In a close race, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee, and Dr. Amy Acton, the Democrat, bring distinctive potential liabilities: his wealth and her time leading Ohio's pandemic response.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican pharmaceutical entrepreneur, and Dr. Amy Acton, a Democrat who served as the Ohio health director under the current Republican governor, won their respective primaries for governor on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, setting up what will most likely be a closely watched contest this fall.
Both primaries lacked suspense, as Mr. Ramaswamy, 40, and Dr. Acton, 60, had their partisan fields mostly to themselves for months. But the general election is not so predetermined and may rest on two questions: Will Mr. Ramaswamy have the discipline to stay on message and let his money do most of the talking, and can Ohio really elect a Democrat statewide?
Ohio has not made a Democrat its governor for nearly 20 years, but recent polls have shown a surprisingly tight race to succeed Gov. Mike DeWine, a retiring moderate Republican. This may largely reflect Mr. Trump's slide in popularity, but other factors at play are more specific to this race.
The campaigns have strikingly different pitches: Dr. Acton's emphasizes affordability, a message her campaign thinks will resonate at a time when gas prices are soaring and inflation is up, while Mr. Ramaswamy's focuses on a gospel of ambitious renewal, promising to make Ohio once again a national hub of innovation and wealth.
But both candidates also come with prominent potential liabilities. Mr. Ramaswamy's vast wealth will help fund his campaign, but it will be on display at a time of economic struggle. Dr. Acton's association with the Covid-19 pandemic might give her statewide name recognition, but it ties her to a time many Ohioans may want to forget.
A presidential candidate in the 2024 campaign, Mr. Ramaswamy announced his candidacy for governor in February 2025, a month after ending his bumpy stint with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the government-slashing task force that he led alongside Elon Musk. President Trump immediately endorsed him, and three months later, the state party followed suit, making Mr. Ramaswamy's nomination a virtual lock a year before the primary.
He raised huge sums even before putting in $25 million of his own money; in April, he reported a fund-raising haul of more than $50 million since his campaign began.
But while Mr. Ramaswamy's aspirational speeches, not to mention his deep pockets, have excited Republican Party leaders, his longstanding eagerness to weigh in, often at length, on a broad range of subjects has proved a fertile source of unwanted headlines.
He has already drawn the enmity of the populist right for expounding on American culture's tendency to venerate mediocrity. More recently, recordings have circulated of Mr. Ramaswamy joking that Ohio is not his favorite state, and explaining to a voter in Iowa the fundamental differences between his Hindu faith and Christianity, saying he considered Jesus a son of God but not the son of God. Such moments of candor may not reassure a skeptical Ohio conservative.
And while his campaign has focused its attacks on Dr. Acton's actions during the Covid outbreak, Mr. Ramaswamy, in his role as a biopharmaceutical entrepreneur, had his own pandemic strategy at the time, in comments recently resurfaced in The Associated Press. Namely, he suggested the possibility of creating a "national system," under which people would be "segregated" according to lab tests showing whether or not they had immunity to Covid.
Voters "can sense the difference between somebody who's reading off a poll-tested script versus someone who's speaking authentically," Mr. Ramaswamy said in an interview on Tuesday. "I'm a candidate in the latter mold."
Dr. Acton has some personal baggage as well. In 2019, when she worked for the DeWine administration, the police responded to a late-night argument she was having with her husband. But her biggest challenges are structural. She is a Democrat in a state that has moved steadily to the right.
As of April, she has raised about $10 million—a record-breaking total for a Democratic challenger in Ohio but a fraction of what Mr. Ramaswamy has reported.
The Ramaswamy campaign has already spent more than $15 million on ads, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm; some of them attacking Dr. Acton for her role during the pandemic.
As state health director in the early days of Covid, Dr. Acton signed orders requiring the closure of businesses, schools and sporting events, in addition to an order closing polling places in the 2020 March primary. Though Governor DeWine has endorsed his fellow Republican Mr. Ramaswamy, he defended Dr. Acton from some of these attacks publicly clarifying that the decision to close polling stations was his.
On the other hand, a spokesman for Mr. DeWine told NBC News that the governor was "very disappointed" that he had not been informed about the 2019 domestic incident.