POWELL, Ohio (AP) — Biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy embarked on a statewide bus tour across Ohio with fellow Republicans on Friday, even as his gubernatorial campaign's ad featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Dr. Amy Acton was sowing growing divisions within his party as they fight to maintain political control of the state.
With the backing of Vice President JD Vance and at President Donald Trump's urging, Ramaswamy has continued a $4 million campaign to air the ad on streaming platforms and TV. During stops on the tour Friday, he defended it against criticism that he characterized as concocted by Democrats and the news media.
“The irony is they’re lying about an ad that is about lying,” he told a crowd in suburban Cleveland Friday morning. “They’re changing the subject because they don’t want to answer for their own failures.”
The 60-second spot features Acton's mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter “a liar” who “needs help” due to a “a serious problem” being honest about her past. But Arthur hasn't seen her daughter in nearly 50 years. She lost custody of her children after her husband, the children’s stepfather, was indicted for raping Acton when she was 12. Acton, Ohio's former state health director, says she hasn't seen her mother since 1978.
By Friday, every living full-term governor of Ohio — two Democrats and three Republicans — had spoken out against the ad. GOP former Gov. Bob Taft told Marion radio show host Scott Spears that his great-grandfather, President William Howard Taft, “is probably rolling over in his grave” at the negativity of this year's elections.
He urged Ramaswamy to cease airing the ad, as another fellow Republican, Gov. Mike DeWine, had done a day earlier. “It really exceeds the bounds of human decency,” he said.
Sen. Husted forced to navigate GOP feuding
U.S. Sen. Jon Husted — who, like Ramaswamy, is locked in an unexpectedly tight race against his Democratic opponent, former Sen. Sherrod Brown — shared a stage with Vance on Wednesday without mentioning the controversial ad, and then issued a statement shortly afterward saying he would not have run it. Other statewide candidates have drawn the same careful line, without raising the issue when on the same stage with Ramaswamy.
Husted, whose name is emblazoned on the side of the bus along with all the other statewide candidates, did not participate in the first two stops of the tour Friday.
The difference of opinion with Ramaswamy over the ad is not the first awkward Republican family feud Husted has had to navigate this cycle, as he works to retain the seat won by Vance in 2022.
In August, Husted called on GOP U.S. Rep. Max Miller to resign and drop out as the northeast Ohio congressman faces a congressional ethics investigation related to domestic abuse allegations leveled against him by his ex-wife. Husted's decision came after Miller's former father-in-law, U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, also a Republican, said his wife's former husband was not fit to hold elected office.
Democrat Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker and local councilman seeking to unseat Miller, has used Moreno's interview about Miller in attack ads against his Republican opponent. Meanwhile, Miller was quoted in The Wall Street Journal blasting Husted — fighting for one of the GOP's most critical Senate seats of the cycle — as “as smart as a box of rocks” and “as entertaining as a two-by-four.”
At a campaign rally in Iowa on Thursday, Trump told the crowd Ramaswamy called him to ask for advice about the ad.
“You’ve got to ride with it,” Trump recalled telling Ramaswamy, a former 2024 presidential candidate. Trump expressed jealousy that he didn’t have such a strong ad to run during his own campaigns. He said it was like “hitting pay dirt.”
Acton has made no secret of facing homelessness and abuse as a child. She has condemned Ramaswamy for the ad.
“I won’t normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is just something I’m complaining about.” she told Spectrum News, a cable news outlet in Ohio.
According to police and court documents obtained by The Associated Press, Cledith Arthur was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter, then 12, in July 1978, after Acton’s biological father reported him to authorities. The abuse allegedly happened from December 1976 to April 1978.
Cledith Arthur pleaded not guilty. He was indicted by a grand jury that September, but failed to show at a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981. He has since died.
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Catalini reported from Morrisville, Pa.
