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Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is already facing significant backlash from voters over his new ad featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, with one man angrily interrupting him at a rally last night. Both current and former officials at the Pentagon are apparently lining up to reveal damning information about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth if Democrats take back control of the House. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is now directly accusing her conservative colleagues of attacking American democracy with their recent rulings. And Democratic state attorneys general are actively preparing to counter efforts from Donald Trump to interfere in the midterms.
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The Ohio gubernatorial election has taken a particularly ugly turn, after Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign produced an ad that’s been universally condemned on both sides of the aisle.
During a rally on Tuesday, local ABC affiliate WSYX captured footage of a protester confronting Ramaswamy at the CrossPointe Church in Westerville, shouting at him until police carried him out. The voter was upset about Ramaswamy’s ad featuring the estranged mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton, who called her daughter a liar over her recounting of how her family once lived in a tent when she was a child.
Acton said she was removed from her birth mother at age 12 “for severe abuse and neglect and sexual abuse.” According to CBS affiliate WKBN, Acton lived in roughly 18 homes by age 12 and even spent a winter in a tent at a campground outside of Youngstown. Arthur sided with Acton’s abuser, who died while on the run from the law. The two haven’t spoken in decades.
The candidate’s brother, Philip Stearns, accused Ramaswamy of exploiting Acton’s childhood sexual abuse to score political points. Ramaswamy defended the ad, telling WSYX that Acton dodged debates and was spreading “defamatory, disparaging lies” about him and his family.
Ramaswamy isn’t getting a lot of support. Conservative commentator Meghan McCain called the ad “dastardly” and it should’ve never been made. Former Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, who is now running against Republican Jon Husted for his old seat, called the ad “disgusting” and called on Husted to condemn it.
Voters have also making their feelings known about Ramaswamy even before the ad came out. Marist’s latst poll from mid-October showed Acton ahead by a 50 to 43 margin. Polls from CNN, YouGov and the New York Times/Siena College also showed Acton in front, though some polls show Ramaswamy with a slight edge.
One of the oldest rules of politics is that it’s considered crass to go after a candidate’s family. Back in 1828, Americans learned why when Andrew Jackson’s opposition spent months attacking his wife Rachel as an adulteress. She was dead before his inauguration. When a campaign uses the estranged mother of a child sexual abuse survivor as a surrogate, the question is no longer about Amy Acton, but whether Ohio voters believe there’s no depth to which politicians should stoop to win votes.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appears to be in short supply of friends at the Pentagon. According to a new report in the Telegraph, House Democrats have already contacted several potential whistleblowers in preparation to investigate Hegseth if they retake control of the House of Representatives in November.
One of the Telegraph’s source anonymously confided that there are multiple people planning to tell the chair of the Armed Services Committee they want to “spill their guts” about Hegseth. A former senior Trump administration official said Hegseth’s arrogant attitude has turned some of his former allies into willing allies of a potential new Democratic majority.
There’s plenty of reasons for people to want Hegseth gone. He’s forced out dozens of senior-level military officers. Thart includes C.Q. Brown, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He’s also thrown out longstanding civilian DoD officials and staffers, and famously lectured top military leaders at Quantico about wanting to drive out “fat generals.” Three members of Congress, including Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky, have already introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth.
Should they win back a majority, Democrats aim to use their new subpoena powers to call up members of Hegseth’s inner circle to testify, including his wife Jennifer and top aide Ricky Buria. They may also subpoena officials Hegseth fired, including former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. They’re also planning to focus on the Signalgate scandal, when Hegseth inadvertently shared classified attack plans on a group chat that included the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. A Pentagon report found Hegseth violated security protocols with the texts, but cleared him of any criminal charges, since he can decide what’s classified as defense secretary. One source urged investigators to call for the written declassification memo Hegseth would’ve needed to make that decision official.
And of course there’s the Iran War, the reported arsenal shortages that include missile interceptors, the strikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 200 people and Pentagon contracts to firms connected to the administration, like those Donald Trump’s eldest sons are invested in.
