By roughly 11 p.m. on Tuesday, it was obvious that Vivek Ramaswamy would not become the next governor of Ohio. That was a blow to Ramaswamy, but also to President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance and the right wing’s politics of cruelty. A few weeks before the election, Ramaswamy pinned his faltering hopes on an ad with Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton. There was a rudimentary logic to the move: If Acton’s mom won’t vote for her, neither should anyone else. But Arthur and Ramaswamy omitted a few key details in the ad. Like the fact that Arthur’s husband raped Acton when she was 12 years old, then fled the state to escape justice. Or that she lost custody of Acton and her brother. She’d even killed kittens, NBC News reported. The Daily Mail interviewed Acton’s former stepsister, who told them her father had also raped her late sister. Arthur remained married to him until his death, and when Ramaswamy called on her she was ready to hurt Acton again.

Vance called Acton a liar and told Republicans to “stop whining” about the ad, but voters didn’t listen. Not in Ohio or anywhere else. In Texas, Ken Paxton & Co. said James Talarico was either gay, or trans, or not gay enough. He was Freako Talarico. The voters of Texas should “transition him out of office,” Paxton said. He might even be vegan. (He’s not.) Talarico won by 12 points, and Abdul El-Sayed won by seven in Michigan, despite racist attacks on his Muslim faith and imaginary radicalism from Republicans and some Democrats. A surrogate for Susan Collins told The New Yorker that her opponent,........

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