A late burst of momentum appears to have been experienced by the candidate. The most recent Fox News poll shows J.D. Vance in first place, but he was the only other top contender to gain ground. According to a poll released Tuesday by Blueprint Polling, Dolan was in first place with 18 percent of the vote, followed by Vance with 17 percent.
It was enough to prompt Trump to release a statement suggesting that the state senator is not fit to serve in the Senate.
There is mounting evidence that he is running up the middle, unmolested, with a unique message and some things in his favor. No way. It is a competitive race and he is in it. He has got the energy, as of last week.
With his dependence on Republican voters who are willing to move on from Trump, he has a low ceiling of support. That could be enough in a splintered field of candidates.
When I decided to run, I knew that it was going to be a long and difficult journey. I thought it was going to play out.
According to a person familiar with the data who said the campaign has aglide path to getting a plurality of the vote, internal polling shows him tracking to second place.
Despite being viewed as a longshot, Dolan has avoided any real attacks from his opponents, who have spent over $60 million on ads in the primary. The Club for Growth took out ads against each of the three candidates as each saw gains in support in recent months.
They and other campaigns and outside interest groups didn't target Dolan, who has spent a lot of money on television ads with his own positive message.
The only candidate who doesn't agree with Trump is Dolan. He accused the former president of lying about the outcome of the election. He called the attack on the Capitol a failure of leadership and an attack on democracy.
He has been careful to say that he considers himself a Trump supporter. According to a person working on the campaign, the staff has been badgered about seeking correction to any news reports that referred to Dolan as anti-Trump or a Never Trumper. They would tell reporters that Dolan had voted for Trump twice and that he would do so again if Trump were the nominee. He said he wouldn't have voted to convict Trump in an impeachment trial.
Trump has been paying attention to a possible rise by the candidate, even though the campaign was once dismissed as a joke. On Tuesday, he attacked Dolan not as an opponent of his America First agenda, but because the Major League Baseball team he and his family own changed its name from the Indians after the 2021 season.
The Cleveland Indians, an original baseball franchise, are not fit to serve in the United States Senate.
A person close to Trump insisted that there was no reason for the former president to release the statement, and that it was unrelated to the polling data that day that put Dolan in the lead or in second place. The person noted that the message was something Trump has been saying for months and that he just wanted to remind people.
He supports his family, but he was not involved in the decision to change the name.
While his campaign events this week haven't drawn high-profile supporters, such as Trump, who held a rally Saturday to support Vance, or Donald Trump Jr., who has visited the state twice in recent days to stump with him. surrogates have been writing letters to the editor on his behalf.
Mandel traveled to campaign stops with Michael Flynn, a leading advocate for efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Mandel will be at an event with Sen. Ted Cruz.
Trump's approval rating among Republican voters in the state is as high as 85 percent. Its approach has been to thread the needle between support for Trump's agenda and his denunciations of it.
Chris Maloney, the campaign consultant, said that the race has to be about Ohio.
Gibbons, a wealthy business owner, has taken a dive after peaking earlier this year and loaning his campaign more than $16 million, in contrast to Dolan, whose large investment in the race for months appeared futile as he failed to gain traction.
Several factors are helping Dolan now, according to Murphy, the Republican strategist. In addition to emerging unscathed after the other candidates spent months hurling insults at each other, Dolan fits the mold of pragmatic conservatives that Ohio Republicans have traditionally chosen for Senate, including retiring Sen. Rob Portman.
He is not an alien species to the normal comfort zone of the Ohio Republican Party.
The campaign staff has been out on foot for more than two months, allowing them to have an established ground campaign. In several markets, Timken has been dark on broadcast television and cable for weeks, and has been completely off broadcast statewide the past week, running only $15,000 worth of cable ads. Winning for Women has a small number of cable spots.
The Club for Growth is leading in television ads right now, followed by Protect Ohio Values, an outside expenditure group that has received $13.5 million in donations from billionaire tech executive Peter Thiel.
At a recent debate, he was asked if he could win the Republican nomination without Trump's support.
The irony of this whole thing is that I am the only one who has implemented Republican Trump ideas.
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