No Matter What Mike DeWine Says, He Just Made It Crystal Clear He Wants Vivek Ramaswamy to Lose in 2026

If DeWine was going to sand bag Ramaswamy and proclaim the “buck stopped with me,” the least he could have done is tell Ohioans he was sorry for getting things so wrong, which he has never done.

I’ve never been a fan of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Ever since his role in the “Gang of Fourteen” in the U.S. Senate that undermined my old boss George W. Bush’s ability to appoint true conservatives to the judiciary by preserving the filibuster that Democrats were using to thwart Bush in 2005, I’ve seen DeWine for the moderate squish that he is. Sure, he throws out red meat on abortion and guns like every Republican in Ohio, but, at his core, he is milquetoast moderation. Because of DeWine and his ilk, here we are today still living under the filibuster that Democrats are AGAIN using to stop any and all action by Donald Trump to make America great again. We’ve all had to swallow a bitter pill on DeWine over the years by voting for him in his political runs because his moderation was still better than a left-wing progressive holding the reins of power. Yet, when I had better choices (Joe Blystone in the 2022 Republican primary) or when my vote didn’t matter, I undervoted in DeWine races.

I will admit there were moments when I wanted to throttle Ohio Republican Party chairpersons, Republican county chairs, and large Republican donors who cheered and supported DeWine no matter what he did (i.e., record state spending, shut down Ohio severely during the pandemic, etc.) or didn’t do (eliminate the state income tax, pass right-to-work, repeal John Kasich’s Medicaid expansion, etc.). How many Lincoln Day Dinners did DeWine keynote over the years where attendees sucked up to him despite his garbage record? How many times did the Dicke, Mathile, Farmer, and Castellini families max out donations to DeWine that only kept Ohio chained to his do-nothing agenda? Not even DeWine’s opposition to Trump stopped Republican county chairs from inviting him to speak or large donors from writing those big check. DeWine’s moderate incrementalism agenda may not have harmed the big wigs, but millions of Ohioans have suffered because DeWine and his ilk kept failing to do the tough stuff needed to truly reinvigorate Ohio.

And what did all of those keynote addresses and big checks get? An Ohio that remains at the back of the pack on virtually every measure. An Ohio that has legalized gambling, marijuana, and unlimited abortion. Based on the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, since DeWine became governor (and Jon Husted his Lieutenant Governor), Ohio has netted just 133,600 private sector jobs, or a paltry 19,086 jobs per year TOTAL, in a state with nearly twelve million people. You can keep your head buried in the sand, or you can read this column, “National Conservatives Pretend Supermajority Republican Red Ohio Doesn’t Look Like a Democrat-Led Blue State”, where I detailed on issue-after-issue just how bad Ohio is doing compared to other states. Read the six columns linked in that piece. Please tell me where I am wrong. Please tell me why you as a Republican county chair, ORP chair, or large Republican donor supported these piss poor results—results attained despite having a supermajority Republican legislature. In no other area of your life would you tolerate and support such weakness. Why in your politics?

Setting aside this rant, let me present DeWine to you unedited as he cuts the legs from underneath Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2026 gubernatorial campaign by issuing a blanket amnesty to Democrat Amy “Shut Down Ohio” Acton on whose terrible advice DeWine and Husted closed our businesses, schools, religious institutions, and sports; prevented loved ones from holding the hands of dying family members or comfort each other at funerals; and caused untold psychological harm to our kids.

In another part of the interview, DeWine notes he hasn’t endorsed Ramaswamy yet as they need to have more policy discussions. Seriously? In what world are Ramaswamy’s right-leaning policies not inexplicably better than Acton’s left-leaning policies? In one interview, DeWine just undercut the single best attack line on Acton. DeWine knew exactly what he was doing. Because she hasn’t held elected office, Acton doesn’t have a record to attack. Incidentally, DeWine’s defense of Acton also serves as his effort to insulate Husted who shut down Ohio along with DeWine and Acton.

If DeWine was going to sand bag Ramaswamy and proclaim the “buck stopped with me,” the least he could have done is tell Ohioans he was sorry for getting things so wrong, which he has never done. And, hey Colleen Marshall, the only people praising DeWine, Husted, and Acton for their pandemic shutdown actions were progressive left politicians and their media allies. Conservatives were praising Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for standing astride the leftist mob in support of the Free State of Florida. That is why the masses fled the Blue states during the pandemic for Florida and Texas. They didn’t flee to DeWine’s Ohio, which lost citizens to Florida during the pandemic.

The bottom line is DeWine despises Trump like all Establishment Republicans do (including Husted). He does as little as he has to do to pretend he supports Trump, but we aren’t dumb. Ramaswamy is a mini-Trump who DeWine doesn’t like either. Beyond being like Trump, Ramaswamy and his money got in the way of Husted running for governor in 2026 to replace DeWine and carry on the incrementalism of DeWine-Husted-Jim Tressel. Don’t think for a minute that DeWine wouldn’t mind an Acton win in 2026 so Husted can run against her in 2030. Given the current polls, Husted may be unemployed by January 2027, so time will tell.

Let me end by making one last point. I don’t know about you, but I am so tired of Trump endorsing opportunistic candidates who clearly don’t support his agenda and who quietly work against him. He endorsed DeWine. He endorsed Husted. He endorsed Majories Taylor Greene. Trump can’t be surprised that his agenda is stalled when he helped put in place too many politicians who don’t really support his agenda. They are just bidding their time until he is term limited and heads to Florida permanently so they can go back to how things were.

This political cartoon sums up exactly how I and many on the Right feel.

P.S. Once again, folks, I have been proved right. Back on November 24, I raised the strong likelihood that the Somali fraud happening in Minnesota was also happening in Ohio. Eighteen days later, a whistleblower in Ohio has come forward claiming that to be the case.

P.P.S. A quick word on Marjorie Taylor Greene who I was nearly alone in castigating from the get go. She is acting like a fifteen-year-old high schooler who got dumped by the captain of the football team, so is getting together with his arch enemy “to show him.” Nothing she does surprises me given what was publicly available about her before she got elected to Congress. At some point, the Right must stop getting lured by clickbait snippets from hearings and start keeping fringey and cringey politicians on the back bench.

P.P.S.S. This headline—“Black families to feel brunt of cuts”—is exactly why you shouldn’t trust the media and should never assume they are as a group very bright. Let’s do the math. If there are 100 people on SNAP and 25% are black, that would mean twenty-five blacks are on SNAP. If 35.4% of the people on SNAP are white, that would mean thirty-five whites are on SNAP. Last I checked, 35>25, so how can blacks be dealt the “brunt” of SNAP cuts if, be definition, “brunt” means according to Merriam-Webster “the greater part?” The headline was written either to inflame blacks against Trump or because the writer is just dumb. You see the same bad math used when discussing America’s poor in which factually there are more poor whites than any other group. The sooner we excise race from our political discourse, the better we all will be.