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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter steeling itself for the sheer number of D.C. adults planning to dress as “Jon Husted’s ass” for Halloween.

We’re almost there, reader. There are just 10 days until the midterms. After that, and after several years of litigation in Alaska, we may know who controls the Senate. This week, we look at Democrats’ still-awful favorability numbers and ask how much it matters amidst all this. Regrettably, Wedgewood polling is no longer able to survey this for us. Plus: Mississippi??

Let’s begin with this week’s signature unpleasantness.

What matters now: How far could the Vivek blast radius spread?

This keeps sounding like hyperbole in our head, but we can’t think of anything that tops it: Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad this week is the most odious advertisement we’ve ever seen. It doesn’t hit hard at some element of Democrat Amy Acton’s record. It doesn’t hit hard at some personal shortcoming. It’s not demagoguery stoking some broader prejudice among the electorate. It’s just inexplicable cruelty.

The ad features Acton’s birth mother, with whom Acton has been estranged since she was 12, calling her daughter a liar. The backstory, which you’re probably familiar with by now, is that Acton had accused her stepfather of molesting her between the ages of 9 and 12. Her stepfather would ultimately be indicted for rape, but the stepfather jumped bond and fled the state with Acton’s birth mother. This is as repulsive as people get, and Ramaswamy chose to feature this sinister person in a campaign ad. That, in turn, is as repulsive as campaigns get.

We are almost certain—not quite 100 percent, regrettably—that this will backfire on Ramaswamy, who apparently wasn’t doing all that great in his race if he chose this path. There’s an element of edgelord-iness among Republican staff and consultants who’ve come up in the Trump era, who’ve seen Trump’s ability to get away with acts of cruelty and believe the power of the dark arts is boundless. But not every candidate is Donald Trump—Ramaswamy, certainly, lacks any trace of charisma—and voters of all stripes generally don’t like ads in which someone is attacked over her history of being sexually abused as a child.

Should this backfire meaningfully, we’re interested in the fallout beyond just Ramaswamy’s own race.

This is, after all, the biggest political news story in the country less than weeks before an election. And if the ad moves numbers against Ramaswamy, how much of that spills over to the state’s........

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