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Donald Trump Jr. is set to hit the campaign trail to push for Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance as his father's other endorsed candidates with no previous political background flounder ahead of the midterms.
Trump Jr. will join up with the Hillbilly Elegy author, who was endorsed by Donald Trump in April, at three events in Ohio on Wednesday, October 5, starting with a rally in Perrysburg, before moving on to East Caledonia and Columbus.
Wednesday will mark the first time that Trump Jr. has campaigned for Vance during the campaign for November's midterm elections, although he did appear at events supporting Vance leading up to the Ohio GOP primary elections in the spring.
Vance is running against Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan for the Ohio Senate seat in what could be one of the closest of all the races on November's ballot.
In the six most recent polls reported by poll tracker FiveThirtyEight, Ryan and Vance have each come out on top three times, with the most recent Spectrum News/Siena College survey taken between September 18-22, giving Ryan a 3-point lead, 46 percent to 43 percent.
According to FiveThirtyEight's polling average, Ryan is the current favorite to win the Ohio seat over Vance, although the margin is extremely narrow at 0.5 percent (45 to 44.5 percent).
When Vance, a political novice, won the Ohio GOP primary in May, the result was seen as an indicator of the power of Donald Trump's influence over voters and the former president's dream of filling Congress with MAGA-esque candidates willing to support the false claim the 2020 election was rigged potentially coming true.
Trump's success in terms of picking outsider candidates who went on to win their primaries continued with former NFL star Herschel Walker winning Georgia's GOP Senate primary, and celebrity heart surgeon Mehmet Oz clinching the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania Senate.
However, in recent days both Walker and Oz have been hit with controversies that threaten to derail their already struggling campaigns.
Walker, who trailed Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock by 5 points in a recent poll, was recently been accused in an article by The Daily Beast of paying for his then girlfriend's abortion in 2009.
The report, which Walker denied in a statement as a "flat-out lie," arrived as the GOP candidate has vowed to support a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks and has also stated he believes the procedure should not take place under any circumstances, such as rape or incest.
In Pennsylvania, Trump-endorsed candidate Oz has been accused of killing more than 300 dogs while conducting medical research at Columbia University.
While citing 75 studies published in academic journals, Jezebel alleged that Oz oversaw medical experiments on dogs which resulted in the deaths of at least 329 dogs, as well as other animals, between 1989 and 2010.
In a statement reacting to the reports, Oz campaign spokesperson Barney Keller told Newsweek: "Only the idiots at Newsweek believe what they read at Jezebel."
The allegations arrive as Oz has trailed his Democratic rival John Fetterman in the race for the Pennsylvania seat in the last six opinion polls.
FiveThirtyEight also said Fetterman is the favorite to win the seat in November, giving the Democrat a 48.2 percent chance of victory compared to Oz's 42.4 percent.
David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati, told Newsweek that while the former president "loves to brag" about his winning percentage, a number of his endorsed candidates such as Vance are "self-destructing" ahead of November's elections.
"J.D. Vance hasn't run a great campaign. He hasn't defined the race on his own terms. He hasn't raised as much money as he was expected to. He hasn't campaigned with much passion. But he is viable," Niven said. "At this point, Trump may care more about J.D. Vance's political future than J.D. Vance does.
"Vance represents a potential Trump win in the face of the ugly and inept races run by Oz and Walker. Trump needs Ohio because he will likely be desperate to change the subject when anyone points out his unforced errors in Pennsylvania and Georgia."
In a statement ahead of his campaign appearance for Vance, Trump Jr. said: "I've gotten to know JD really well over the past two years and strongly believe he's the type of political outsider we desperately need in the U.S. Senate," Trump Jr. said.
Update 10/5/22, 8:32 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from David Niven.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more