s endorsement, Vance was upbeat about his prospects.

“I think Mandel, Gibbons and me are tied pretty tightly at the top,” he said.

Gibbons, who’s been of particular focus of attacks given his surprising strength in various campaign polls, tried to turn the tables on everyone launching new attacks against Timken, Vance and Mandel while defending himself against criticism over his history of making business deals in China.

Over last weekend, Gibbons had gone on the defensive after the Associated Press published a story highlighting comments about taxes he made in October during a podcast interview with Crain’s Cleveland Business.

Specifically, as part of a lengthy answer about economic policy, Gibbons said Democrats advance what he called a “false narrative” that the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share of taxes at the expense of the middle class.

“The top 20% of earners in the United States pay 82% of federal income tax — and, if you do the math, and 45% to 50% don’t pay any income tax, you can see the middle class is not really paying any kind of a fair share, depending on how you want to define it,” Gibbons said.

“Now the problem is, you need the middle class to win an election. So the narrative is the middle class is getting screwed, and the wealthy, the elite, are cheating everybody and getting by unfairly. How much of the total tax bill can a very small percentage of the nation pay and still be a democracy? You can’t have 10-20% of the population carrying the whole bill. It doesn’t work long-run, and it’s a very dangerous situation. So everybody should share in some degree the tax bill.”

In an effort at some damage control, Gibbons released a two-minute video on social media last Saturday pledging not to raise taxes on anyone.

“The career politicians are afraid of me because I don’t speak in simple sound bites,’ Gibbons said. “And I’m not going to play their game of gotcha politics.”

Gibbons also has spent time cleaning up over attacks on his business connections in China, a popular theme in the race. A recent ad bashes Mandel, the former state treasurer, for loaning “tax dollars” to “Chinese business interests.”

Asked to explain the ad, the campaign cited a state program’s holdings in companies like JPMorganChase and Toyota, companies that, like most major multinational firms, have significant investments in China.

“Like many entrepreneurs, Gibbons had to negotiate with dozens of Chinese businessmen,” a narrator intones in another Gibbons ad, which mirrors themes in an accompanying op-ed that appeared in the right-leaning Washington Examiner. “Gibbons took on China in the board room. He’ll do it in…