The super PAC paying for the ads you see on Ohio TV has $25.8 million in the bank. Almost none of that money came from Ohio.

TiffinOhio.net reporter Bonnie Lucas pulled the filings on V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims — the outside group boosting Vivek Ramaswamy's run for governor. Here's what she found. The group raised $41.7 million this cycle. Five men gave $37 million of it. That's roughly 88 cents of every dollar. Not one of the five lists an Ohio address.

Then she went looking for that spending in Ohio's own public records. On the biggest line — a nearly $8 million payment for ads — the space that's supposed to say what the money was for is blank.

That's the story. A handful of billionaires from out of state are paying for the ads that will decide who runs Ohio, and Ohio's own campaign finance system doesn't tell voters that they exist or what they bought.

Who is actually paying

The five donors, straight from the federal filings:

• Jeff Yass — $20 million, given across three separate checks. He's a Pennsylvania investor who co-founded the trading firm Susquehanna International Group. The Philadelphia Inquirer describes him as the richest man in Pennsylvania and one of the biggest political donors in the country — his firm owns a roughly 15% stake in TikTok.
• Ross Stevens — $6 million. A New York financier.
• Ratmir Timashev — $5 million. Lists a Connecticut address.
• Elon Musk — $5 million, written in May.
• William Ackman — $1 million, written in June.

Look at that Musk check for a second. Ramaswamy co-founded DOGE with Elon Musk. DOGE went on to target Social Security offices in Ohio for closure and cancel $29 million in research grants at Ohio State. Ramaswamy walked away from DOGE before the damage landed. Now the man he built it with is writing seven-figure checks to make him Ohio's governor.

Add it up: five men, none of them Ohioans, put up 88% of the money. The Ohio Republican Party — the actual state party, made of actual Ohioans — is the largest outside contributor to his campaign committee, at $513,069. Jeff Yass alone gave about forty times that.

What they bought, and when

V-PAC reported $8,211,114.50 in spending described as opposing Amy Acton. Every dollar of it landed inside a single month: June 2026. One payment to a media firm on June 5 came to $7,963,282.

Over the whole cycle, the same group spent about $6 million on ads supporting Ramaswamy.

Read those two numbers together. V-PAC spent more tearing down his opponent in one month than it spent building him up in the eighteen months before it. That's not a group that likes its candidate. That's a group that has looked at the polling and concluded the only path left is to make the other person unacceptable.

The polling explains why. The Cook Political Report moved Ohio's governor race from Lean Republican to Toss Up in July. Cook editor Jessica Taylor's write-up quoted a Republican source saying, "This was the wrong guy to roll the dice with in this political environment." Taylor added that Ramaswamy has been "unable to bolster his own image so far."

When you can't sell yourself, you buy attacks. With other people's money.

The blank space in Ohio's records

Here's the part that should bother every Ohio voter, no matter who they're voting for.

V-PAC is a federal committee spending in a state race. Ohio law lets it do that, with conditions: it has to register with the Secretary of State before it spends a dime here, and then file the pages of its federal reports that itemize Ohio spending.

Notice what that catches — and what it misses. The state gets the spending. The state does not get the donors. There is one piece of the law that would surface donor names at the state level, and it only reaches contributors who are Ohio residents. None of the five men bankrolling this operation lives in Ohio. So an Ohioan searching the state's database will never learn that a Pennsylvania investor supplied nearly half the money, or that Elon Musk wrote a $5 million check in May.

Now the second problem. Ohio's file on V-PAC lists $14 million in Ohio-related spending. Just over $10 million of it — including that $7,963,282 media payment, the single biggest line in the whole file — shows up with the purpose field empty. The federal version of the exact same transaction says what it was: media opposing Amy Acton.

And the switch is easy to date. Every Ohio entry through June 17, 2025 states a purpose. Every entry from July 17, 2025 onward is blank. The change happened months before the anti-Acton buy and covers all of it.

So a voter who does everything right — who goes to the state's own public database instead of taking a TV ad at its word — sees eight million dollars walk out of a super PAC in June with nothing at all indicating it was spent attacking a candidate for governor.

