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!”
“I know of at least one person in the race who I won’t be endorsing,” Trump said of Dolan. “The Republican Party has too many RINOs!” he added, using the acronym for “Republican in name only.”
A person close to the Dolan family pushed back on the assertion that the name change was the state senator’s idea, saying: “Contrary to the assertions of his opponents, Matt is not involved in the day-to-day operations or management of the team, but it is a family business and Matt stands by his family.”
Trump brought up Dolan again during a late January meeting with top advisers to discuss the midterm landscape, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Then, on Feb. 3, Trump privately met at Mar-a-Lago with Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno, a wealthy business owner in the race. During the two-hour meeting, the two discussed how the GOP must not lose the seat to a “Democrat” in the primary or general election. A person familiar with the meeting said the remark was an implicit reference to Dolan.
That evening, Moreno announced he was dropping out of the primary, attributing his decision to concern that a split Republican field of pro-Trump candidates would make it harder for a Trump ally to win the nomination.
“After talking to President Trump, we both agreed this race has too many Trump candidates and could cost the MAGA movement a conservative seat,” Moreno said in a statement announcing his departure, adding that he would focus his “efforts on supporting the candidate that wins President Trump’s endorsement.”
In the days since, the former president has expressed concern to allies about the quality of the pro-Trump candidates, and he even raised the idea that someone new jump into the race. (That is now an impossibility given that the filing deadline was Feb. 2.) Trump has privately mentioned that he nearly endorsed one of them, former Ohio Republican Party Chair Jane Timken, last year. But he pulled the plug at the last minute after she initially defended Ohio GOP Rep. Anthony Gonzalez after he voted for Trump’s impeachment. (Timken later condemned Gonzalez and called on him to step down.)
The courtship of Trump has been long and intense: Last March, several leading Ohio candidates — Dolan not among them — privately sat down with the former president at his West Palm Beach, Fla., golf club. The meeting devolved into a backbiting, “Apprentice”-style boardroom competition to win him over.
Trump has told those close to him that he could make an endorsement as the race heads down the stretch. However, doing so may present a challenge, given that political advisers across Trump’s orbit are working for different candidates. Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, the two top officials on Trump’s reelection campaign, are helping investment banker Mike Gibbons. Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and Andy Surabian, a top adviser to Donald Trump Jr., are working for Vance. Club for Growth President David McIntosh, another Trump ally, is behind former state Treasurer Josh Mandel.
There are indications that Dolan’s advertisements are paying dividends. A just-completed survey from co/efficient, a Republican analytics firm, shows Dolan moving into third place with 7 percent, behind only Gibbons and Mandel. The figures represent a clear upward trajectory for Dolan: A poll taken by a pro-Vance super PAC that was conducted Jan. 18-20, at the start of Dolan’s ad blitz, put Dolan in a distant sixth place with only 3 percent.
Dolan has more reinforcements on the way. His family, which made its fortune in cable TV, has plowed $3 million into an allied super PAC. The candidate also recently won the endorsement of the Franklin County Republican Party, the state’s most populous county, which will be bolstering him by sending mailers, dispatching volunteers and creating a fundraising committee on his behalf, among other things.
And while Trump is looking to sink Dolan, some of his supporters are not. James Wert, a financial adviser and donor who was Trump’s 2020 finance chair in the state, recently hosted a breakfast reception for the candidate.
“I can assure you that Matt Dolan appreciates and supports the many great accomplishments of the president during his term of office, as do I,” Wert wrote in an email, adding that he had “come to the conclusion that Matt Dolan is best positioned among the field to win both the Republican primary in May and also win the general election in November.”
Whether Dolan can appeal to enough voters in a primary electorate bound to be dominated by Trump supporters is far from certain. According to the survey conducted by the pro-Vance super PAC, more than 90 percent of likely Republican voters approved of Trump, meaning that those closely aligning themselves to the former president may have an easier path to the nomination.
But Dolan supporters disagree. Beth Hansen, a Dolan backer and longtime adviser to former GOP Gov. John Kasich, argued that while the pro-Trump candidates competed for the same slice of voters, Dolan had a clear lane to win over “traditional conservatives.”
“In my opinion is there a winning plurality of voters available to Matt Dolan?” Hansen said. “Absolutely.”
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism