I’m afraid that just won’t do. She made one mistake and it is unforgiveable:
During Jane Timken’s tenure as Ohio’s GOP chair, Donald Trump won the one-time bellwether state by a whopping 8 percentage points. She put 150,000 miles on her car driving to the state’s 88 counties as a surrogate for the president. And she raised a total of $5 million for his two campaigns.
But that sterling record of MAGA support might not be enough to guarantee the former president’s support in her bid for the GOP Senate nomination. Timken’s sin? In her capacity as state party chair, she failed to immediately condemn home-state Republican congressman, Anthony Gonzalez, for voting to impeach Trump in response to the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
At the time, Timken said the congressman had a “rational reason why he voted that way. I think he’s an effective legislator, and he’s a very good person.”
That statement is proving costly. In a Republican Party where a candidate’s viability is measured in degrees of fealty to the former president, the crowded field of primary opponents is insisting Timken has failed a key test.
Days after entering the Senate race in February, Timken changed gears and called on Gonzalez to resign. But despite that — and despite calling both Trump impeachments a “sham” — Timken’s foes and two dozen conservative activists penned an open letter this weekend to the state Republican Party that called on primary voters to reject her candidacy.
“Timken is everything that President Trump stood against: politicians who say one thing and do another,” read the letter, a hard copy of which was also sent to Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Timken defended Anthony Gonzalez’s vote to impeach President Trump, then called for his resignation the moment it became politically toxic for her to stand with Gonzalez.”
You DO NOT excuse someone who said that Trump did not win the election. EVER. That is MAGA treason.