Top Survey Shows Vivek Ramaswamy and Jon Husted Face Steep Climbs

In a tough election year in which the President is struggling along with the economy, likeability matters far more than which letter is next to your name. The latter may actually hurt you big time.

In April, Bowling Green State University conducted of survey of 1,000 registered voters on Ohio politics, which matched the +11 margin of victory that Donald Trump achieved over Kamala Harris in 2024. That makes the survey a very insightful one for us six months out from Election Day 2026. When it came out, most of the focus was on the topline results in both the governor’s race between Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and Democrat Amy Acton and the U.S. Senate race between Republican Jon Husted and Democrat Sherrod Brown. In those races, Ramaswamy was up one point (49% to 48%) and Husted was up three points (50% to 47%). As a broad brushstroke, those numbers indicate that both Republicans are grossly underperforming Trump’s 2024 result.

In the video below (behind the paywall so if you want my insights, you’ll have to get access by subscribing, donating, or reading), I dig into the two questions that I think give greater insight to the state of each race, especially looking six months out. The first one focuses on the governor’s race. That question, I believe, indicates more dark clouds over Ramaswamy’s odds of winning. The second question covers both races, with several key findings that aren’t good for Republicans.

Before I get to my thoughts on the survey, I wanted to let you know we’ve added a new chart to our monthly Medicaid one-pager. The chart shows the monthly enrollment and costs of John Kasich’s Medicaid expansion under Obamacare that has been the hot topic in the news due to fraud/fleecing in the Somali community in Ohio. As you can see, over 700,000 Ohioans are on Medicaid who shouldn’t be (i.e., earn more than the poverty rate), with those enrollees consuming $766 million per month in costs. As you also can see from a chart we added several years ago, the Medicaid population in Ohio is nearly 60% the size of Ohio’s entire private sector, so that means for every 1.68 workers paying into the system, one Medicaid recipient takes out of the system. Without the Medicaid expansion group, that figure would rise to less than two or more workers paying in for every Medicaid recipient taking out, which would be a far healthier ratio.