Amy Acton wins Ohio governor’s race after Vivek Ramaswamy’s vile attack ad

A Democrat hasn’t won the Ohio governorship since 2006.

Democratic candidate Amy Acton is projected to win the race for Ohio governor.

The finish marks a surprising turn of fortune for Democrats in the state, where a Democratic candidate hasn’t won the governorship since 2006.

Acton, the state’s former health director, was up against the Trump-backed Vivek Ramaswamy, a 41-year-old biotech billionaire who has never held public office.

Ramaswamy rose to political prominence with a 2024 presidential campaign and a short-lived tenure leading the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk.

Ramaswamy leaned on his personal wealth to heavily outspend Acton, loaning himself more than $36 million for the effort.

Including outside spending, Acton’s campaign and other groups together spent $30 million on Democratic ads by late October, according to data tracked by Cleveland.com, compared with $97.3 million spent on TV and radio ads by Ramaswamy and outside groups.

In the closing weeks of the general election, Ramaswamy ran an ugly attack ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calling her a “liar.”

The ad neglected to mention that Arthur lost custody of her children after their stepfather was indicted for sexually abusing Acton from the ages of 9 to 12. Arthur proceeded to abandon her children to live with the man as a fugitive until he died in 2004.

Ramaswamy didn’t initially take credit for the ad, which first appeared on social media and didn’t include a legally required disclaimer about who had paid for it.

Amid bipartisan backlash, Ramaswamy’s campaign took responsibility for the controversial spot, then doubled down and said it would spend $4 million promoting it.

Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who’d endorsed Ramaswamy, called the 60-second ad “deeply, deeply troubling” and urged the campaign to take it down.

“It’s wrong to run this ad,” he said.

Casey Putsch, one of Ramaswamy’s opponents in the GOP primary, also called the ad “pretty damn low” and said he’d be crossing party lines to vote for Acton.

On the trail, Ramaswamy also attacked Acton for overcoming severe hardship as a child, telling voters they should elect someone with “a positive vision for our state versus a governor who has none at all other than to complain about what someone else did to her.”