Does Matt Dolan Have a Shot in the Ohio GOP Senate Race?

The most likely outcome in Ohio next Tuesday is a gubernatorial primary win for DeWine and a Senate primary win for Vance, who, according to Trump’s endorsement, “has been a warrior on the Rigged and Stolen Presidential Election.”

The likely split decision in Ohio may be explained by something as unexciting as name I.D.: DeWine has been a fixture of GOP politics for decades, serving in the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, Ohio attorney generalship, and Ohio governorship. In the Senate race, by contrast, the only candidate with a statewide profile before 2022 is Josh Mandel (who held a relatively obscure office as state treasurer).

A split decision, of course, isn’t the only possible outcome. If primary voters consolidated behind one of DeWine’s two challengers, DeWine could lose. And if three out of four of DeWine voters backed Matt Dolan, the only Republican who hasn’t embraced Trump’s stolen-election narrative, then Dolan would win.

While the outcome remains unlikely, I spoke to Dolan on Tuesday about his bid to pull off such a stunning upset.

“The undecided voter is still the winner,” Dolan said of the polls when asked about the view that the Senate primary is a two-man race between Vance and Mandel.

Dolan has campaigned as the only candidate who wants to move beyond Trump. When I asked him what it really means to move beyond Trump, he said: “We’ve got to focus on the crisis that the Biden administration has caused in our country, and the direction they’re taking our country, which is extremely scary. We’ve got to return to being constitutional conservatives.”

“The Trump policies are fine,” he added. “The Trump-Republican policies are what we have to be focusing on, not anything else.” Dolan has said he’d vote for Trump if he’s the 2024 nominee, and he committed to backing any Republican nominee in the Senate race against Democrat Tim Ryan.

Dolan got into the race late (in September), and while he has been steadily gaining in both Fox News and Trafalgar polls, Jane Timken, the Ohio state GOP chair who has been trying to straddle the MAGA-mainstream divide, has been slipping. “What does Jane Timken stand for? She has yet to find a message. You call it straddling. I call it searching for a message,” Dolan told me.

Dolan also knocked Mike Gibbons for suggesting that the middle class should pay more in taxes; hit Mandel for “putting his finger in the air” in his various campaigns; and called Vance’s Ukraine comments “a slap in the face to the Ukrainian Ohioans. It’s also a statement that Putin and Chairman Xi in China must love, that we don’t care anymore when dictators invade a sovereign nation.”

Dolan’s family owns the Cleveland Guardians (the Major League Baseball team formerly known as the Indians), and both Vance and Trump have gone after Dolan for the name change.

“I come from a big family, and my family made a decision and I’m going to stand by my family’s decision,” Dolan told me, adding that it has nothing to do with important issues like inflation, the border, or drugs.

Later in the day on Tuesday, Trump issued a statement hitting Dolan on the matter:

Anybody who changes the name of the “storied” Cleveland Indians (from 1916), an original baseball franchise, to the Cleveland Guardians, is not fit to serve in the United States Senate. Such is the case for Matt Dolan, who I don’t know, have never met, and may be a very nice guy, but the team will always remain the Cleveland Indians to me!

Was Trump’s decision to attack Dolan on Tuesday evening a sign that Dolan might actually have a chance of pulling off an upset? Before Trump issued his broadside, a Democratic pollster released polling that showed a four-way race in the Ohio GOP Senate primary, with Dolan one point ahead of Vance:

Blueprint Polling is the polling arm of Chism Strategies, a Democratic firm based in Texas. “It’s really a four-way race at this point,” says Brannon Miller of Chism Strategies. “Any of the top four candidates — Gibbons, Vance, Dolan, and Mandel — any of the four could win.”

Miller says the firm isn’t working on behalf of any candidate in Ohio and simply polled the race to “test our mettle.”

“I sort of expected that Vance would have surged following the Trump endorsement,” Miller said. He also thinks it is possible that Dolan could be closer to a ceiling because undecided voters skew conservative. “Dolan is drawing half of his support from self-described moderates, who make up less than a quarter of the Republican primary electorate.” says Miller. “He’s got a slight lead among those who say they’re somewhat conservative.” The Blueprint poll found that among the third of the GOP electorate that are undecided, 40 percent describe themselves as very conservative, 36 percent as somewhat conservative, 18 percent as moderates, and 5 percent as liberals.

Dolan’s backing among moderates likely has more to do with his disposition toward Trump than any particular policy issue. Prior to the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Dolan did vote against a “heartbeat bill” to ban most abortions on the grounds that it would be struck down in federal court, but that’s a tactical dispute that has divided pro-life groups in Ohio over the years. Dolan said in a 2020 state senate debate: “I’m pro-life, so if Roe v. Wade got turned to the states, I would vote to ban abortion with the exception of rape and incest.”

Another inkling of increased support for Dolan: Google search trends in Ohio show that Dolan has overtaken Gibbons, Timken, and Mandel but is still generating less interest than Vance. Too little, too late? Probably. But crazier things have happened in politics. And DeWine’s likely victory would prove, even if Dolan loses, that Dolan’s theory of the race wasn’t crazy at all.