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Republican J.D. Vance warned this week that he may have to drop out of Ohio's Senate race in a final fundraising push with less than a week until Election Day.
In a Tuesday email, Vance asked his supporters to donate to his campaign in "the most important Senate race in America."
"I'm reaching out with some very bad news," the email read. "We missed our final fundraising deadline before Election Day, and if I don't come up with emergency resources in the next 24 HOURS to make up for it, I might as well drop out of the race."
While polling shows Vance with a narrow lead over Democratic Representative Tim Ryan, Ryan has the financial advantage over his Republican opponent, according to recent campaign finance disclosures.
In the first 19 days of October, Ryan raised $9 million, bringing his campaign total to more than $48 million over the course of this election cycle—breaking the state record previously held by Senator Sherrod Brown, who raised $29.7 million for his 2018 re-election campaign.
On the other hand, Vance has raised a quarter of what Ryan's campaign has accomplished with $12.7 million throughout the cycle, although national Republicans, like former President Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have swooped in to pour tens of millions into Vance's campaign.
"Missing the most important fundraising deadline of my campaign was the absolute LAST THING that needed to happen if we're going to stop my radical Socialist opponent, Tim Ryan," Vance said in Tuesday's fundraising email.
"Please don't waste any time! I'm already down in the polls and being outraised by millions!" the campaign added.
FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics both show Vance with a 2-point lead over Ryan, while Wednesday poll tracking from Cygnal's Momentum shows Vance leading 48.7 percent to Ryan's 44.1 percent. Another 7.2 percent of Ohio voters remain undecided.
The recent unreliability of public polls in Ohio has made it a tough state to predict, but polls typically underrepresent GOP support, meaning Vance's win in a state that Trump carried by more than eight points in 2020 could be significantly larger than forecasted.
Nonetheless, Ryan's campaign has remained optimistic about the poll numbers, which are still within the margin of error, and about the number of GOP voters who may be swayed to vote blue in six days.
"There's a lot of Republicans who would never tell a pollster that they're voting for me," Ryan told the New York Times last week. "They don't want to put a yard sign up. They don't want to get in a fight with the neighbor who's got the 'Let's Go Brandon' flag."
About the writer
Katherine Fung is a Newsweek senior reporter based in New York City. She has covered U.S. politics and culture extensively. ... Read more