Ohio’s governor race has become a test of Trump-style politics, with Vivek Ramaswamy's ad featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Amy Acton casting her daughter as untrustworthy and a “liar”.

The Ramaswamy ad using family trauma sparked anger and sympathy, but Trump defended the ad while JD Vance called critics “whining”.

Polls are tight in a usually Republican state, with voters split over costs, taxes and character, and the result may show whether Trump’s style still wins.

AI generated WOODSVILLE, Ohio – The world perhaps doesn’t care too much about who runs an American Rust Belt state, if we are to be painfully honest.

But it is hard to look away when the race to become governor of Ohio morphs into the most crucial stress test for President Donald Trump’s brand of shoot-from-the-hip politics.

Will Trump’s combative style – demonising an opponent and never saying sorry even in the face of certifiable fact and breaching the norms of human decency – survive beyond his term? Can a candidate win by borrowing his methods? What kinds of leaders will American voters elevate after seeing two years of Trump’s second term? What, now, is the political temperament of the world’s most influential democracy?

Ohio will offer an answer to all those questions on Nov 3, when Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech billionaire, attempts a Trump-like transition from a MAGA celebrity to an elected executive.

For most of 2026, the race favoured the Ohio-born Ramaswamy whose Tamil-speaking parents emigrated from the southern Indian state of Kerala. The 41-year-old, who studied biology at Harvard and law at Yale, had already made a splash on the national stage with his 2024 presidential run.

His gubernatorial run seemed a shoo-in at first, given Ohio’s hospitality to Republicans and an endorsement by Trump, who won the state in all three of his Republican Party presidential campaigns.

Meanwhile, the Democrats, who have won only one of the state’s past nine gubernatorial elections, have thrown in their lot with Amy Acton, 60, a physician who has never worked as a doctor but won notice for her handling of the state’s response to Covid-19 as a former state health director. A New York Times opinion piece in May 2020 called her “the leader we wish we all had”.

Under Acton’s guidance, Ohio became the first state in the US to order a statewide closure of all public schools. Her policies were widely praised by liberals and panned by conservatives who found the lockdown and mask mandates to be too intrusive and alarmist. She resigned soon after, under pressure to roll back the Covid-19 restrictions.

As months went by, the opinion polls began to show Acton catching up with Ramaswamy against a backdrop of inflation and growing dissatisfaction with Trump.

When the contest tightened, the vitriol rose. She called him a con artist, an out-of-touch billionaire surveying the state from a private jet.

He called her tenure as health director a failure. Her “only qualification for this job is a short-lived stint as the health director when she shut down the economy of this state, and then when the legislature forced her to actually follow real data, she quit on the job”, he said.

But all that paled beside a bombshell ad by the Ramaswamy campaign that began airing on Oct 22. From bitterness over public records, it crossed the line to private trauma.

The ad featured Acton’s elderly mother casting her daughter as untrustworthy and a “liar”. What it left out was that the mother lost custody of Acton at the age of 12 after Acton accused her stepfather of sexual assault. He fled the state before he could be tried and Acton’s mother stood by him.

The ad won Acton, who had publicly disclosed the abuse in 2019, a wave of public sympathy.

It also elicited an intervention from Trump, who leaned in to praise the mother’s “courage” and told Ramaswamy to carry on broadcasting the ad. “What she was really doing was saving Ohio from making a truly horrible choice,” he wrote on Truth Social.

“The Press is trying to convince everyone that this ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt’,” he wrote.

Vice-President J.D. Vance, seen as a contender in the 2028 presidential election, said he was “disgusted”. Not by the ad but by fellow Republicans who were “whining” about it.

Confidence beneath the rafters A day before the storm broke, I spoke to Ramaswamy briefly at a campaign stop in Woodsfield, a once prosperous Appalachian town in south-eastern Ohio, its compact historic downtown surrounded by wooded hills and farmlands.

The townhall-style meeting was held in a cosy barn with wooden rafters. Ramaswamy spoke from a small wooden stage, his voice modulating with emphasis, rather like a businessman making a pitch than a politician given to rhetoric. He told me his voters were missing in the opinion polls.

“Midterm environments are always tough for the party that’s in power. That’s always true, whether it’s Democrat or Republican. I am confident we will win this election because Ohio polls have consistently undercounted Republicans,” Ramaswamy said.

“That’s just a fact. In this room, if I asked how many have been polled, probably no hands would go up. I ask them how many are going to vote, all of them are going to vote.”

He pointed to the elections in 2024, 2022, 2020 and 2018 as evidence. “That has been the pattern in Ohio,” he said. “I am confident we will prevail because of people like those who are in this room.”Nathaniel Swigger, associate professor at the Ohio State University who studies public opinion, political psychology and campaigns, told The Straits Times that there was no particular reason to think the polls are wrong.

“Many Republicans will use the ‘Republicans don’t answer polls’ line to claim that they are always undercounted, but that’s not really true,” he said.

Response rates across all groups, including independents, are pretty bad and pollsters use weighted sample results to try and make up for that.

“If the polls are wrong – a big if – then they are just as likely to be wrong in ways that overrate voter support for Ramaswamy,” Swigger said.

“For example, social desirability bias may prevent voters from expressing true opinions if they think others will judge those views as racist or sexist.

“Maybe some people say they’ll vote for Acton because they don’t want to admit they would never vote for a woman.

