Ask Ohio Republicans about filling the U.S. Senate vacancy created by Sen. JD Vance becoming vice president, and two names come up right away: Donald Trump and Sherrod Brown.
Trump has won Ohio in three consecutive presidential races, and Gov. Mike DeWine has made it clear anyone he picks to fill the seat must have the support of MAGA Republicans to avoid a divisive GOP primary in 2026.
“It has to be someone who could win a primary. It has to be somebody who could win a general election, and then two years later, do it all again,” DeWine has said. “So, this is not for the fainthearted. This is not for someone who just wants a seat.”
And a priority among Buckeye State Republicans is that the candidate can handle heavyweight competition from the Democrats, including a possible attempt to return to Washington by recently ousted U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.
After a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago with DeWine, Lt. Gov. Jon Husted is getting some attention. Supporters say he’s got a lot going for him: good looks, lots of friends, a kind smile, and a successful political career. But what he doesn’t have is the thing he probably needs most – the support of MAGA.
Husted was Ohio’s secretary of state in 2016 when Donald Trump was first running for president, and in the weeks before the election, when Trump said he was concerned it might be rigged against him, Husted said it was “irresponsible” for the Republican nominee to make such a comment. “We should not question the legitimacy of the American election system,” Husted said.
Trump apparently forgave him, as Husted was asked to warm up the crowd at a Trump rally at Dayton International Airport in September 2020. But when Husted came out wearing a mask (albeit a Trump mask), and tried to make a joke about making masks great again, he was loudly booed by the crowd, with one person yelling: “Get off the stage!”
Susan Daniels, a conservative activist in the Cleveland area, recently sent an email to a large list of friends with the subject line: “‘NO’ to Jon Husted for JD Vance’s Senate seat.”
“He’s bad news all around and is a RINO. He is the Republican version of the slimy Sherrod Brown,” she wrote.
Among the other frequently mentioned candidates — Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Rep. Mike Carey, former Ohio Republican Party Chair Jane Timken and attorney Mehek Cooke — the one who’s closest to the MAGA movement is Carey.
A former energy industry lobbyist and self-declared outsider, Carey won a multi-candidate Republican primary for the 15th Congressional District in a special election in August 2021. The district stretches from the western suburbs of Columbus to Dayton and includes several rural counties dotted with small towns.
Carey won the GOP primary with the endorsement of Donald Trump, and he has been an outspoken supporter of the president-elect.
In Congress, Carey serves on the powerful Ways and Means Committee and the House Administration Committee, which investigated the role of Mark Zuckerberg’s money (“Zuckerbucks”) in the 2020 campaign through the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
State Rep. Jeff LaRe, who represents a district just outside Columbus, ran against Carey in the 2021 special election GOP primary. Today he’s urging DeWine to pick the congressman.
“I got to know Mike as a competitor,” he told InsideSources. “He proved he has the ability to pull out a victory in a contentious primary. That’s going to be important because whoever Gov. DeWine appoints is going to have to run nonstop.”
One possible objection is DeWine’s expressed concern about taking another member from the GOP’s extremely slim majority in the House of Representatives. “It’s a reality of where we are today after the president took a few,” DeWine has said.
But a veteran Ohio GOP strategist with connections to several of the potential picks told InsideSources on background that the size of the majority has already become so narrow it’s no longer a factor. “On this question on the majority, there is no functional difference between 216, 217, and 218. Anything of real controversy, or if there is a division in the caucus, that vote would have to wait until April, anyway.”
Much more important, the strategist said, is being able to stop three-term Democrat Brown, who lost to Republican Bernie Moreno in November, from making a comeback.
“We worked so hard to finally defeat him, and we don’t want to reopen that door.”
Carey outperformed Moreno in his district by almost 18,000 votes.
Carey also has the support of the Columbus Fire Fighters Union IAFF Local 67 and the Ohio Association of Professional Firefighters, the state’s largest union of firefighters.
“Mike has been fantastic to us,” said Steve Stein, the president of the union. One positive, according to Stein, is Carey’s experience in Congress. “It’s tough for Ohio to lose someone like Sen. Sherrod Brown, with his seniority in the Senate. But Mike has experience on the Hill. We’d love to see someone like him tapped for that role.”
ABOUT THE WRITER
Margaret Menge is a freelance journalist who’s written for the Columbia Journalism Review, New York Observer, Miami Herald, The American Conservative, among other publications. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.
