CINCINNATI — When Cindy Cromwell saw the TV ad that Republican Vivek Ramaswamy created with Democrat Dr. Amy Acton’s estranged mother saying she lied about documented childhood abuse, Cromwell’s immediate reaction was “revulsion” — but not shock. Over the years, Cromwell, 82, has had a front-row seat to how the country treats women — and how acceptable it’s become for politicians to abuse women, engage in violence against them, or use it to their advantage, and how it never seems to be disqualifying on its own.
For 20 years, the mother of two was a clinic manager for Planned Parenthood and checked for pipe bombs before work each day. In 2016, she watched the country elect President Donald Trump weeks after an audio tape emerged in which he bragged about how “you can do anything” to women if you’re a star. She observed the lengths to which Republicans went to stymie investigations into Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein after the disgraced financier’s 2019 arrest and indictment for sex trafficking minors.
Then, in 2023, a jury found Trump himself liable for sexual abuse in a civil lawsuit brought by E. So when Cromwell saw the GOP gubernatorial candidate’s ad, she thought: “This is a very calculated assault on women.” Cromwell spoke to The 19th from a weekly protest she organizes and has attended every Saturday since February 2025 at a Cincinnati-area Tesla dealership. That first snowy Saturday, it was a group of five women — they called themselves a “posse” — who met when they were precinct captains and volunteers gathering signatures for a 2023 ballot measure that Ohioans approved protecting abortion rights.
Then, the group reconvened in the early days of Trump’s second presidential term to protest the cuts orchestrated by Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which was initially led by Elon Musk, who owns Tesla. Some 20 months later, the women are still there — and their ranks have grown, with 30 or so present on that particular October Saturday. They’ve become a fixture that passing motorists anticipate as they honk their horns in support.
There are fewer middle fingers these days, too. The pharmaceutical entrepreneur was already trailing Acton by between 4 and 9 points in most reliable nonpartisan polls in the weeks leading up to the ad’s release. Then, a Suffolk University/USA Today poll showed that 72 percent of Ohioans had seen the ad, and among poll respondents, only one said it caused them to switch from supporting Acton to backing Ramaswamy, while seven said it prompted them to defect from Ramaswamy to Acton.
A separate poll commissioned by Republicans and obtained by Axios showed that 86 percent of 800 respondents had seen, read or heard something about the ad — and those who were familiar with it were more likely to vote for Acton by a 2-to-1 ratio. Melissa Kary Miller, a political scientist at Bowling Green State University who studies political behavior and women in politics, cautioned that the “effects of the ad itself are likely to be fairly marginal” because “no election boils down to a single ad, even an ad as outrageous and despicable as the one featuring Amy Acton’s mother.” Early voting in Ohio started on October 6, a full week before the ad was released, so thousands of votes had already been cast by the time it was in front of voters. Plus, Miller said, this is a “textbook pocketbook-voting election, because the economic conditions are not rosy for voters today, so the pocketbook issues will still be the driver and a lot of the people who would be upset by the ad, and think that the ad is vile or inappropriate, and should be taken down, were probably already in the Acton camp or leaning that way.” Polls have consistently shown that affordability tops the list of Ohio voters’ concerns.
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