Why Matt Dolan Is Surging in Ohio’s GOP Senate Primary

T wo polls conducted since Thursday show Republican state senator Matt Dolan surging into serious contention to win the race to become the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio.

An Emerson poll released Sunday showed J. D. Vance at 26 percent, Josh Mandel at 24 percent, and Dolan at 21 percent, while a Trafalgar poll released Monday found Vance at 26 percent, Dolan at 22 percent, and Mandel at 21 percent.

The Trafalgar results were especially surprising, because they showed a ten-point jump for Dolan and only a three-point jump for Vance since right before Donald Trump endorsed Vance on April 15, when Trafalgar last polled the race. (They also showed Mandel falling seven points over the same period.)

“Saturday and Sunday, there was a big Dolan surge,” says Robert Cahaly, the pollster who runs Trafalgar. “The snapshot of Sunday doesn’t look anything like the snapshot of Friday. . . . Vance has always been first, but Vance’s lead shrunk and second place switched hands” between Mandel and Dolan. “It wasn’t that Vance was going down. It was just that undecideds were breaking [to Dolan] and making the gap tighter.”

Another positive sign for Dolan in the Trafalgar poll: Among the 9 percent of likely voters in the primary who were still undecided, a solid majority are backing incumbent governor Mike DeWine, a traditional Republican with a profile similar to Dolan’s, in the gubernatorial race: According to Cahaly, in the Senate primary DeWine voters break 33 percent for Dolan, 21 percent for Vance, and 18 percent for Mandel. (Trafalgar finds DeWine at 47 percent in his own primary race, 20 points ahead of his nearest challenger.)

Vance, of course, remains the front-runner in the Senate race, and it’s entirely possible that Emerson and Trafalgar could be understating his support. But Dolan’s late surge is the most surprising development of the campaign thus far.

What explains it? Several factors are in play.

The four other candidates in the race obsessively campaigned for Trump’s endorsement, and beat one another up in the process, leaving Dolan unscathed in the TV-ad wars. All five candidates are well-funded, including Dolan, who has spent $10 million of his own money on the race. But the Dolan surge has occurred so late that the other campaigns won’t have the time to book anti-Dolan ads.

Jane Timken, the former Ohio GOP chair, has for most of the race been the candidate trying to straddle the divide between Trumpist Republicans and traditional Republicans. But even with retiring GOP senator Rob Portman’s endorsement, Timken’s campaign has collapsed over the last several weeks, and that has benefitted Dolan. “Timken has been dark on broadcast television and cable for weeks in several markets, and has been completely off broadcast statewide the past week, running only $15,000 worth of cable ads,” Politico reported last week.

NBC News reported on Monday that one prominent Ohio Republican who had previously raised money for Timken has now switched his support to Dolan:

Dolan is the only candidate in the race who has earned Trump’s ire: He’s criticized Trump for “perpetuat[ing] lies about the outcome” of the 2020 election and for his role in instigating the Capitol riot, while the other four candidates have embraced the former president’s stolen-election narrative. But Dolan has smartly run more as a candidate who wants to move on from Trump than as an anti-Trump candidate. “The Trump policies are fine,” Dolan told National Review last week. “The Trump-Republican policies are what we have to be focusing on, not anything else.” Dolan has pledged to vote for Trump if he is the 2024 nominee, and he has committed to backing whichever Republican nominee emerges from the Senate primary to face Democrat Tim Ryan in the general election.

For most of the campaign, Vance has steered clear of attacking Dolan, focusing his fire on Mandel, among others who’ve long seemed bigger threats to win the race. But after the new polls were released, Vance sprung into action on Monday:

Close polls or not, it would still be a shock to the political world if Dolan actually pulled off a win on Tuesday. Though Trump may not be a miracle worker, most observers thought he would at least be able to put Vance over the top in a fractious five-way race between candidates without widespread name recognition. But Dolan’s late surge is certainly testing that conventional wisdom — and could very well upend it come Tuesday night, when the primary votes are counted and the results are released.