The remaining field of possible candidates is full and without an obvious favorite. Josh Mandel, the former state treasurer who lost the 2012 Senate race, is considering an offer and must run. Jane Timken, the state president of the Republican Party, is also considering running, and several members of the state’s House delegation are considering their options.
Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted and former MP Pat Tiberi announced that they would not run. But other state officials, including Secretary of State Frank LaRose, are also potential candidates.
Republicans are preferred to keeping the seat in a state that has shifted to the right in the past decade: Trump won 8 percentage points in November. But a crowded and potentially confusing primary gives Democrats an opportunity they wouldn’t have had Portman running for a third term.
Jordan, who was first elected to Congress in 2006, was on the sidelines of the Republican Party conference for much of his term in the chamber, especially due to his strained relationship with former Mayor John Boehner, a citizen of Ohio. Jordan became more prominent in the Trump era, and was one of the founders and the first president of House Freedom Caucus, a hardline group of conservatives who finally became Trump’s close allies after he won the presidency.
More recently, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who worked to unite the establishment and the far-right wings of the conference, elevated Jordan to two main committees, from which he supported Trump against significant misdemeanor allegations: Supervision and Committees. judicial authorities. Jordan became a graduated member of the House Judiciary Committee in March 2020 – after the president’s first impeachment trial, during which Jordan served as an unofficial member of his legal team, charged with defending Trump in public – and would be in queue to chair the committee in 2023 if Republicans regain control of the House in next year’s midterm elections.
But Jordan was also one of the most prominent propagators of false and misleading information about the 2020 presidential election and was among the many members of the House who objected to the results of the Electoral College. Five days after the Capitol was ransacked by protesters who unsuccessfully sought to prevent Congress from ratifying the victory of now President Joe Biden’s Electoral College, Trump awarded Jordan the Medal of Freedom.
Jordan represents a duck-shaped and gerrymandered district that meanders from the shores of Lake Erie in northeastern Ohio, south and west to near the Indiana border. Trump won about 67 percent of the votes there last November.