The word she uses is “inadequacies” but c’mon. We’re all adults here.

By the way, is it spelled “wiener” or “weiner”? I used to spell it “ie” but the prominence of a certain someone has forever changed that.

I didn’t think this year’s Ohio Senate primary could get any more embarrassing for the GOP, but life is full of surprises:

We all know guys who overcompensate for their inadequacies, and that description fits the guys in the Senate race to a T.

I’m different. I’m the MAGA conservative with a backbone. WATCH my new ad below: pic.twitter.com/EEzqaYToPa

— Jane Timken (@JaneTimkenOH) February 18, 2022

Jane Timken has many commendable qualities, no doubt, but “good on camera” isn’t one of them.

Another thing she *almost* had last year was the endorsement of Donald Trump, which might have cleared the field for her if he had followed through. Waaaay back in March 2021, Trump was reportedly prepared to back Timken, someone who’d raised big bucks for his presidential campaign. He was talked out of doing that, urged to keep his powder dry until he had a better sense of what the field would look like. Fast-forward 11 months and the Ohio Senate primary is one of the most muddled of the entire 2022 cycle, with no fewer than five candidates in contention. Trafalgar’s latest poll looks like this:

For four of those five, the campaign is essentially a contest to see which establishment Republican can position him- or herself as the biggest Trump sycophant. Timken is a former head of the Ohio Republican Party who donated to John Kasich when he ran against Trump in 2016. J.D. Vance is an Ivy League law grad, hedge-fund employee, and former Never Trumper. Mandel campaigned alongside Mitt Romney when he ran for Senate in 2012, urging voters to reject “hyperpartisanship” and elect leaders who would “rise above it all to do the right thing.” Gibbons is a mega-rich investment banker.

Four phonies, each willing to posture insincerely as a Trumpy populist, and only one can be the Republican nominee. No wonder Ohio Republicans are having trouble settling on a candidate.

The fifth candidate, Matt Dolan, is the interesting one. And reportedly the one whom Trump has his eye on — but not for an endorsement.

During meetings, phone calls and impromptu chats, Trump has been peppering top aides and allies with questions about Matt Dolan, a wealthy Ohio Republican who accused the former president of “perpetuat[ing] lies about the outcome” of the 2020 election and called the pro-Trump Jan. 6 Capitol riot “a failure of leadership.”

While other contenders in the crowded GOP Senate primary are auditioning for Trump’s support, Dolan is funding a battery of TV ads that don’t even mention the former president. And in a barely veiled jab at his rivals who are making pilgrimages to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Dolan has declared that his campaign “is about one thing, and one thing only: Ohio.”…

“The other candidates have been so obsessed with appeasing interests outside Ohio, they forgot what they are supposed to be fighting for in Ohio,” said Chris Maloney, a Dolan strategist. “We like that contrast.”

Dolan is careful not to seem too anti-Trump, claiming that he voted for the former president in 2016 and 2020 and opposed impeachment. But his longshot strategy is clever: He’s betting that Mandel, Vance, Timken, and Gibbons will tear each other apart for the MAGA vote, splitting it four ways and leaving Dolan with the centrist, less Trumpy vote all to himself. If, say, a third of Ohio Republican primary voters are looking for someone more moderate, it’s possible that Dolan can win the primary with that third provided that the rest of the vote splinters relatively equally.

The flaw in that strategy is Trump himself. If he ends up endorsing someone, that person will consolidate most of the MAGA vote and win the primary easily. But does Trump want to endorse with the polls as unsettled as they are? Vance has underperformed, polling middle-of-the-pack despite lots of MAGA media attention and big money behind him. Mandel has no funding, is shunned by the GOP establishment, and is reportedly viewed as “f***ing weird” by Trump himself. Despite her own wealth and her many connections in the party, which now includes endorsements from Elise Stefanik and Kellyanne Conway, Timken has also struggled to gain traction. And Gibbons, as a lesser-known businessman, is a risky political investment.

Trump doesn’t want to give his blessing to a lackluster candidate and then watch them lose. It’d be a blow to his prestige as a kingmaker. If he declines to endorse, suddenly Dolan has a shot. But if Trump does endorse, he risks pissing off the different camps of MAGA voters who have already aligned behind the other candidates.

All of which points to a cynical cunning behind Timken’s new ad. As cringy as it is to have a Harvard-educated professional from the GOP country-club set calling herself a “MAGA conservative with a backbone” and making dick jokes about her male opponents, name recognition has become hugely important in this race. With the top candidates polling at only 20 percent or so, anything Timken can do to make an impression on voters is apt to pull her closer to the lead. It makes me wonder if she’s trying a variation on Dolan’s strategy: Instead of letting her opponents fight over the MAGA vote, Timken might be aiming to consolidate Republican women and let the rest of the field fight over men. If she can get women behind her — and the endorsements from Stefanik and Conway suggest that she’s straining to do so — then she’s got an obvious path to victory with the male vote divided.