There it was. The most famous rear end in politics.
It was hard to see under layers of flannel and quilted vest, but that was definitely it.
The one that President Trump has called a “great ass” and a “pile of muscle.” The one that, as a result, starred on “Saturday Night Live” and blew up on TikTok. The one that belongs to Senator Jon Husted, the Republican candidate in a high-stakes election in Ohio, who for a brief moment at a campaign event on Saturday night turned around onstage.
“We couldn’t see it,” said Missy Hartman, 58, a baker at a grocery store.
“I never check anyone’s butt out,” said Jeff Bair, 73, a farmer.
“It’s a middle-aged ass,” said Karen Tetrick, 52, who owns an apartment complex. “I should know, I have one.”
Here is the thing about Mr. Trump’s comments about Mr. Husted’s rear: Online and across Ohio, they have more people talking about the senator than anyone has in the two years since he was appointed to the Senate to succeed Vice President JD Vance.
Mr. Trump, who first complimented the senator’s backside at a campaign rally last month and has not stopped talking about it since, can be mocking, crass and cruel with his focus of physicality. But in this case, he took a candidate who had toiled in relative anonymity and gave him an identity that stuck.
“I’m jealous,” Mr. Vance said last week on Fox News of Mr. Husted’s rump. “The president has never said that about me.”
Mr. Husted, 59, has leaned into the newfound attention. Before his physique — or rather, a description of his physique — went viral, even some hard-core Republican voters in Ohio had hardly heard of him. Many of them thought his opponent, Sherrod Brown, a Democrat and former senator who has been a fixture in Ohio politics since the 1970s, was still in office.
Now at least some of them know about Mr. Husted’s allegedly powerful glutes. What’s his secret? His staff members declined to share his gym routine. They also declined to let a reporter join him for a workout, citing “trade secrets.”
Mr. Trump has claimed the attention on Mr. Husted’s frame has given the senator a 12-point lift in the polls. A new New York Times and Siena University poll shows Mr. Brown, a longtime economic populist, ahead by six points.
“I know nothing about Jon Husted’s body,” said Judy Kruger, 68, a Republican. “It’s not anything to make me vote one way or another.”
Jason Vannette, 50, who on Friday joined a small group of Democratic protesters outside a rally in Toledo for Republican candidates, sized up Mr. Trump’s remarks this way: “It’s weird.”
For his part, Mr. Husted has played up the president’s commentary.
At the event on Saturday in Fairlawn, he arrived with a football in his hand and kept it with him as he took the microphone and addressed the crowd.
“During the campaign, President Trump discovered that I was a college football player,” said Mr. Husted, who played at the University of Dayton nearly 40 years ago. “He’s been talking about it.”
The senator threw the football into a room of attendees eating apple pie.
There was a reason Mr. Trump said he had been “studying” Mr. Husted’s body.
Republicans in Ohio are trying to turn the Senate race, which could decide control of the chamber, into a culture war much like the ones that delivered Mr. Trump and others on the right to power.
On one side, according to Mr. Husted: socialism, transgender athletes and a world in which Mother’s Day becomes “Birthing Person’s Day.”
On the other? In the words of the president, a former football player with “a big piece of muscle” on his backside.
“I don’t do this with men very often,” Mr. Trump said last month at a rally in Youngstown. “I started examining his body.”
He apparently would like to continue to do so aboard Air Force One. Bill Pulte, a top federal housing official, made a poster of Mr. Husted for the president to display on the plane.
So far, the focus on Mr. Husted’s buttocks appears to have mixed results in Ohio — or at least it did among the voters who convened on Sunday at a bar in Geneva to meet candidates and watch the Cleveland Browns game.
“Who cares?” said Donald Goodenow, 66, a lab tech wearing a Harley-Davidson sweatshirt, when a reporter asked him if he had heard Mr. Trump’s comments about Mr. Husted.
Mr. Goodenow said he thought Mr. Brown was in office and planned to vote for Mr. Husted because “by the looks of most of the Democratic Party, they’re out to lunch.”
Ms. Tetrick said she was considering leaving Mr. Husted’s bubble blank, despite broadly supporting Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.
“Sherrod Brown, I do appreciate him over the years — he did care about the people,” said Ms. Tetrick. “Husted, I just don’t know.”
Mr. Husted was not at the bar on Sunday with the other Republican candidates who had taken a bus to mingle with voters at the sports bar.
Perhaps he was at the gym.
Mack Liederman contributed from Toledo, Ohio.
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