It's Trump's Ohio now

The primary is a post-Trump stylistic experiment in bridging the gap between the old party and the new. Timken, who’s never run for office, seems dispositionally and biographically to have more in common with the party leaders of days gone by. A Harvard-educated lawyer who married into a wealthy family, she’s a major Republican donor. She gave enough to hang around at a Trump-attended April fundraising weekend in Florida, while Mandel gate-crashed the event and was asked to leave. Mandel could probably out-yell Timken in a room—he was temporarily suspended from Twitter for asking which types of “illegals” would commit more crimes: “Muslim Terrorists” or “Mexican Gangbangers”—but she has Trump bona fides to play up. “Kasich had transformed the party organization into a corrupt, anti-Trump mess,” Timken said earlier this year, bragging that she’d turned the Ohio GOP into “a well-oiled, pro-Trump machine.” Trump reportedly was tempted to endorse Timken this spring, though he’s held off for now. Part of Timken’s appeal is that she belongs to that ebbing GOP demographic: white, college-educated women. “Very candidly, I like that she’s gender diverse,” the Cincinnati-area GOP chair, Alex Triantafilou, told me. In the shadow primary of endorsements, Timken has been doing well, picking them up from officials around the state. The 43-year-old Mandel, who is running for the Senate for a dizzying-for-his-age third time, has a lead in early polls. Much of that is likely name recognition, though, which might not end up being an advantage. The suburban Republican politico told me that Mandel’s incessant campaigning over the past decade has worn some donors out. In May, the Delaware County GOP ended its joint fundraising account with Mandel, and three of the campaign’s fundraisers left. In late June, reports came out that staffers had quit because of a toxic work environment created by Mandel’s finance director, who is also his girlfriend.