Will the GOP’s Big Money Save Jon Husted in Ohio?

The very bad news for the GOP: Donald Trump’s record unpopularity means its once-presumed lock on the US Senate continues to look more and more tenuous. Only recently, Big Money groups have begun pulling cash away from Trump favorites like Michael Whatley, running against Democrat Roy Cooper in North Carolina, and Representative Mike Collins, trying to bring down incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia. In the past week, Senate Republicans halted spending in Georgia—and so did Senate Democrats, a sign of Ossoff’s strength.

But where there are losers in politics, there are winners, and a big one in this Senate cycle is Ohio Senator Jon Husted, whose Democratic opponent, former senator Sherrod Brown, is now up against a tsunami of Republican, corporate and crypto funding, as the big spenders pull cash away from other Republicans. Politico reported last week that “MAGA, Inc.” was shifting funds from struggling Senate candidates to Husted. In October, the GOP Senate Leadership Fund has shifted almost $12 million to Ohio, virtually the identical to the sum they’ve taken out of North Carolina.

The Ohio Senate special election—Husted was appointed to replace Vice President JD Vance—is now the second-costliest in the country, as spending recently hit more than $466 million, according to AdImpact, right behind gargantuan Texas, where the race between insurgent Representative James Talarico and scandal-dogged Attorney General Ken Paxton has cost more than $520 million. But despite the influx of Republican cash, Brown is nevertheless leading Husted in most polls. Obscene spending was enough to bring down the populist Senate veteran in 2024, and it could conceivably do so again. Still, even if the money seems overwhelming enough to topple Brown, it might not be sufficient to boost Husted. He is an uncommonly bad politician who only seems to be getting worse.

Just a brief recap: Husted cast the deciding vote for the so-called big beautiful bill, which gave tax breaks to the wealthiest while stripping healthcare and other social services from working-class and poor Ohioans. He’s voted 14 times for the Iran War. He has taken more campaign donations from the late Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators than any other member of Congress. For his support for bringing data centers to the state, the editor of Cleveland.com has called him “a data center’s best friend,” and he’s been caught up in a local utility scandal. A leaked National Republican Senate Committee memo concluded that data centers are “the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.” On Thursday, the Columbus Dispatch proclaimed that the incumbent had “failed Ohioans” and endorsed Brown instead.

But none of that has stopped big GOP money. Nor has it thwarted Trump, who traveled to Youngstown, Ohio, last week for a campaign stop that likely hurt Husted while giving the rest of us a lot to laugh about. The increasingly demented-seeming president crowed about Husted’s physique—he’s a former college football player—going so far as to praise his “ass,” along with his hands, which he described as “claws.”

“Look at the jawline, I’m telling you,” Trump went on. “I never saw that. I never studied him. I now study him. I say, why was he such a good footballer? Look at that jawline.”

But Husted hasn’t left Trump alone on the hustings when it comes to embarrassing comments. Earlier this year, the right-wing Ohio senator insulted parts of his base, insisting that “people in poverty just aren’t very experienced at navigating the real world” and that reliance on programs like SNAP meant they didn’t “understand money.” The multimillionaire senator also asserted that struggling Ohioans needed to “fix” their “work ethic.”

To fight public perception about his position on data centers, Husted sponsored a fairly toothless “Ratepayer Protection Act,” which would have required states to “consider” developing frameworks to regulate rising utility rates. It passed the House, but fell in the Senate last month, blocked by Democrats. “Let me be clear, this is nothing more than a messaging bill on the eve of an election,” New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich told reporters.

On Monday, just a week after it charted the GOP’s big resource shift to Husted, the Politico Playbook quoted multiple GOP consultants trashing the Ohio senator. A national GOP strategist who worked with the senator said, “Jon Husted looks like a quarterback, he talks like a quarterback, but he acts like a waterboy,”

Still, the cash keeps pouring in. The crypto super PAC Defend American Jobs promised last month to spend $30 million to beat Brown, the crypto-critical former Senate banking chair. But that’s now up to $45 million. This month, the Senate Leadership Fund hiked its spending on Husted to $93 million. Elon Musk has spent at least $7 million to boost the incumbent. And a Trump-aligned super PAC is reportedly behind glossy ads boosting Ohio socialist Senate candidate Greg Levy as a way to siphon votes from Brown. (Even Levy has questioned the spending.) Brown says he’s not surprised at any of it, telling Morning Joe that Husted’s “been looking out for his billionaire friends.”

But even as they continued to shift money to Husted, Republicans couldn’t help continuing to talk him down. “When the story is written on this campaign cycle, Sherrod Brown will have run the best race in the country,” one MAGA-affiliated consultant told Politico. “Jon Husted may have run the worst campaign in the country.” Can big money beat the best Ohio candidate? “We’re winning, and we’re gonna win,” Brown told Morning Joe. We’ll find out in two weeks.