Ohio GOP Senate primary poll: Vance slipping, Timken rising

In a chaotic Ohio GOP Senate primary race mainly seen nationally as a race to the right, a new internal campaign poll indicates that candidate J.D. Vance’s standing is rapidly deteriorating while opponent Jane Timken is finding her footing.

The poll, released by Timken’s campaign and conducted by Moore Information Group, shows the former Ohio GOP chairwoman is now in second place in the primary. Timken gained six percentage points between September and November, going from 11% to 17% in a full-field horserace. No other candidate on the ballot had a change over two percentage points, either positively or negatively.

The poll also shows Timken’s “name ID” rated 29% favorably and 12% unfavorably in the month of November, a massive positive shift from 19% favorable and 11% unfavorable in September. In the same time frame, however, author and venture capitalist Vance went from 20% favorable and 12% unfavorable to 22% favorable and 26% unfavorable.

Timken announced the poll results yesterday on “Steve Bannon’s War Room” on Real America’s Voice.

“I’ve really increased in the past month in Ohio, and that’s because Ohio voters have been waking up and looking at this primary and saying, ‘Who’s the real MAGA candidate?’” Timken said on Bannon’s show. “I win because I’m the real MAGA candidate. Where were J.D. Vance and Josh Mandel in the 2020 election?”

Timken already has an audience with Trump; she was handpicked by Trump as the state’s GOP chair, and it ultimately led to him winning the famously contested state in 2020 by eight percentage points. However, diehard MAGA voters criticized her in the past for originally defending Republican Rep. Anthony Gonzalez for voting to impeach Trump in January.

But Vance is currently dealing with much harsher criticism from the far-right voters he’s trying to court. Much of the anger stems from the “Never Trump” stance he took in 2016. He continues to say his previous statements were a mistake and continues to find opportunities to court the far right, including recently on Newsmax where he proclaimed Kyle Rittenhouse showed “basic manly virtue” when he shot three people at a protest in Kenosha, Wis. in 2020, killing two.

Still, as Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reported yesterday, the attacks on Vance’s supposed lack of loyalty to Trump from opposing PACs have gotten so bad that the former president himself intervened for those PACs to stop, as he thinks broadcasting Vance’s old comments may hurt his 2024 chances.

Mandel, the former Ohio treasurer, leads the primary field Moore Information Group poll with 21% of the vote. He is the loudest in the Ohio primary field in denying the results of the 2020 election, saying “…Democrats cheat to win elections” in a recent forum.

This article has been edited for clarity.