OH-Sen 2022: So you’re telling me there’s a chance

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I've always liked Mandel (and his 2012 Senate campaign was the first one I ever volunteered for), so he tentatively has my vote, in spite of my generally anti-Trump valence.

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https://twitter.com/HenryJGomez/status/1408524901745631232

I'm sure his "you people are all lazy welfare queens who need to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps like me" is going to be a winning message in rural Ohio lol

To be entirely fair to J.D. Vance, this is a message which has been very successful in rural Ohio in the very recent past.

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Graham Allen dropping out of his South Carolina House race the other day meant that Trump had decided on Russell Fry to receive his endorsement, so this probably means that Trump has picked someone in the field. Hopefully not Vance; Timken or Mandel would be fine. Hard to imagine that it would be Gibbons or Dolan.

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This is so dumb

I really dislike Vance's campaign (at this point, I'm probably Gibbons > Dolan > Timken > Mandel > Ryan > Vance), but he has a point here. Certain states really are bizarrely slow in counting the votes, even compared to many quite poor countries.

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Vance should win the general, but it probably won’t be by much more than Trump's margin even in a R wave. My early prediction is 53-44 or so, a very underwhelming result in a year like this. I also think he would have been in real danger of losing the seat in a D-leaning (and potentially even neutral) year.

What makes you think he's a weak candidate? He seems like a fairly strong candidate to me.

A pretty large number of campaign missteps, having a platform decently far from a Generic R platform, being held to under a third of the vote in spite of having Trump's endorsement.