The Ohio governor’s race is an early test of how much voters will tolerate from Trump’s imitators.

President Donald Trump shakes hands with gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy at a campaign rally at the Covelli Centre, in Youngstown, Ohio, on Oct. 12, 2026. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Jonathan Martin is POLITICO’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. He’s covered elections in every corner of America and co-authored a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column chronicles the inside conversations and major trends shaping U.S. politics.

It’s tempting to say that Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad deploying the estranged mother of his opponent in the Ohio governor’s race is the worst sort of ends-justify-the-means politics.

But the ends, in this case, are likely to be an even more pronounced rejection of Ramaswamy at the polls next month. The spot isn’t just bad taste, it’s bad politics.

What the ad represents, rather, is an opening salvo in the post-midterms fight for the Republican Party’s future. It’s a battle that will accelerate next year but may not culminate until the 2030s. Put simply, what sort of party does the GOP want to be — and what will the market bear?

Ramaswamy’s bet is that Donald Trump has fundamentally transformed politics and the old rules no longer apply. Voters are cynical, the news media has a shadow of its influence and boundaries are for RINOs. Might makes right. Oh, and as he has told Republicans, the ad tested well with voters, I’ve been informed by a GOP official.

Count me as skeptical — and not just because Ramaswamy is loathsome, his conduct appalling and the spot an act of self-sabotage once people learn the facts.

Voters want something better, and they’re about to make that clear, in Ohio and beyond, next month.

As former Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, told me Thursday, the “increasing incivility in the political arena should concern us all,” and Ramaswamy’s ad is an “unfortunate example of that broader trend. It crosses the line.”You can hear the counterargument from Ramaswamy’s fellow Ohioan, Vice President JD Vance. He was more irritated at Republicans for being critical of the commercial than he was bothered, on moral or strategic grounds, about putting Amy Acton’s elderly mother on camera.

“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that than they are about what … Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” Vance said Wednesday. He saluted Ramaswamy for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”To the surprise of absolutely no one, Trump also supports Trump-style politics, and he offered a social media defense of the ad Thursday. But here’s the question: Can anybody besides Trump pull off this sort of low-down stunt?

The body of evidence may be limited, but it’s fairly conclusive: Trump is singular, and his imitators have scant appeal with voters. There’s only one Trump, and if you don’t have Friars Club-level talent, well, you’re Ramaswamy. Or Kari Lake. The list goes on, and they’re all winless.

Trump was judged as a celebrity rather than a conventional politician, a grace that, along with his stand-up timing and absurdities, dulled the blade and brought a sort of it’s-just-Trump alibi. It’s why even as his shtick grows old and more erratic — this turn toward hunky men — it’s still less cringey and try-hard than when Vance attempts similar material.

A Trump party without Trump is a minority party. MAGA has always been a minoritarian movement — Trump just benefited from great timing and his opposition. Most Republicans, privately at least, have grasped this.

Perhaps Ramaswamy’s defeat will drive it home, delivering yet more education in the 17th kick of the mule.

Republicans were given the choice between defeat and dishonor after Ramaswamy aired an ad featuring a woman who sided with her husband, who was indicted for molesting her daughter, over her own child: They chose dishonor, and they will have defeat. Well, not all of them.

The MAGA crowd will dismiss them as RINOs, but some prominent Ohio Republicans spoke up. There was Portman.

And, to his credit, there was Sen. Jon Husted, the appointed incumbent who was already facing a difficult election and said he would not have aired the ad.

Going further was Gov. Mike DeWine, for whom Acton served as Ohio’s health director.

DeWine is a paragon of decency, and it was only a matter of when he denounced the ad, even though he’s a party man through and through. On Thursday, DeWine urged Ramaswamy to take it down.

But he did something else as well, intentional or not, which was to remind Ohioans of what Acton endured.

“When you know the rest of the story, when you know the backstory, when you know that the husband of the mom was indicted by a grand jury after hearing testimony and that he took off along with the mother ... and that two children never saw, I guess, the mother after that — when you know that, it just to me makes it more serious,” DeWine said. “It makes it just more wrong.”It was a fitting last act in DeWine’s public life.

As Trump nears his exit, Republicans should consider what one shrewd conservative observer reminded me of Thursday, as Ramaswamy began airing the ad.

In 1993, the right-of-center party in Canada aired an attack ad against Jean Chrétien, the Liberal leader, that appeared to mock his Bell’s palsy. The shorthand for it in Canadian political infamy is “the face ad.”It backfired spectacularly, and the Liberals prevailed in the federal election that year, elevating Chrétien to prime minister.

A different era, perhaps. But for all the technological change and willingness to define deviancy down, voters will only tolerate so much — particularly when they’re suffering.

Trump found that out in 2020, when Covid-19 made his act look less amusing. Ramaswamy will find it out in a little less than two weeks. And Republicans will in 2028 if they offer dime-store Trumpism.