A Trump endorsement of Renacci is probably the biggest threat to DeWine, whose handling of the former president is perhaps the governor’s most impressive political feat of the past four years. DeWine is nominally supportive of Trump and co-chaired his reelection campaign in Ohio. At the same time, he rejected Trump’s bogus claims of a stolen election and yet has somehow avoided, at least so far, the president’s retributive wrath.
Part of DeWine’s success in Trump management is undoubtedly luck, because he presided over a state that Trump won by eight points and did not face the pressure that governors such as Doug Ducey in Arizona and Brian Kemp in Georgia did when the president and his allies implored them to help overturn the election. But at least some of DeWine’s handling of the man who reshaped his party reflects raw political skill. DeWine is possessed of a self-discipline that frustrates his opponents on the right and the left, who tend to see it as evasiveness.
The key difference between Trump and DeWine is that the governor is conservative in both substance and style. “We’re not big show people, big drama people,” he told a business group in Athens, a college town in the Appalachian southeastern part of Ohio, last month. When I visited the governor in Columbus the next day, DeWine wandered deep into the weeds as he explained some of his statewide initiatives on education and economic development. But on the questions dividing the Republican Party at the moment, he resorted to generalities and offered up a demonstration of his famous restraint. He made clear that he remained a loyal Republican, saying he would support Josh Mandel, J. D. Vance, or any of the other Senate hopefuls who have been criticizing him and otherwise lurching to the right on the campaign trail.
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