Like felines to catnip, liberal Twitter users pounced on J.D. Vance, the author turned Ohio U.S. Senate hopeful, when he suggested on Fox News last week that "childless cat ladies" now run the country, preventing it from having a "healthy ruling class."
"We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too," Mr. Vance told Fox News host Tucker Carlson, sending the kind of people who don't typically watch Mr. Carlson's program into a tizzy online.
Mr. Vance, a Yale Law School‑educated venture capitalist, directed his dig specifically at Vice President Kamala Harris, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, favorite targets of the right.
The candidate posted a clip of the interview to Twitter, and the comments directed at him there and elsewhere were predictably excoriating.
"I'm a proud childless cat lady," one user wrote. "Vance can go suck an egg."
The media outrage cycle has become the go‑to campaign playbook for some candidates in Ohio's Senate contest, where the battle for Republican votes in a crowded primary is moving from Lincoln Day dinners and suburban cookouts to cable news hits and Twitter retweets.
In a field with five serious candidates and no clear front-runner, Mr. Vance and Josh Mandel in particular are going the route of amping the base and goading detractors online to generate buzz. It's the playbook invented by former President Donald Trump, who was permanently banned from Twitter after the Capitol insurrection and has claimed Big Tech is trying to censor conservative voices.
The strategy's success hinges on who's paying attention and whether they perceive what the candidates are saying as genuine — or poor attempts at mimicking the former president's style.
The Senate campaign is the first statewide race to fully embrace this tone in the post‑Trump era, a time when staid, establishment Republicans are falling out of favor and many are emulating Mr. Trump's brash style to try and win elections.
"Even when we had primary fights ... they've been so calm and restrained by modern outrage-politics standards," said David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. "In any other era, you could run on experience, but experience is not an asset in the Republican primary. The degree to which the entirety of the task is one of personality is something we've never had the chance to fully appreciate the joys of in Ohio."
Mr. Niven said Ohio seems to be "behind the times" because it's been slower to reject establishment Republicans like Gov. Mike DeWine and Sen. Rob Portman, whose retirement set the GOP primary into motion.
"The establishment hung on a little bit longer here than it did elsewhere," Mr. Niven said. "Kasich, Portman, and DeWine are not exactly the modern, social‑media friendly candidate."
He said it's hard to imagine them throwing bombs like Mr. Mandel, the former state treasurer who's taken a hard right turn in the primary, or Mr. Vance, a one‑time skeptic who's had to walk back earlier remarks about Mr. Trump to be viable in the race.
Mr. Mandel has gone after moderate Republicans, moderate Democrats, liberal Democrats, immigrants, and Muslims, in tweets that can read like red‑meat Mad Libs designed to rouse the base and annoy others.
"I'm not a Liz Cheney, Anthony Gonzalez, Mitt Romney Republican. I'm a Jim Jordan, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz patriot," Mr. Mandel wrote Sunday on Twitter. "I'm not going to Washington to make friends with party elites. I'm going to DC to drain the swamp."
In a tweet the day before that was shared 2,300 times and garnered 8,300 largely negative responses, Mr. Mandel pointed out the last three letters of Democrat spell the word rat while letters at the end of Republican spell "I can."
"That should tell you everything you need to know," he wrote.
In early June, Mr. Mandel posted a video of himself lighting a face mask on fire with the caption: "FREEDOM."
Meanwhile, his rival Mr. Vance on Wednesday tweeted: "Is breakthrough COVID when a COVID-positive illegal immigrant breaks through our southern border?" A day later, it had racked up 3,200 replies.
"I regret buying your book," one user wrote, referring to his memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
Both campaigns declined to make the candidates available for interviews about their social-media strategies.
Besides potential supporters, there's one person who both men hope is paying attention: Mr. Trump, who has yet to endorse in the race and whose support, or lack thereof, could make or break a candidacy. Mr. Trump's favored candidate, Mike Carey, won a special congressional election this week in central Ohio, testing the theory of Mr. Trump's kingmaking status post‑presidency.
"What they're doing on social media is to a very targeted audience," said Mike Hartley, a Republican strategist in Columbus. "Not anybody else other than Republican base folks, and they're utilizing the media and others to amplify their message, and I'm sure they're stunting for former President Trump, too."
A common refrain, though, is that Twitter or any social media platform isn't representative of the broader population. Only one in five U.S. adults say they use Twitter, and those people tend to be younger and better educated than most Americans, and more likely to identify as Democrats, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study.
Social media also isn't the only battleground in Ohio's Senate race. Former Ohio GOP Chairman Jane Timken is trying to thread the needle between wooing the base online and assembling a coalition of grassroots support. Investment banker Mike Gibbons has pledged to spend $10 million on advertising through the primary. Entrepreneur Bernie Moreno has clamored for a piece of Trump World, hiring one‑time Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
"I don't get myself caught up in their nonsense," Ms. Timken said Monday in Toledo of her rivals. "What I'm focused on is my messaging and how I'm gonna win the race."
But there are signs Mr. Mandel and Mr. Vance are skating ahead for now if not on their combustible social-media takes, then on name recognition. The Club for Growth, a conservative group that backs Mr. Mandel, released a poll this week showing Mr. Mandel with 40 percent support in the Republican primary, followed by Mr. Vance at 12 percent and Ms. Timken at 8 percent. Thirty‑three percent were undecided or wanted someone else.
For an idea of how the field is playing to some Republicans, Ralph King, a hardcore Trump supporter from Cleveland who founded a Tea Party chapter and was a Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention in 2016, said it leaves much to be desired.
He said Mr. Mandel is too pandering and insincere, and Trump loyalists can see through it.
"He's not Donald Trump and he never will be Donald Trump," he said.
"If you don't realize these guys are going to say and do whatever the hell they need to say or do to get your support, you've not learned anything since the Tea Party started."
First Published August 6, 2021, 12:00 p.m.
