MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace opened a Monday segment of “Deadline: White House” calling Vivek Ramaswamy’s attack ad against Democrat Amy Acton “abhorrent desperation,” and spoke with the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Chris Quinn about the paper’s rare decision to endorse Acton.
The ad uses Acton’s estranged mother, whose husband was arrested and indicted for raping Acton when she was 12. Since it came out, even a number of Republican lawmakers have disavowed or condemned it. President Donald Trump, who himself has been accused of sexually assaulting or harassing dozens of women, has fiercely defended it as justified.
Wallace noted the Plain Dealer’s editorial board broke its own policy against endorsing in governor’s races, writing: “A candidate who uses childhood sexual abuse as a weapon against the person who endured it has crossed a line that Ohioans should defend, whatever their party. We are better than this.”
Quinn said the policy came from reader feedback. A few months ago, the paper asked readers whether endorsements mattered and got a “tidal wave” of responses telling it to keep doing them, but not for the big races. “We really don’t need you for the president, the governor or the senate,” Quinn said readers told him, so the paper agreed to skip those three.
That, he continued, changed after the ad.
Quinn said readers began writing to say “this is something bigger than a horse race,” and that “this is about your identity as an institution.” By Friday, he said, the volume was “overwhelming,” and he wrote the editorial, circulated it to the board, and “tore up our weekend plain dealer plan.”
The decision was “pretty much unanimous,” Quinn said. “This is too low. We cannot accept it.”
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