COLUMBUS, Ohio — Josh Mandel’s wager was easy: Nobody would outflank him in mirroring Donald J. Trump, either on hard-right America First positions or the bellicose, come-at-me kind of the previous president.
So, Mr. Mandel said of Black Lives Matter activists, “They’re the racists, not us.” He stirred animosity toward migrants, including refugees from Afghanistan, and falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. The Jewish grandson of a Holocaust survivor whose website includes a Christian cross, Mr. Mandel stumped mostly in evangelical churches, claiming “there’s no such thing” as separation of church and state.
For a very long time, it worked. Mr. Mandel was the presumed front-runner within the crowded Republican field for U.S. senator from Ohio.
But two weeks ago, the one person he sought most to impress — the previous president himself — spurned Mr. Mandel, a former state treasurer, and bestowed his coveted endorsement on J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” writer, remaking the race overnight.
Mr. Vance, who had been trailing in polls and running low on money, has seen a surge in donations and support since Mr. Trump’s embrace, as the primary major Senate midterm primary election entered its final weekend before Tuesday’s voting.
And across the state, Republicans including Mr. Mandel; Mr. Vance; Mike Gibbons, a self-funded businessman; and State Senator Matt Dolan fanned out in a preview of national G.O.P. politics to return — different moons circling Mr. Trump’s sun.
On Saturday, Mr. Vance campaigned with two far-right members of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Mr. Mandel hopscotched across the state’s big cities — Toledo, Columbus and Cincinnati — with a conservative ally of his own, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
To longtime acquaintances and observers of Mr. Mandel, 44, who early in his profession promoted civility and bipartisanship, his unrequited embrace of Trumpism and divisiveness suggested there was a price on political calculation.
“I see the desperation there these previous few months,” said Matt Cox, a former Republican operative who was an early adviser to Mr. Mandel before a falling-out. “I believe his strategy was: All right, Trump won Ohio by eight points twice. All I even have to do to change into the nominee is to change into essentially the most like Trump.”
The candidate most left on the sidelines since Mr. Trump’s nod at Mr. Vance, in accordance with polls, has been Jane Timken. The one woman running, Ms. Timken was endorsed by Ohio’s retiring senator, Rob Portman, a center-right throwback to an earlier Ohio G.O.P. who voted with Senate Democrats for the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Ms. Timken has solid Trump-era credentials — she chaired the state party while Mr. Trump was in office — but she doesn’t mimic the previous president’s aggrieved style, which has been a key to unlocking essentially the most fervent Republican voters. She has set herself aside from rivals who she says seek day-after-day to get themselves “canceled on Twitter” with their statements and antics.
In a debate in March, Mr. Mandel nearly got right into a physical confrontation with Mr. Gibbons.
At a Baptist church in Columbus on Saturday, Mr. Mandel took aim at popular targets of the appropriate, including transgender people, Republicans with “jelly knees” like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and the “liberal media at the back of the room” (just minutes after greeting reporters amicably by name in a personal room).
Fitting the setting, the largely older crowd within the pews called out encouraging “amens!” or groaned audibly when Mr. Mandel named enemies.
“The explanation that we’re going to win on Tuesday is because we’ve this army of Christian warriors throughout the state,’’ he pledged.
One pastor present, Dan Wolvin, said he “felt sorry” for Mr. Trump over the Vance endorsement, saying he was “listening to the fallacious people.” Still, Mr. Wolvin predicted the Trump nod would gain Mr. Vance “about five points” on Election Day, while conceding, “it’s lots for Josh to make up.”
Spurned or not, Mr. Mandel was still flying the Trump flag.
“I supported President Trump yesterday. I support him today, and I’ll proceed to support him tomorrow,” he said. He predicted the previous president would return to the White House, “and I look ahead to working with him.”
The candidates, to various degrees, all concur. Listed below are snapshots from around Ohio within the last weekend of campaigning.
J.D. Vance in Newark, Ohio
J.D. Vance, the writer and enterprise capitalist, bounded onto the stage on the Trout Club in Newark, Ohio, with the boldness of the nominal front-runner, a standing bestowed by Mr. Trump’s endorsement on April 15.
The gang of about 75 within the bar and restaurant of a well-manicured country club had been warmed up by Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Greene, who ticked through the talking points of the perimeter right: “medical tyranny,” “open borders,” “gender pediatric clinics” turning boys into girls, men in women’s bathrooms and ladies’s sports, The Walt Disney Company “grooming” children into homosexuals and transgender people.
Mr. Vance breezed through a number of the same themes, but he appeared more intent on previewing the larger issues he planned to argue in the overall election to return.
He castigated each parties free of charge trade agreements that he said had sent Ohio manufacturing to Mexico and China, for the “bipartisan decision to permit American Wall Street firms to get wealthy off the expansion of China and never off the expansion of the American middle class.” He also accused financial firms of allowing “the Chinese into this country, buying up our farmland, buying up our single-family homes, making it unattainable for young families to purchase a house, to own a stake in their very own country.”
“That’s the game they play, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate to go and play a unique game, a game where we put our residents and the people on this room first,” he said to cheers.
The people in that room — just off a verdant golf course, far-off from the illegal immigrant, drug-infested cities that Mr. Vance speaks of on the stump — were hardly the down-and-out white employees central to his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” But an unspoken truth is, his audience is the true core of the pro-Trump vote in Ohio. The one income group that President Biden won on this state in 2020 was that of voters who earn lower than $50,000. More affluent voters went for Mr. Trump.
But economic themes generally — and the China threat specifically — resonated.
“That’s within the DNA in Ohio,” said Representative Tim Ryan, the likely Democratic nominee for the approaching Senate race.
Mr. Vance was asked by a reporter why he invited Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz to barnstorm through Ohio with him on the closing weekend of the first campaign.
“There’s nothing more disgusting in politics than the way in which that leadership asks you to stab your folks within the back,” he said before heading with them to West Chester, outside Cincinnati. He added for emphasis, “I’m not going to disavow them because some scumbag who doesn’t have the very best interest of Ohio at heart wants me to.”
Jonathan Weisman
Mike Gibbons in Dublin, Ohio
Mr. Gibbons likes to sport a navy blue suit coat and red tie harking back to Mr. Trump. He has a habit of reminding voters that he’s a businessman, not a politician. And he speaks often of how, in 1989, he began his investment banking and financial advisory firm in a small Cleveland office with nothing but a desk and a phone.
But imitation didn’t win Mr. Gibbons the endorsement of the previous president he so sought to emulate, and he’s closing out the ultimate stretch of the first much the way in which he began: together with his own gumption and private wealth.
In an interview on his campaign bus Saturday, Mr. Gibbons emphasized his lifelong Ohio roots and business credentials as the very best fit for Ohio voters.
“I used to be shocked,” Mr. Gibbons said of Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Vance, referring to his opponent as someone who “flew in from the West Coast.” He added: “Ohioans needs to be insulted.”
Outside, a few volunteers mingled in a food market car parking zone near Columbus, picking up Gibbons swag and eating pizza, before fanning out to knock on doors.
Mr. Gibbons grew up in Parma, a working-class suburb outside of Cleveland. He was a one-time skilled football player, and at 37, he founded Brown Gibbons Lang & Company. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2018, and this time has pumped roughly $17 million into his campaign, making him the biggest self-funder within the race.
He drew some scrutiny in March for comments he made in 2013 on China and Asian those who used offensive stereotypes and was later criticized for the heated debate stage encounter with Mr. Mandel.
Mr. Gibbons served as Mr. Trump’s Ohio fundraising co-chair in 2016. But in a single crucial way, his supporters say, his path has sharply diverged from Mr. Trump’s: Mr. Gibbons didn’t receive a multimillion-dollar loan from his father to launch his business empire.
“I like that he’s from Parma, Ohio — real down-to-earth sort of guy who worked hard for all the pieces he has in life and earned his way,” said Michael Palcisko, 54, a schoolteacher and military veteran in Cleveland.
Jazmine Ulloa and Kevin Williams
Matt Dolan in North Royalton, Ohio
On an overcast Saturday morning, Mr. Dolan knocked on doors in an affluent suburb just south of Cleveland. He was making a last-minute push to get voters to the polls, and on his goal list were registered Republicans who had yet to forged a ballot. But on his route, he was just as more likely to encounter Democrats and independents who were backing his candidacy — or just cheering him on.
“If it must be a Republican, I hope it’s you,” Wealthy Evans, 69, a retired educator, told him, as he stopped manicuring his lawn to shake hands.
From the start, Mr. Dolan, who has served within the statehouse since 2017 and whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, has been walking in his own lonely lane. He’s the one Republican candidate who supports Mr. Trump but has attempted to place far between himself and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump “did a number of good things for Ohio,” Mr. Dolan said. But he said he wanted his own campaign to stay focused on Ohio. He desired to get back to discussing policy, and he definitely didn’t wish to re-litigate the last election.
“I’m not looking backwards,” he said.
Like the opposite Republicans within the race, he said he desires to secure the border, cut the flow of fentanyl into the state and tackle inflation. But he also said he could do greater than his competitors to bring employees to the state and put together a novel economic development agenda.
He’s hardly a never Trumper. He said he voted for Mr. Trump within the last presidential election, opposed each impeachment cases against him and has said he would support the previous president should he change into the 2024 Republican nominee.
But on Jan. 6, Mr. Dolan didn’t draw back from criticizing Mr. Trump for spreading lies in regards to the results of the November 2020 election, writing on Twitter, “Real leaders lead not manipulate.” Unlike the opposite leading Republican candidates within the race, he also acknowledges President Biden is the nation’s legitimate leader.
It was a stance that Pat Ryan, 64, said he respected. Standing at his front door, Ryan, who considers himself a Democrat, said he planned to vote within the Republican primary this yr due to Mr. Dolan. “I looked in any respect the candidates, and he’s essentially the most honest one,” he said.
Jazmine Ulloa
