When Donald Trump’s team invited Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose last summer to a gathering of Republican elected officials at the former president’s Bedminster golf club, it was a big moment for the Senate hopeful.
But it came with a condition — LaRose would have to endorse Trump’s presidential comeback bid, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.
LaRose had just told POLITICO two weeks earlier that he did not plan to back a presidential candidate any time soon. But then he did, just hours before the dinner.
His forced endorsement of Trump wasn’t reciprocated. The former president instead backed another candidate in Ohio’s GOP Senate primary. And LaRose’s sudden reversal became one in a series of flip-flops that ended with a distant third-place finish in Tuesday’s primary to face Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.
It was a dramatic fall from public favor for a man who had won reelection to his state post less than two years ago. LaRose had started the three-way race with a commanding polling lead and priceless name ID as a well-liked secretary of state.
But with his future on the line, LaRose moved away from his past reputation as a pragmatic establishment conservative and tried to push into an occupied MAGA lane. He ultimately ended up with little support from either faction.
On Tuesday, his attempt at higher office flamed out, ending with less than 17 percent of the vote. He was behind both the victor who ultimately won Trump’s coveted endorsement, Bernie Moreno, and the Trump skeptic who won over the state GOP’s old guard, state Sen. Matt Dolan….
In 2019 he called a Trump tweet “racist”. As Ohio’s chief elections official, LaRose insisted the state’s 2020 elections were fair and accurate, that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in mail voting, and any Republican who suggested otherwise was “irresponsible.”
But in seeking reelection in 2022 with a primary challenge from the right, he accepted Trump’s endorsement — and his language about the 2020 election began to shift. By February 2022, he said “President Trump is right to say voter fraud is a serious problem.”