While several GOP Senate hopefuls in Ohio seeking Sen. Rob Portman's seat are scrambling to find a way to get Daddy Trump to notice them, billionaire Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians MLB team, is not one of them. This is not making Donald Trump happy at all, and Trump wants Dolan gone.
Donald Trump has a new fixation: a Major League Baseball scion who hails from one of the country’s richest families — and who, unlike most other Republican Senate candidates, isn’t bowing to the former president.
During meetings, phone calls and impromptu chats, Trump has been peppering top aides and allies with questions about Matt Dolan, a wealthy Ohio Republican who accused the former president of “perpetuat[ing] lies about the outcome” of the 2020 election and called the pro-Trump Jan. 6 Capitol riot “a failure of leadership.”
While other contenders in the crowded GOP Senate primary are auditioning for Trump’s support, Dolan is funding a battery of TV ads that don’t even mention the former president. And in a barely veiled jab at his rivals who are making pilgrimages to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Dolan has declared that his campaign “is about one thing, and one thing only: Ohio.”
While Dolan is widely regarded as a longshot in the Trump-dominated primary, those in the former president’s orbit say there’s good reason to be focused on him: The candidate is spending $10 million-plus out of his pocket, is slowly rising in polling and is poised to benefit from a raft of Trump-aligned primary rivals splintering the vote among themselves.
Now, Trump is confronting a pivotal decision — one fraught with risk that will test his ability to shape primaries. He can wade into the murky field of pro-Trump candidates and try to consolidate his backers behind a single figure, but picking the wrong person could invite backlash from his base of supporters. Or he can stay out the fray entirely, but run the possibility of Dolan winning the May 3 primary with a plurality of the vote.
“In a divided field, anybody willing and able to deploy those kind of personal resources is a credible threat, even though he’s out of step with the Republican base across a whole range of issues,” said Luke Thompson, a Republican strategist who is working for a super PAC bolstering one of Dolan’s rivals, venture capitalist J.D. Vance.
Dolan’s campaign strenuously denies that he’s anti-Trump. The 57-year-old state senator, whose billionaire family owns the Cleveland Guardians, has said he voted for the former president in the 2016 and 2020 elections and that he would support him should he be the Republican nominee in 2024. He has also said he did not support Trump’s impeachment.
Rather, Dolan advisers say, he is simply running a campaign that doesn’t revolve around the former president — a starkly different approach from his Trump-loving rivals.
“The other candidates have been so obsessed with appeasing interests outside Ohio, they forgot what they are supposed to be fighting for in Ohio,” said Chris Maloney, a Dolan strategist. “We like that contrast.”
Still, Trump’s fixation on Dolan has steadily been growing since late September, when he launched his campaign. That same day, Trump released a statement attacking Dolan, a part-owner of the Guardians, for the baseball team’s decision to change the name it had since 1915: the Cleveland Indians. After the team announced the change in 2020, Trump called it “cancel culture at work!”
Donald Trump is obsessed with finding someone who worships him and can win. I don't think he really cares if Republicans keep the seat, he just wants to pick the primary winner, and if he can't, well, ask Georgia Republicans what can happen...
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