The 2026 Campaign Is Getting Ugly, Especially On The Republican Side.

Any campaign that involves Donald Trump is bound to get pretty ugly. The 2024 campaign was marred by the now-president and now-Vice President JD Vance falsely claiming Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets.

But the 2026 campaign is getting really ugly — especially on the Republican side.

Morality aside, the question is whether that ugliness is a sign of sound GOP strategy or of desperation. It seems to be a large helping of the latter.

The big news this week has been Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s decision to run an ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s estranged mother calling her daughter a liar.

Left unsaid in the ad: Acton has said she hasn’t seen her mother since she was 12 years old, when her mother lost custody of her children and the man she married was indicted for allegedly sexually abusing Acton. Acton’s campaign has countered with an ad featuring her brother talking about the abuse they endured and saying, “Shame on Vivek.”

The Ramaswamy ad has roiled the GOP and the gubernatorial race. Prominent Ohio Republicans — including Gov. Mike DeWine, Sen. Jon Husted and Secretary of State Frank LaRose — have criticized the ad, as have Republicans elsewhere, like Iowa GOP Senate candidate Rep. Ashley Hinson and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a former presidential rival of Ramaswamy. Some are criticizing the politicization of a family trauma. Others are fearing it will backfire.

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Trump and Vance have both urged their party to get with the program and stop criticizing the ad, and Trump said Thursday night that he personally helped convince Ramaswamy to move forward with it.

But that’s not the only recent example of the GOP stooping to new lows in this midterm campaign.

In Texas, Vance recently made a joke that implied Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is gay — elevating a long-running campaign of innuendo on that front. (This despite prominent Trump administration officials being gay.) And meanwhile, MAGA fueled a later-debunked conspiracy theory that Talarico had gone to a mental hospital.

In the Michigan Senate race, GOP former Rep. Mike Rogers’ campaign is running an ad saying his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, “supported” terrorists and that his “radical ideology is a threat to our national security.” (The ad and similar claims distort the facts.)

In North Carolina, a GOP congressional candidate and the national GOP have teamed up on an ad that appears to use AI to depict her opponent dancing with drag queens.

And in Maine, the top Senate GOP super PAC is running a radio ad citing reports that Democratic nominee Troy Jackson’s longtime partner is his second cousin, with a chorus saying, “If he’ll screw his own family, he’ll screw yours, too.”

GOP Sen. Susan Collins has coyly alluded to this too, but on Wednesday she called for the ad to be taken down. The super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, hasn’t responded to a CNN inquiry about whether it plans to do as Collins suggested.

Jackson’s partner responded obliquely in an op-ed on Wednesday, saying she never thought Jackson’s opponents “would stoop this low.” (Jackson’s campaign hasn’t directly addressed the claim.) And despite the GOP attack, Republicans didn’t seem troubled that a once-iconic modern GOP politician, Rudy Giuliani, married his second cousin.

Time will tell whether any of these tactics pays off. But it’s worth noting that the long-running innuendo about Talarico doesn’t seem to have thus far helped Republican Ken Paxton, who’s locked in a tight race to defend this red-state seat.

Many of these races feature more polls with the Democrat numerically leading than the Republican — though many polls are within the margin of error.

The Ohio gubernatorial race, especially, could be getting away from the GOP. CNN’s Poll of Polls average shows Acton up by 6 points, 50%-44%, with all surveys in the average conducted before news about Ramaswamy’s ad.

So, you could perhaps understand why Ramaswamy’s campaign might want to try something. Indeed, when the video first surfaced on Monday, it included no disclaimer about who was behind it, and Ramaswamy didn’t initially claim it. But he later embraced it, and Trump has said he encouraged him to keep the ad up.

Husted’s and Hinson’s decisions to distance themselves from the ad certainly suggest they’re worried about its impact on their races.

Character and even underhanded attacks have long been a part of campaigns from both sides, but often the campaigns will try to keep them at arm’s length and let others do their dirty work.

This week, we saw both the president and the vice president not just defending the Ohio ad, but making rather Machiavellian cases for it.

While Hinson said it was “absolutely terrible” for Acton to have “to relive that trauma,” Vance shrugged off the moral issues.

“Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” he said, adding that Republicans should “stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.”

And despite claiming to know “nothing about” the backstory involving alleged child sex abuse, Trump praised Acton’s mother for her “courage” in speaking out. He said even a smidgeon of truth in the mother’s claims should disqualify Acton from serving as governor.

And pressed by reporters about the alleged abuse, the president repeatedly defended the ad.

What’s clear is that American politics is becoming more shameless. And if that strategy pays off for the GOP this year, it’s likely to get a lot worse moving forward.

SOURCE: CNN