Nineteen days

There's no faster route through the federal side either. V-PAC hasn't filed the near-real-time independent expenditure reports this cycle — those apply to spending against federal candidates, and this is a governor's race.

Because Ohio ties its deadline to the federal one, both records next update on the same day: October 15, covering July, August and September.

That is nineteen days before the election.

Ohioans will sit through two and a half more months of paid television — funded by five men who don't live here — before any public record says what any of it cost or what it was for.

This is a pattern with him, not an accident

Ramaswamy would like you to think the super PAC is somebody else's operation. Fine. Look at what his own campaign does with disclosure.

The Ohio Capital Journal found that his campaign put more than $509,000 on a credit card and reported it as a lump monthly bill — no vendors, no purchases, just a number. Ohio's rules say itemize each transaction. He itemized down to a $1,250 fife and drum corps payment when he ran for president in 2024. Running for governor, he stopped.

The man who co-founded a project sold to the public as a crusade for transparency in government spending will not show Ohioans his own receipts.

And the money that is disclosed doesn't look much better. Utility, gas, oil and solar PACs gave his campaign $97,468 while Ohio electricity bills climbed — and Ohio's governor appoints every member of the commission that sets those rates.

The governor who actually made the decisions says the ads have it wrong

The load-bearing claim in all of these ads is that Amy Acton shut down Ohio during the pandemic.

Acton did sign the orders. She was state health director, and she signed under emergency power the governor handed her. But the governor who handed it to her has said, on camera, exactly who decided what.

"The decisions that were made during COVID, they were my decisions, so no one should blame someone else if they don't like it. The buck stops with me."

That's Mike DeWine, talking to NBC4 last December. He went further in the same interview: "I got advice from her. I got advice from people around the country... but they were my decisions. They were not her decisions."

PolitiFact reached the same conclusion in May, rating Ramaswamy's ad claim that Acton "called off Ohio's election at the last minute" Mostly False — DeWine made the call, multiple Republican officials backed it, and the primary was rescheduled, not cancelled.

Then, on January 7, 2026, DeWine endorsed Ramaswamy. He has never taken back what he said about the pandemic decisions being his.

Sit with that. A super PAC is spending eight million dollars on an argument that requires Ohio's sitting Republican governor to be wrong about his own decisions — on behalf of the candidate that same governor endorsed.

We've written before about what these ads leave out: while Ramaswamy attacks Acton for pandemic overreach, he was pitching mandatory antibody testing and a national immunity registry in 2020, his company was lobbying Washington on COVID drugs — and he later paid a Wikipedia editor to scrub his service on Ohio's COVID-19 Response Team from his page.

The method

The newest ad recycles the old material and adds two new items: a CDC communications training Acton missed, and a clip where she jokes she can't work her TV remote.

Her campaign says she missed the training because she'd fractured her hip and was in prescribed physical therapy. The remote-control line comes from a clip where she describes being too consumed by the pandemic to keep up with internet trends.

An operation sitting on $25.8 million does not reach for a joke about a remote control because the joke is damaging. It reaches for it because the real material ran out.

Acton campaign manager Philip Stein put it this way:

"Vivek Ramaswamy and his allies are grasping at straws as they continue to spread desperate lies about Dr. Acton."

The ads don't have to be false to be misleading. They only have to leave things out — the hip fracture, the context of the clip, the governor's own words. So far, that's been enough.

What this means for you

If you live in Seneca County, or anywhere else in northwest Ohio, your vote gets counted in a race the forecasters now call a coin flip. A few thousand votes across a handful of rural counties could be the whole margin.

And that margin is being fought over almost entirely on television, paid for by five men who don't live in your state, in a race where your own state's public record doesn't say what the ads were for.

You'll find out on October 15. Nineteen days before you vote.

Ohio deserves a governor who doesn't need $37 million from out-of-state billionaires and a blank line in the public record to win.

Source

Read the full fact check at TiffinOhio.net: Fact check: Ramaswamy super PAC misleads voters with Acton attacks over CDC training, TV remote by Bonnie Lucas. Photo: YouTube, via TiffinOhio.net.