As he approaches his final year in office, Gov. Mike DeWine has said he’ll fully expects to endorse the Republican candidate for governor next year. But with only Vivek Ramaswamy running for the GOP nomination, and with the election less than a year away, DeWine still hasn’t offered his endorsement.
While many other Republicans officeholders in Ohio have endorsed Ramaswamy, including U.S. Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), who DeWine appointed to that seat earlier this year, DeWine has not. But DeWine told reporters on Thursday that he’s been meeting with Ramaswamy.
“We're still having discussions," DeWine said. "I want to have better understanding of his positions, what his vision is. And I would say the discussions have been good. And I'm sure I want to talk to him about some of the things I see as well."
Meanwhile, the campaign against Ramaswamy’s likely Democratic opponent Amy Acton is already including criticism of her actions as DeWine’s health director during the pandemic, with the Ohio Republican Party calling her "Dr. Lockdown". Acton signed stay-at-home orders and directives to closing schools and businesses in March 2020, which were widely praised at the time as ways to slow the spread of COVID. But backlash from business owners and many Republican officeholders started building, and Acton became the target of protests at the Statehouse and her home. Acton has said she resigned in June 2020 because of political pressure to sign orders that came from Larry Householder, then the Republican speaker of the Ohio House and now in federal prison on a bribery conviction from the House Bill 6 nuclear power plant bailout.
DeWine wouldn't comment on that criticism, but did say he takes responsibility for actions he directed.
"I'm not going to talk about what anybody in any party is saying or anybody in the campaign is saying," DeWine said. "But I've consistently said—and you can go back, you remember what I said—during the pandemic, the decisions about what to do, the buck stops with the governor."
Ramaswamy and Acton both appear to face easy paths to their parties' nominations. Attorney General Dave Yost dropped out of the Republican race earlier this year and Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel said in September that he would not run. Democratic former congressman Tim Ryan announced last month he had decided not to run after months of saying he was considering it.
