With less than four weeks until Election Day, the race between GOP incumbent Sen. Jon Husted and Democrat former Sen. Sherrod Brown is still among the ones likely to determine who holds the majority in the U.S. Senate.
And the GOP is flooding its resources in Ohio, even more so in these final weeks.
At the end of last month, the candidates and various outside committees had already dumped $250 million to air ads around the state. Another $140 million had been reserved for the last 34 days of the race, according to data analysis firm AdImpact. That data shows Republicans outspending Democrats, generally.
By Monday, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance will have come to Ohio three times total for rallies. But Husted said Thursday he felt “great.”
“Honestly, we have been traveling the state, and you can just feel the energy change over the last month,” he said.
Thursday morning, at his first of three scheduled events, he was in southern Delaware County to greet canvassers getting ready to knock doors for him. Among them was Donovan O’Neil, the senior adviser for Americans for Prosperity Action, which is funded by a network of conservative donors nationally.
O’Neil said Americans for Prosperity Action and affiliates have knocked more than 700,000 doors for Husted—working at times to assuage voters’ concerns about the state of the country.
“We didn’t get into this problem overnight, we’re not going to get out of it overnight,” O’Neil said as he knocked on a door in a Powell neighborhood. “If we didn’t like where we were two years ago, why bring the guy back who was there?”
As some Ohioans sour on Trump, Brown may carry less baggage. The Statehouse News Bureau asked him about the president and vice president’s visits on Tuesday.
“It’s not going to work because Husted’s been on the wrong side,” Brown said. “He was a special interest guy in Columbus, looking out for FirstEnergy, looking out for the drug companies. Now, he’s a special interest guy in Washington, where he’s looking out for the data centers, looking out for Wall Street.”
And Brown has zigzagged the state, too. After voting early at the Franklin County Board of Elections, his schedule this last week included near-daily meet and greets this week from northeast Ohio to Zanesville and elsewhere.
As of Friday, more than 120,000 voters have already cast their ballot, according to data from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office.