“Or maybe some people say they’ll vote for Ramaswamy because they don’t want to admit they would never vote for an Indian-American or non-Christian candidate.

“Without controlled experiments to specifically test that, it’s hard to say what that bias might be ahead of an election,” he said.

The uncertainty is striking because Ohio’s recent political history has been stable. This has been ruby-red Republican for a decade, having voted for Trump, Trump and Trump again in the last three presidential elections after spurning Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Of its 88 counties, only six voted for the Democrats in 2024.

Ohio Republicans are trying to hold on to the control over all three branches of the state government they’ve had since 2011.

Of 15 congressmen that Ohio elected to the US House of Representatives, 10 are Republican. Both senators from Ohio are Republican as well. The last time a Democrat won the governor’s race in Ohio was in 2006.

Yet, most polls now paint Ohio as a volatile, purple territory. “Anything could happen” is the response I heard over and over as I travelled.

In Monroe County, county commissioner Mick Schumacher, describing a transformation of what was predominantly Democrat territory until it voted Trump the first time in 2016, said: “And then we broke a national record per capita for people that flip from D to R.” That flip has not erased practical concerns. Schumacher cautiously welcomed Ramaswamy’s promise to cut property taxes. “Now, I’m a county commissioner and we depend on that property tax to run the emergency services and county government. So I was not in favour of it until we know what there is that’s going to replace it,” he said.

He also said he had heard that the plan was to raise sales tax to make up the difference, but that could devastate a border town like Woodsfield.

“We border West Virginia; a lot of our people can shop there. So it will decimate the border towns. People in Columbus, maybe they won’t be affected,” Schumacher said.

For Jimmy Williams, a Monroe County Republican Party official, polls that showed Acton in the lead were a pressure tactic.

“The Democrats’ playbook is to talk and try to sound like they’re winning and trying to discourage the Republicans from getting out the vote. But they don’t realise, we’re energised,” he said. What do the candidates stand for?

Away from the campaign events, it was easier to find voters who are firmly opposed to Acton but still needed persuading about Ramaswamy, a Hindu in a state where over 60 per cent of the predominantly white population identify as Christian.

A florist’s assistant in Youngstown, a largely Democratic area, who asked not to be named for fear of hurting the shop’s business, said the Acton campaign is running limp, “kind of like Joe Biden’s campaign”.

“You don’t see her; you just see ads on TV. And if anybody wants to get close to her, she’s got bodyguards that don’t let you get near. She doesn’t answer questions. We don’t even really know what she’s for. She’s just there,” she said.

She was more tentative on Ramaswamy. “Vivek seems smart. I am going to give him a closer look,” she added.

An air force veteran expressed surprise that an Oct 12 Trump rally in Youngstown had pulled in a sizeable crowd.

“This area is very Democratic,” said Chad, who gave only his first name. “So if he got 70 per cent seats filled, he did well,” he said.

He regarded Trump’s defence of the controversial ad featuring Acton’s mother as “marginal”.

“Some things Trump does and says I don’t agree with, but I think he does what he thinks is right for the country. And at least I know where he stands. I’d rather have a politician do that than one that lies in my face, which is what we normally get,” he said.

It was an argument I’ve heard often: an approval of Trump despite reservations about his conduct.

Democrats believe that rising costs and unease about government corruption have cracked the door open.

At the Ohio Democratic Party’s headquarters in state capital Columbus – an inconspicuous building with no boards, banners or signs to mark it – spokeswoman Marisa Nahem maintained that Acton was ahead.

“Ohioans are excited about Dr Acton’s campaign because they know she’s the only candidate in this race who will tackle rising costs, stand up to the corporate special interests and billionaires trying to buy Ohio, and put working families first,” she said.

“We are seeing incredible energy among Ohioans, with raw Democratic vote totals in primaries higher in most counties when compared to 2022,” she said, adding that there was lower Republican primary participation and stronger Democrat early voting.

A promise to lower costs and tackle Republican corruption was a message that crossed party lines, she said.

“It is a mission that isn’t just popular, it’s unifying among Ohioans of all political backgrounds,” she added.

The quiet on the campaign trail For all the competing claims of loyalty and energy, the race’s intensity was not always apparent on the streets: Along the routes I visited, few yard signs advertised a contest that polling showed was closely fought.

There were the occasional posters for local judges or sheriffs or other county officials. Officials from both parties claimed that the fear of intimidation from the other side had discouraged yard signs this cycle.

When I said I saw only a few Ramaswamy signs and more of Acton’s, Williams in Monroe County brushed it off.

“Was that Acton sign just setting out along the road? When I’m driving around, it doesn’t bother me if they’re along the road. It bothers me if they’re in someone’s truck, but I don’t see that,” he said.

Gathering hard data on yard signs is problematic so it’s hard to say for sure, said Swigger, who teaches at Ohio State University. But he, too, had noticed fewer in his neighbourhood. “My guess is that it is a combination of conflict avoidance and exhaustion,” he said.

“It’s no secret that American politics, and Ohio politics, has become angrier and many people are probably reluctant to put up signs or put bumper stickers on their cars because they are avoiding a touchy subject.”But that itself had a message, he said.

“I think the lack of yard signs can be taken as a sign that many, many voters are dissatisfied with the US political system,” he said.

That leaves Ohio with a contest where the currents are hard to read. Is it hidden Republican strength or Democratic opportunity? Trump’s name will not be on the ballot but this is still his race.