Convicting a cabinet secretary in an impeachment trial requires two-thirds of the Senate, and it has yet to happen once in American history. But Trump has already fired former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, former Attorney General Pam Bondi and, just last Friday, White House press secretary Katie Zacharia after five days in her role. A steady drip of unflattering testimony from Pentagon officials could eventually lead to Trump firing his defense secretary.
Congress has done so before, even in the middle of a world war. Then-Missouri Senator Harry Truman spent 1941 dragging his own party for enabling waste and war profiteering, saving taxpayers billions of dollars. Conducting oversight of the Pentagon isn’t an act of disloyalty but a Constitutional responsibility of Congress. In November, Americans will decide whether we have a House of Representatives willing to do their job.
Justice Elena Kagan — a Barack Obama appointee — recently tore into her conservative colleagues in a Tuesday speech at Catholic University’s law school, saying their rulings have “created a democracy that doesn’t work as well as it should.”
Kagan cited the example of the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision that prevenred federal courts from stopping partisan gerrymandering. She said that ruling set off a “race to the bottom” that’s playing out now in Texas and elsewhere.
According to Kagan, those gerrymandered maps push candidates toward the extremes because the only race that matters is each respective party’s primary. She also criticized conservative justices’ “evisceration” of the Voting Rights Act, including this year’s Louisiana v. Callais decision that allowed Republican-dominated states to wipe out majority-Black congressional districts.
This ultimately all stems from the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, which opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate and billionaire money in politics. That door has continued to widen ever since. Kagan said Americans look at all the money flooding the political system and see “a nightmare, and they’re right.”
It wasn’t always this way. Back in 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Supreme Court handed down the Reynolds v. Sims decision, telling every state that legislators represent people, not empty acreage, meaning one person’s vote has to count as much as anyone else’s. Kagan’s warning is that the Court she sits on has spent the last decade and a half quietly dismantling that promise. A democracy where your vote is drawn to have no meaning isn’t much of a democracy at all.
Democratic state attorneys general aren’t waiting to see what dirty tricks Trump tries in the November midterms. According to the Guardian, 24 state AGs have been coordinating with roughly a dozen different Democratic secretaries of state and voting rights groups through regular Zoom calls and even in-person tabletop exercises to coordinate their defense for any potential election interference from the federal government.
Washington state’s Democratic Attorney General Nick Brown is spearheading the effort. He called the Trump Justice Department “the biggest adversary to a smooth election.” Officials have planned responses for potential scenarios like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducting operations near polling places and even for agents seizing ballots. They even held exercises for how to respond in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this past May, and in Detroit, Michigan just last month.
The Democratic AGs aren’t imagining threats. The DOJ has already announced plans to deploy an army of 1,000 poll monitors in the midterms, compared to just 289 four years ago. It’s also filed lawsuits against 30 states in an attempt to obtain unredacted voter rolls. So far the DOJ has lost all 26 of the cases decided as of today. Earlier this year, federal agents seized 2020 election ballots from an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia. Trump also told the New York Times he openly regrets not ordering National Guard troops to seize ballots in 2020. And during his midterm convention in Dallas, Texas last month, he urged Republicans to “cheat like hell” if that’s what they needed to do to keep their majorities in Congress.
It’s important to note that the president’s claims about non-citizen voting don’t hold up under scrutiny Even the far-right Heritage Foundation — which is responsible for Project 2025 — found only about 100 such cases out of every American election conducted over the past quarter-century.
Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said his biggest worry is that the Trump administration’s “constant drumbeat of lies is going to suppress the vote.” Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice said one positive outcome is that the government has consistently lost all of these fights over the past 18 months, though he stressed the need for everyone to be ready for anything.
The authors of the Constitution made sure that individual states and Congress had jurisdiction over elections in Article I, Section 4. They specifically excluded the president from that process, as they had just fought a war against a tyrant who thought he got to decide who would be in power. That’s why two dozen state attorneys general preparing a response to ICE agents at the polls isn’t an act paranoia. Rather, it’s simply our system working exactly the way the founders intended. Trump can’t stop the states from standing between him and the ballot box.
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