CHILLICOTHE, Ohio—President Donald Trump continued his midterm campaign tour with a return to the Buckeye State less than a week before the midterm elections.
“If you can get out to vote, we’re going to have a tremendous victory,” Trump told an audience of approximately 2,500 in the Shoemaker Center on Ohio University’s Chillicothe campus on Wednesday.
He touted his administration’s economic achievements, tax cuts, and border security, calling on supporters to elect conservative candidates.
“We‘ll stop the state of Ohio from being invaded, plundered, ransacked,” Trump said of the Republicans on the ballot. “They’ll stop it from being quite honestly destroyed.”
Employees from the Pixelle Specialty Solutions paper mill attended the event to support Republicans after the party’s leaders intervened to stop private equity owners from closing the plant in 2025, which has employed locals for generations.
With the balance of power in the Senate to be determined, Republicans are stumping to secure appointed Sen. Jon Husted’s victory against Democrat former Sen. Sherrod Brown in a closely contested race to decide who will finish the term vacated by Vice President JD Vance.
Brown served three terms in the Senate before he was ousted by Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) in 2024.
“With all the craziness coming out of Washington, including giving massive tax breaks to corporations and billionaires at the expense of hardworking Ohioans, Sherrod knows he has the ability to do something about it, and that’s why he’s running for Senate,” his campaign said in a statement.
Recent polling shows Brown with a slight lead, though within the margin of error.
Republicans hold a 53–47 seat majority in the upper chamber and find themselves on the defensive in several states, including Ohio, Texas, Maine, and Michigan, among others.
Ohio’s open gubernatorial race pits Republican Vivek Ramaswamy against Democrat Amy Acton and Libertarian Don Kissick to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.
Ramaswamy told the rally crowd that the choice on election day “is a fork in the road between common sense and communism.”
The biotech entrepreneur’s decision to run ads featuring Acton’s mother calling the candidate a liar stirred controversy in recent days, as Acton was allegedly the victim of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s partner and was ultimately removed from her custody.
Polling after the ad was released shifted in favor of Acton, giving the Democrat a slim margin.
A physician, Acton oversaw the state’s COVID-19 response as the director of the Ohio Department of Health.
“I am a doctor, advocate, and problem-solver,” she said in a statement. “I’m running for governor because I refuse to look away from Ohioans who are struggling while billionaires and special interests continue to take our state in the wrong direction.”
Chillicothe, in southern central Ohio with a population of approximately 22,000, was the state’s first capital in 1803 and twice held the distinction.
President George W. Bush was the last sitting president to visit the area when he made an appearance at the Ross County Fairgrounds on the campaign trail in 2004.
Trump won the county with about 60 percent of the vote in 2024.
The president prioritized Ohio with three stops this month, having visited Youngstown on Oct. 12 and Vandalia, near Dayton, on Oct. 3. Vance also campaigned frequently in his home state.
Ohioans will also vote on a measure to determine whether photo identification should be required for future elections, an issue Trump joked to Husted and Ramaswamy “might be just as important as you guys getting elected.”
Multiple protesters disrupted the rally and were escorted out by security.
One man, wearing a blue blazer and a white-and-gold Make America Great Again hat, yelled about the Epstein files.
He timed the outburst when the room was relatively quiet, allowing the crowd to hear his complaints, which prompted the president to respond after the individual was removed.
“I threw Jeffrey Epstein out of a club like 20 years ago,” Trump said, referencing his decision to remove Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2007 for allegations that surfaced of inappropriate behavior with staff.
He dismissed the protesters as paid agitators, repeating claims that they are given payments of $250.
A few dozen individuals held signs, some calling out with bullhorns, in protest on the streets near the rally.
The president’s schedule includes near-daily events, with multiple rallies on some days, including two in Texas on Oct. 27. He will return to South Carolina on Thursday before rallying in Florida, Kansas, and Iowa in the coming days.
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