A rare red line in deeply cynical times

There’s a campaign moment I can’t stop thinking about. It happened shortly after the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, released a shocking attack ad featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.In the ad, as many readers will know by now, Acton’s mother accuses her daughter of lying and tells Ohioans not to vote for her. Acton, 60, says she has not spoken to her mother since she was 12, when she and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody after their stepfather was arrested and charged with raping her. Acton says she last saw her mother at the courthouse, where her mother came to support her husband as her daughter testified against him.The moment that captured my attention took place at a campaign event on a farm in Wharton, Ohio, and it was much less newsy. Acton was speaking to a group of supporters and a woman asked: “Can I give you a hug?”“Of course you can,” the candidate replied, walking over and allowing herself to be embraced. After watching the ad, the woman told Acton: “All I wanted to do was cry and hug you and tell you it’ll be OK.”It was a small moment of humanity in what has otherwise been a particularly vicious campaign season, even by the standards of the Trump era. After weeks of wondering ‘how much lower can they go’, particularly on the right, Ramaswamy pulled out a shovel and dug deeper.Campaign signs outside the Lake county board of elections in Painesville, Ohio, on Monday. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/ReutersIn Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate, has faced a barrage of ads attacking his religion (he is Muslim) and claiming, baselessly, that he has ties to Islamic terrorist organizations. As Donald Trump barnstorms the country trying to salvage Republicans’ majorities in Congress, he has hurled Islamophobic invectives at El-Sayed.In Texas, the Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton and his allies have pumped out controversial ads – many of them AI-generated – that attack his opponent James Talarico as effeminate and misstate his position on transgender rights. JD Vance doubled down on that line of attack, baselessly musing that Talarico was gay.Perhaps unsurprisingly, both Trump and Vance have defended Ramaswamy’s ad. “Stop whining,” the vice-president told Republicans who had called for the ad to come down. Ramaswamy, a billionaire entrepreneur who has embraced the president’s never-back-down, politics-as-blood-sport ethos, was defiant.Many Republicans, including the state’s outgoing governor, Mike DeWine, have condemned the ad alongside Acton. “It’s wrong to run this ad,” said DeWine, who has endorsed Ramaswamy. On Thursday, amid mounting pressure and polling that found the ad backfiring, Ramaswamy said that his campaign had discontinued it.Politics has never been for the faint of heart. Attack ads have long been a tool of political combat. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign pulled the so-called “Daisy” ad from TV amid fierce public criticism over its suggestion that the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, would wage nuclear war if elected.The “Daisy” ad seems almost quaint now, from the vantage point of 2026, a year in which the US president threatened to “annihilate” Iran in a speech before the United Nations general assembly.Trump has crossed so many red lines since he emerged as a presidential candidate in 2015 – gleefully breaking political, legal and constitutional norms – that it can be hard to tell what the rules of engagement are anymore. He has mocked world leaders, flattered dictators, disparaged political opponents as the “enemy within”, encouraged violence against protesters, called a female journalist “piggy,” declared that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, and on and on.So it took me by surprise that the Ramaswamy ad was met with such strong bipartisan condemnation – the rare red line in deeply cynical times.The ruthless ad aired in Ohio, a one-time presidential battleground that has shifted toward Republicans in recent election cycles but is home this year to several competitive races. Will the ad have a blast radius that hurts other Republicans in the state, like Jon Husted, the incumbent Ohio senator whose posterior Trump can’t stop raving about?Amy Acton making a campaign stop in Youngstown, Ohio. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/ReutersActon must have known when she decided to run that the campaign would be ugly. She first rose to prominence in early 2020 as the director of the Ohio department of health. She became an early face of the pandemic response and, in the beginning, was roundly praised for her clearly communicated daily briefings, inspiring bobblehead dolls and little girls’ Halloween costumes. But as backlash brewed against the state’s lockdown measures, she also became a high-profile target of armed protests outside her home, antisemitic slurs (Acton is Jewish) and misinformation campaigns.At a campaign event earlier this fall, an armed man was arrested after lunging at Acton as she spoke at a county fair. She was not injured, and Acton, a physician, stayed on site to treat one of the onlookers injured in the episode.For many disgusted voters in Ohio, the choice on Tuesday is now between a woman who at 12 took the stand in court to testify against her mother’s husband – the man charged with raping her, while her mother stood by his side – and a man who allowed that dark story to be twisted into a political attack ad.Maybe after Tuesday, it’s Ramaswamy who will need consoling.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeet the candidate: Adam HamiltonAdam Hamilton at a campaign rally in Emporia, Kansas, this week. Photograph: Mark Reinstein/ShutterstockKansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the US Senate in nearly 100 years. Adam Hamilton is running to change that.Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor, is challenging the Republican incumbent, Senator Roger Marshall, who was elected in 2020.My colleague, Rachel Leingang, was recently in the unexpected battleground state to catch Hamilton on the campaign trail.Hamilton, a former Republican who had considered running as an independent, regularly points to one of his state’s most famous residents: Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Recalling a visit he made to Liberal, Kansas, and its Oz museum, he asks the audience to recall what Dorothy’s companions on her journey need. The lion needed courage, the scarecrow a brain and the tin man a heart.Washington needs more of all three, he likes to say, and he can deliver it.Read more: Kansas Democrat’s pitch to voters amid historic Senate bid: ‘I’m gonna just fight like hell’📣 Quoted double quotation markWe’re watching a bit of a political revolution play out in slow motion. – Stan Barnes, a political consultant and former Republican state senator in Arizona, referring to his party’s eroding support in the suburbs around Maricopa county, which has powered a slate of Democratic victories in the years since Trump was first elected to the White HouseThis year, Arizona Democrats believe they can finally flip congressional district 1, where Democrat Amish Shah – an emergency room doctor who narrowly lost the seat in 2024 – and Republican Jay Feely – a former National Football League kicker backed by Donald Trump – are battling for the House seat left open by Republican congressman David Schweikert.Read more: ‘A revolution in slow motion’: is Arizona’s wealthiest district finally done with Trump?