New York Times: “Today, as J.D. Vance pursues the Republican nomination for an open Senate seat in Ohio, he has performed a whiplash-inducing conversion to Trumpism, in which he no longer emphasizes that white working-class problems are self-inflicted.”

Mike Gibbons (R) — a Cleveland investment banker running for the Republican nomination in Ohio’s 2022 U.S. Senate race — is planning to spend $10 million on television and radio advertising over the next nine months, Spectrum News reports.

“The last letters in Democrat: RAT.”

“The last letters in Republican: I CAN”

“That should tell you everything you need to know.”

— Ohio U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel (R), on Twitter.

In advance of announcing his Senate bid, J.D. Vance (R) deleted dozens of old tweets blasting former President Donald Trump, but Vance forgot to scrub his Twitter “likes,” the Daily Beast reports.

“Vance’s Twitter likes, which were still visible as of Monday afternoon, include two tweets supporting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy, a post implying Trump supporters are antisemitic, and multiple tweets indicting Trump’s character. One tweet even accuses then-candidate Trump of sexual assault, and another calls him ‘psychologically disturbed.’ He also liked two tweets mocking Melania Trump.”

“Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is injecting huge sums into some crucial 2022 midterm contests — and drawing fire from Republicans eager to tie their rivals to the GOP’s Silicon Valley bogeymen,” Axios reports.

“During an interview last week, one of J.D. Vance’s primary rivals, former Ohio state treasurer Josh Mandel, hit Vance for positioning himself against Big Tech while he has ‘a guy who is on the board of Facebook as his biggest political funder.'”

Josh Mandel is staking his bid for Senate in Ohio in a wide-open Republican primary field “on a Trump-aligned brand of cultural conservatism heavily focused on religion,” the Washington Examiner reports.

“Instead of building his campaign through traditional Republican Party groups, he is turning to churches, holding Faith and Freedom town halls and organizing through meetings with pastors.”

Said Mandel: “I believe we need a Judeo-Christian revolution in this country.”

Tom Nichols: “What do we call a man who turns on everything he once claimed to believe? For a practitioner of petty and self-serving duplicity, we use ‘sellout’ or ‘backstabber.’ (Sometimes we impugn the animal kingdom and call him a rat, a skunk, or a weasel.) For grand betrayals of weightier loyalties—country and faith—we invoke the more solemn terms of ‘traitor’ or ‘apostate.'”

“But what should we call J. D. Vance, the self-described hillbilly turned Marine turned Ivy League law-school graduate turned venture capitalist turned Senate candidate? Words fail. His perfidy to his own people in Ohio is too big to allow him to escape with the label of ‘opportunist,’ and yet the shabbiness and absurdity of his Senate campaign is too small to brand him a defector or a heretic.”

J.D. Vance (R) told NBC News that he isn’t worried that his past criticism of Donald Trump will hurt his chances of winning the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Ohio.

Vance said that while he believes that Trump “gets a certain kick out of people kissing his ass,” but the former president views those who do as “weak.”

He added: “I think that he respects people who can defend themselves, who have their own ideas.”

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) has raised nearly $2.3 million since launching his Senate bid in April, The Hill reports.

“The vast majority of contributions to Ryan’s Senate campaign — 96% — were under $100.”

J.D. Vance (R), who’s running for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, addressed his since-deleted tweets criticizing former President Trump, Axios reports.

Said Vance: “I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”

JD Vance (R), who is running for U.S. Senate in Ohio, deleted a tweet about voting for Evan McMullin for President in 2016.

He also deleted a tweet saying he found Donald Trump “reprehensible” from October 2016.

“At least two of the three fundraisers who quit Josh Mandel’s U.S. Senate campaign in recent months did so because of a toxic work environment created by Rachel Wilson, the campaign finance director,” the Columbus Dispatch reports.

“Wilson cussed out her subordinates, often demanded 12-hour workdays, berated them in front of others and called them names.”

Key detail: “Mandel and Wilson have been dating one another since August 2020.”

“J.D. Vance — whose raw bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, helped elites process the Trump upset — plans to announce at a factory in Ohio this week that he’s seeking the Republican nomination for Senate,” Axios reports.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) formally launched a campaign for Senate on Monday, giving Democrats their first candidate in the race to succeed Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), who is not running for re-election, NBC News reports.

Ryan could have a relatively clear path to the Democratic nomination which will be a big help in a state that’s trended to Republicans.

“Kellyanne Conway, who served as campaign manager and counselor to former President Donald Trump, has been named a senior adviser to Ohio Senate hopeful Bernie Moreno, taking sides in a race that has become a fight over which GOP candidate is closest to the former president,” Politico reports.