In her bid to be Ohio’s next governor, Amy Acton sometimes warns audiences that her voice may trigger feelings.
It’s the voice millions of Ohioans heard live from their televisions every afternoon at 2 p.m. during the earliest, darkest days of the coronavirus pandemic, as Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, and Dr. Acton, serving as his health director, delivered daily briefings on the virus.
Now Dr. Acton is the presumptive Democratic nominee to succeed Mr. DeWine, and her voice provides a test for the political moment, six years postpandemic. Her service to Mr. DeWine, who is term-limited, could be a perfect calling card in an increasingly Republican state, marking her as a pragmatic moderate willing to work across party lines.
But that service — running the Covid response — provokes intense emotions. In her race against the presumptive Republican nominee, Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire entrepreneur and one-time presidential candidate, the question is, which feelings will prevail?
To many, Dr. Acton’s voice in the daily briefings was firm but reassuring. She inspired bobblehead dolls, little girls dressing up like her in white lab coats and admiring profiles in national publications. An animated tribute video substituted “DeWine and Amy” for the stars in the opening sequence of “Laverne & Shirley.” (“We’re gonna make our state pull through/Doin’ it our way!”)
To many others, hers was the crushingly cautious voice of Dr. Doom. She issued a stay-at-home order to the state’s 11 million residents after three people had died. The state was the first to close its schools. As lockdown orders continued, angry small-business owners, anti-vaccine activists and men brandishing handguns demonstrated outside her house. Legislators tried to impeach her and called her antisemitic slurs (she is Jewish) at the same time they likened her orders to Nazism.
Ohio, once a swing state, is challenging enough for any Democrat: It voted twice for Barack Obama, but no Democrat has won statewide since 2018. The state has elected only one Democrat as governor in the last 35 years.
And running as the person who ran Covid response is a decidedly mixed blessing. Dr. Acton has wide name recognition and offers herself as a public servant — a doctor, not a politician. But for some people in Ohio and across the nation, the pandemic turned public health officials into public enemies, accused of misinformation, killing businesses and causing long-lasting damage to children shut out of school.
“People hate that time in their life, they absolutely hated it,” said Jai Chabria, Mr. Ramaswamy’s chief strategist. “They also don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to be reminded of it. The problem for her is, that’s who she is.”
Dr. Acton said she believed her experience with Covid gave her the kind of deep connection with Ohioans that is forged in trying times.
“Talking to them honestly, doing the things we did in that moment, created this bond,” she said.
“Even hearing my voice brings back that sense” with voters, she added.
Ohio showed success during Dr. Acton’s time in the Covid hot seat; a month in, the state had 193 deaths, while neighboring Michigan, with a smaller population, had 959. But in a preview of a campaign that promises to be ugly and the most expensive in state history, Mr. Ramaswamy has accused Dr. Acton of lying about death rates to justify lockdowns that damaged the state’s economy.
He has mocked her for tearing up in briefings as the death toll rose, and for quitting her position three months into the pandemic — Dr. Acton says she stepped down because the Republican-led legislature was asking her to sign reopening orders that would have violated her Hippocratic oath to do no harm.
314 Action, an organization that works to elect scientists and doctors, counts 35 doctors, nurses, or public health professionals who are not incumbents and are running as Democrats for the House, Senate or governor. They are inspired in part by the Trump administrations cuts to health care and scientific research budgets, and the anti-science, anti-vaccine bent of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Mr. Trump’s top health official.
Dr. Acton is betting that the nation is ready to shake off its political long Covid and vote instead on the rising costs of health care, heat and housing, and the turmoil of the Trump presidency.
“People are exhausted,” she said. “They are exhausted at the hate, the chaos and vitriol, they’re exhausted of being pitted against one another, and they are struggling.”
In Covid briefings, Dr. Acton implored Ohioans not to be afraid. She uses the same language now.
“We can’t be afraid of this time in history,” she said in an interview. “This is a movement of people refusing to look the other way.”
Dr. Acton, 60, grew up in Youngstown, a Northeast Ohio city synonymous with industrial decline. She was homeless for a time; she and her brother were what she calls “frequent fliers” with child services and lived in a tent for a winter. At 12, after accusing her stepfather of sexual abuse, she went to live with her father. With a new school and new stability, she went on to enter an accelerated medical school program straight out of high school. She is married to a 43-year public school teacher.
Her story has drawn a contrast with Mr. Ramaswamy, a 40-year-old pharmaceutical entrepreneur and finance executive, especially among rural and working class voters.
“Rural Ohioans want their candidates to be authentic, they want them to be genuine, they want them to be honest, and Amy exudes that,” said Chris Gibbs, a soybean, corn and cattle farmer who led the Shelby County Republican Party until 2015, and now leads the county’s Democratic Party.
“As far as Covid,” he added, “to me, that’s ancient history.”
Chris Mabe, a corrections officer and president of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, said he was impressed with Dr. Acton’s ability to connect with even skeptical voters after he noticed her lingering to talk to some of his members after her appearance at a recent union conference in Southeastern Ohio.
Some were in tears, and he presumed they were giving her an earful about her pandemic response. In fact, he said, they were “saying, ‘thank you for being there.’”
Tears — bipartisan tears — are common at her events. Dr. Acton herself says she has “never gotten out of a room without someone crying.”
But beyond the “R” next to his name, Mr. Ramaswamy likely will enter the general election after Ohio’s May 5 primary with a huge advantage. He has raised nearly four times as much money as Dr. Acton, $19.8 million to date, compared with her $5.3 million.
By necessity, Dr. Acton is running a scrappy campaign. She has questioned his commitment to Ohio after he moved his financial services firm to Dallas from Columbus just before announcing his gubernatorial campaign. She has hammered him for using his jet to fly to campaign events around the state (he defends it as the most efficient way to reach its 88 counties) and for saying Medicare and Medicaid were “mistakes.”
And both she and some of Mr. Ramaswamy’s detractors on the far right have used the candidates’s own words against him, especially his contention that American culture has “venerated mediocrity.”
At the risk of reinforcing pandemic-era references, Dr. Acton calls herself the “Ted Lasso of politics” — the naïve underdog who walks onto the job not understanding the forces arrayed against him, then charms adversaries into fans.
“In the end, as the plot unfolds, it wasn’t naïve,” she said. “He could see the future, he could believe and he had had enough life experiences where he had seen things turn around. He had seen people do more than they think they are capable of doing.”
Kate Zernike is a national reporter at The Times.
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