10/20/2026
🚨🚨Breaking News: OH Democrat gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s own mother urges voters not to vote for her daughter!🚨🚨
A new ad running in Ohio features Donna Arthur, the mother of Democratic governor candidate Amy Acton, asking voters to keep her daughter out of office. Arthur says Acton has lied about her own childhood and about her opponent, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.
Arthur looks straight into the camera for the entire spot. This is everything she says:
"My name is Donna Arthur and I'm Amy Acton's mother. I worked at Children and Family Service Association, building one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America.
"I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent, and it's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem.
"She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She's lied her entire life.
"My daughter needs help, and she can't help you if she needs help herself. People can change, but first they have to tell the truth, and my daughter still isn't doing that.
"Don't vote for people who lie. Don't let her become your governor. If you think she'll make your life better, you're fooling yourself. It will only get worse."
This is the toughest campaign ad ever run. It is also truthful, and Ohio voters needed to hear it.
Acton has built her campaign around her life story. In 2020, CNN and other outlets told how she moved from place to place as a child with her mother and younger brother. She told a Youngstown TV station she lived in 18 places before age 12. She told the Toledo Blade the family slept in a tent at one point.
Her mother was there for those years, and she says the story is false. Acton moved in with her father in Youngstown around seventh grade, so the childhood in question is the one Arthur saw firsthand. Arthur made similar claims in a published interview back in 2020. Now she is making them on camera, where far more Ohioans will hear them.
A candidate who will stretch the truth about her own past will stretch it about anything. Acton asks voters to trust that she understands struggling families because she lived it. When her own mother says that story isn't true, every other promise Acton makes deserves a second look.
Ohio families already know what happens when they take Amy Acton at her word. In the spring of 2020, she stood beside Gov. Mike DeWine at daily briefings and told Ohioans what they could and could not do. As health director, she signed the statewide stay-at-home order. The night before the March primary, she ordered polling places closed.
Those orders locked down the state. Small business owners watched years of work disappear while big-box stores stayed open. Parents tried to run a kitchen-table classroom and hold down a job at the same time. Grandparents spent their final months behind glass in nursing homes, and many families never got to say goodbye.
Now Acton wants a promotion to the office that signs the state budget, appoints judges, runs every state agency, and speaks for nearly 12 million people.
Her trouble with the truth is matched by trouble at home. In August 2019, months into her job as Ohio's health director, one of her daughters called 911 to report that Acton and her husband were fighting. According to the call, Acton had been "drinking and throwing things." The responding officer wrote that she pulled a mirror off the wall during the argument and broke the glass.
No charges were filed. Ohio voters didn't learn about that night until NBC News reported it this spring, nearly seven years later. Acton spent 2020 telling 12 million Ohioans how to live their lives, and none of them knew.
Acton locked down the state and shut the polls on the eve of an election. Police were called to her home during a domestic dispute. And now her own mother is on television telling Ohio that her daughter has lied her entire life.
Nobody enjoys hearing a mother say these things about her child. Arthur says she loves her daughter, and there is no reason to doubt her. Speaking out against your own child in a statewide race carries a heavy personal cost, and Arthur chose to bear it anyway.
Ohio cannot afford a governor who rewrites her own history when it suits her. The woman who has known Amy Acton longer than anyone is warning that she does.
The polls show how much is at stake. A recent Emerson College survey had Acton at 46 percent and Ramaswamy at 45 percent. In a race this tight, a few thousand voters who care about the truth could decide who runs Ohio for the next four years.
