One Donor, Thirty Million Dollars, and the Ohio Race Nobody Is Covering Correctly
There is a number in the Ohio governor's race that should be getting more attention than it is.
Jeffrey Yass, a Pennsylvania financier, has now given at least $30 million to V-PAC: Victors not Victims, the federal super PAC supporting Vivek Ramaswamy. Amy Acton has reported raising $21.8 million for her entire campaign, from every donor she has, combined.
One person has out-given an entire statewide campaign operation.
I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean, because the easy version of this story is the wrong one.
It does not mean anything illegal happened. V-PAC is a federal super PAC. It can raise and spend without limit. Acton's campaign committee is bound by Ohio's contribution caps. The asymmetry is the system working exactly as designed after Citizens United, and every serious person in politics knows it.
It also does not mean one side has outside money and the other does not. The Democratic Governors Association is spending $9.4 million in Ohio starting after Labor Day. National money flows both directions.
What it means is scale and timing. Ramaswamy and his allies have spent or reserved $82.3 million on television and digital advertising this year. Expected pro-Acton spending is $11.1 million. That is roughly seven to one, and the Ramaswamy advertising has been running all year while most of the pro-Acton advertising has not started yet.
For most of 2026, Ohio voters have been hearing one description of Amy Acton roughly seven times for every time they have heard another. Her unfavorable rating went from 37 percent in June to 47 percent in August in the same Fox News poll. Her favorable number barely moved. Ramaswamy's image was essentially unchanged over the same period.
That is what $82 million buys. Not a lie, necessarily. Just volume.
And here is the part that makes this genuinely interesting rather than just depressing: it has not decided the race. The RealClearPolling average has Acton at 47.0 and Ramaswamy at 46.8. Cook rates it a toss-up. The prediction markets moved toward Acton in late August, though those contracts are thin enough that I would not put weight on them.
A candidate outspent seven to one is running even. That should tell you something about how much of politics money actually controls, and how much it does not.
Three things I would ask anyone following this race to hold onto.
First, watch what the office does, not what the ads say. The next governor of Ohio appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission, which sets utility rates and the terms of data center agreements. Ohio electricity bills rose 55 percent between July 2021 and July 2026. Voters are showing up to township meetings about data centers in numbers nobody predicted. That appointment power is the single most consequential thing on this ballot, and it is barely in the advertising on either side.
Second, be suspicious when an ad uses a dead family. Both campaigns did it this month. The National Republican Senatorial Committee ran a spot using crash footage from an Interstate 71 accident that killed a young family in Delaware County, blaming Sherrod Brown's immigration votes. The family asked for it to come down and said their grief was not campaign material. FactCheck.org found the tie between Brown's votes and the crash to be weak, since the driver entered the country sometime in the 1990s and later obtained citizenship. On the other side, a Ramaswamy ad blames Acton for a woman's death in a nursing home, and the Columbus Dispatch verified that the woman lived and died in Kentucky, six weeks after Acton left office.
Two campaigns, two grieving families, two central facts that did not hold up. If your reaction is to be angry about only one of them, that reaction was manufactured.
Third, stop reading the party label as a shortcut. In this race, the Democrat has been endorsed by a police union, opposes eliminating qualified immunity, supports the voter ID amendment, and says she will not stop local police from assisting federal immigration enforcement. The Republican is the one warning that expanding automated license plate camera networks risks an authoritarian surveillance state. If you assumed the opposite on both counts, you were reading the letter and not the record.
Ohio votes November 3. Registration closes October 5, and a federal judge just blocked the state's new proof of citizenship requirement for BMV registration, so that obstacle is gone for now.
I break all of this down with sources in this week's episode.
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Navigating the vast amount of bouncing around the political spectrum my entire life I have finally figured something important out. It doesn't matter. I've been religious, been in the military, went to a liberal school and all in all none of the political biases matter. We shouldn't let toxic discourse cloud our judgement and find a solution through logic and conversation. In pursuit of this mission I created this podcast to focus on these important conversations.
