Rob Portman’s surprise announcement triggers free-for-all for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat in

COLUMBUS, Ohio — This year kicked off with a surprise announcement that promises to make next year’s Ohio political scene a lot more interesting.

Sen. Rob Portman sent shockwaves through state political circles after he announced on Jan. 25 that he won’t seek re-election in 2022. Portman, a traditional Chamber of Commerce-style Republican who had been in office since 2011, cited partisan gridlock as a major contributing factor to his decision.

The development — a rare, open U.S. Senate seat — kicked off a mad scramble among state Republicans to get in the race.

Jane Timken to quit her job as Ohio Republican Party chairman to get in the race. And former state treasurer Josh Mandel, who previously ran for U.S. Senate in 2012 and 2018, returned from his political exile — including re-activating his deleted social media accounts — to re-invent himself as President Donald Trump’s number one supporter. JD Vance, the memoirist and venture capitalist who also considered running for U.S. Senate in 2018, got in the race in July, joining Timken, Mike Gibbons and Bernie Moreno as candidates who now are hoping to make the U.S. Senate their first elected office. Ohio Sen. Matt Dolan announced his candidacy in September.

Mandatory financial disclosures have shown all the Republican candidates, including minor candidate Mark Pukita, are millionaires, with most of them being sufficiently wealthy to largely self-fund their race. And that’s what’s happened, with Timken, Moreno and especially Gibbons plowing millions of their own money into their campaign coffers. This dynamic, plus Ohio’s population size and stature in national politics, contributed to the state’s U.S. Senate race being among the nation’s most expensive, with the candidates all raising $28.5 million as of the most recent campaign-finance deadline, second nationally only to Georgia.

On the Democratic side, Niles-area Rep. Tim Ryan, who’d dipped his toes into statewide politics before, finally decided to take the plunge. Likely weighing in his mind was the seeming likelihood that his congressional district would be eliminated following 2020 redistricting — something that indeed happened when Republicans approved a new congressional map late in the year. Ryan appears to be the presumptive Democratic nominee for the race, but activist Morgan Harper got in the race in August, which could make things interesting.

Republicans are favored to win the seat in 2022, due to a combination of a national political climate that’s expected to favor the GOP, as well as the state’s increasingly rightward political tilt.

But no matter who wins the race, they’ll almost certain to be a major change from Portman.

The mild-mannered Portman by no means is an anti-Trump Republican. But he has shown himself willing to break with the president on key issues, for instance dropping his endorsement of Trump in the days after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape just before the November 2016 election. That move and others contributed to Portman placing 43rd out of 48 Republican U.S. Senators on a Trump loyalty index the website devised in October 2020. And following the November 2020 election, Portman broke ranks with Trump, rejecting the former president’s false and unsupported claim that the election was fraudulent. (Also rejecting Trump’s claims are his own justice and homeland security departments, some top Republicans and dozens of state and federal courts.)

Even on his way out of office, Portman has gotten cross-ways with Trump by being a lead negotiator on a bipartisan infrastructure bill that Trump has argued is wasteful and benefits Democrats politically.

In contrast, the Republican field has been almost completely in lockstep with Trump. Not only are the candidates hoping to get an endorsement from the former president, whose support could be decisive, as Ohio’s special 15th Congressional District election showed, but they’re trying to appeal to his voters. Loyalty to Trump has been perhaps the defining issue of the race, with only Dolan trying to distance himself. A telling illustration of this dynamic is the fact that all the Republican candidates have followed Trump in bashing the infrastructure bill, one of Portman’s highest-profile legislative achievements and a capstone to his political career. But they haven’t gone as far as joining the president’s call to oust Mitch McConnell, the powerful, longtime Republican leader in the U.S. Senate.

The race still is in early stages, with most candidates focused on attending party functions, raising money and locking up endorsements as they position themselves to win.

But the Republican race already has started to heat up. Candidate forums began to increase in frequency in October, and multiple candidates — Gibbons, Moreno and Timken — have launched significant TV ad campaigns. Vance has been the target of multiple waves of attack ads, highlighting the extensive comments he made before becoming a political candidate in which he criticized Trump and his supporters, attributing his support in part to racist and xenophobic appeals. (Trump has made his displeasure with the ads known, believing they could hurt his political support in Ohio, Politico has reported.)

When it comes to issues like guns, abortion and culture war issues like critical race theory, all the candidates largely are on the same page. But some early points of distinction — all Trump-centric — have been:

• Timken’s initial halting defense of Rep. Anthony Gonzalez following Gonzalez’s vote to impeach Trump over the events of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.
• Questions about whether Mandel is the Trump supporter he’s portrayed himself as, given his total disappearance from the public eye after he dropped out of the 2018 Senate election
• Vance’s extensive past criticism of Trump
• With Dolan trying to distinguish himself by running a Portman-esque campaign, whether there are enough anti-Trump or at least Trump-neutral Republicans for Dolan to mount a viable candidacy.

Internal candidate polls, to the extent that they can be believed, have shown Mandel in a lead with a mixture of Gibbons, Timken and Vance trailing behind them. But most voters have yet to make up their minds. And perhaps most important of all, Trump still has not endorsed a candidate, although he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt during a Dec 8 interview that he plans to do so “at some point.”

As for Portman, he’s avoided commenting on the race. And he’s yet to endorse a potential successor.