“LaRose also has been a Trump critic in the past and has voiced concerns about how the former president has raised baseless claims of election fraud to explain his loss in the 2020 election. But LaRose also accepted Trump’s endorsement last year when he was seeking re-election as secretary of state, recently endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential bid and has made clear he’d like Senate race backing in return.
“Asked last week by NBC News’ Chuck Todd if Pence was right to ignore Trump’s pressure to block certification of the 2020 election results. LaRose tiptoed around the question, saying he believed that Pence ‘made the best decision he could with the information in front of him.’
“A source close to Trump later said Trump had seen video of the interview and indicated that any expectation that Trump would remain neutral in the Ohio Senate race — despite praising Moreno, he has not officially backed a candidate — was misguided. A LaRose strategist, meanwhile, sought to clarify the Pence comments as neither agreement or praise. And on Tuesday the LaRose campaign tweeted an old photo of the secretary of state standing alongside Trump, claiming that ‘Democrats are afraid of a Trump/LaRose ticket.’ …
“’Dumping a hardworking, popular guy to chase an endorsement you’ll never get from someone whose values don’t align with who you are historically,’ the former colleague added, ‘is going to have a chilling effect on your team and hurt you in the long run.’”
LaRose is the lamentable poster child of the “primary problem” affecting US election law right now: candidates abdicating their principles in an effort to secure Trump’s endorsement so that they can win a MAGA-dominated Republican primary. The 2022 midterms in Ohio confirmed that the general election voter prefers a non-MAGA Republican (like Governor Mike DeWine, who won with 62%) to a MAGA Republican (like Senator J.D. Vance, who won with 53%). But unless a candidate has the kind of incumbency advantage that DeWine had, in the primary a candidate needs to veer hard-right to win the nomination. We can criticize LaRose (and others like him, including J.D. Vance) for abandoning their principles, but we must recognize that this is a structural problem, which we won’t solve without structural reform so that non-MAGA Republicans can compete for the support of general election voters without having first to prevail in a MAGA-dominated primary.