At an Amy Acton campaign event over the holiday weekend at the Canfield Fair, Patrick Havas, 38, filmed himself walking toward the Democratic gubernatorial candidate and calling out her name, according to the Mahoning County prosecutor.
Officers with the Ohio State Highway Patrol then “intercepted” Havas as he knocked over two elderly attendees while approaching Acton, law enforcement said. The Acton campaign said Havas “lunged” at her.
Police said Havas had two pistols, a taser and brass knuckles – the Youngstown Vindicator reported that this referenced electrified brass knuckles – which law enforcement officials said he did not brandish or fire. He has been charged with two counts of assault and one count each of disorderly conduct and inducing panic. He has pleaded not guilty.
We are highlighting a few different angles because the incident dominated the race’s news cycle and reflected several elements of the campaign:
Some Republicans call ‘hoax’
From almost immediately after the incident, some on the right have suggested the attack was anywhere from overblown to “staged.” The day of, Laura Loomer, a political activist and influential far-right social media personality, called the whole thing a “hoax” and called Acton “Amy Smollett.” That’s a reference to actor Jussie Smollett, who was accused in 2019 of staging a racist and homophobic incident against himself for attention.
Bill Cunningham, a Cincinnati-area conservative talk radio host, told listeners that the “assassination attempt narrative is falling apart.”
Those distrusting reactions don’t necessarily represent the majority’s take. The Ohio Republican Party and Vivek Ramaswamy – who has faced his fair share of threats – both condemned the incident.
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, for whom Acton once worked as Ohio’s health director, told reporters on Wednesday the skepticism is “total garbage … no one overblew it. Facts are facts. These are not good situations, and they’re anti-democratic,” according to the Statehouse News Bureau.
Signal Statewide received a copy of an incident report from the Ohio State Highway Patrol on Wednesday. It said little other than providing a date, a location and a single sentence: “An individual was apprehended following an incident at a gubernatorial candidate’s speech.” Troopers weren’t wearing body cameras, an agency spokesperson said.
Executive protection
Havas’ arrest came amid rising concerns about political violence in America that prompted state lawmakers to act recently.
A new state law offering an Ohio State Highway Patrol security detail to major-party candidates for governor and lieutenant governor and their immediate families is set to take effect later this month after lawmakers approved it in June.
It’s a scaled-back version of a bill introduced last year after separate gunmen killed a senior Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and conservative activist Charlie Kirk, just a few months apart.
The new law codifies an informal policy that DeWine used to assign OSHP details to Acton and Ramaswamy in May, after they won their parties’ respective nominations. (That protection was in place on Sunday.) It also requires enhanced protection for a candidate immediately after they win the November election.
“I think we viewed it as a ministerial cleanup that makes explicitly legal something that was already being done,” said Rep. Brian Stewart, a Republican in House leadership.
Guns at the fair
Last summer, Jake wrote about an increasing number of shootings and other incidents involving guns at state and county fairs in Ohio. GOP then-Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who was angling to run for governor at the time, had recently penned an advisory opinion prohibiting county fair boards from banning firearms on fairgrounds. These same sites are a top-tier destination for Ohio political candidates, especially now that it’s an election year.
One nugget in that story connects to the Canfield Fair in 2022, when a large crowd devolved into a nexus of different fistfights occurring around the fair and ended with a gun going off. No one was hit.
Hours after the Acton event last weekend, a gun was involved in another incident near, but not inside, the Canfield Fair grounds. The Warren Tribune Chronicle reports that three boys were arrested amid reports of a shooting around 11:30 p.m. that night. A gun was found in the backyard of a house on Fairground Boulevard.
What data centers say they want
A new AI industry-backed report acknowledges that taxpayers have a legitimate grievance when it comes to the generous tax breaks data centers have received amid a construction boom in Ohio.
It calls on policy makers to respond not by eliminating the breaks – but by cutting more finely tailored deals with data center developers.
A recommendation in the report issued this week by the advocacy group, Build American AI, says Ohio should “replace open-ended tax benefits with capped, phased, performance-based agreements.” Examples could involve negotiating shorter-term deals with benefits that only convey when money is actually invested.
The push comes as the industry has fought to convince lawmakers to protect a state tax break that cost the state $1.6 billion in lost revenue in 2025, triple the previous year. A Republican-backed effort to scale it back stalled in June in the face of a concerted lobbying effort from data center companies, such as Google, Meta and Amazon. Each received sales tax exemptions worth $600 million apiece over 40 years under an open-ended deal state officials negotiated in the late 2010s.
The industry is also trying to manage growing backlash from the public, including a burgeoning citizen’s movement to ban data centers at the local and state level. National Republicans grew so alarmed about the situation in Ohio last month that they called on the industry last month to better make its case to the public ahead of the November election. Build American AI, backed by the president of OpenAI and others, told NBC News this week the group has $50 million at its disposal and is making plans to donate campaign money to sympathetic politicians. A separate pro-data center effort backed by the Ohio Business Roundtable also launched on Wednesday, saying Ohio needs to make sure data centers are “done right.”
The Build American AI report references the flip side of Ohio’s ballooning $1.6 billion tax break – it grew as the industry tripled its capital investment in 2025 to $27 billion. The rest of the report repeatedly references the jobs the facilities have created for construction workers and others in the building trades, as well as the downstream suppliers they support.
Republican mayor of Springfield criticizes Trump immigration policy
Last week, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant named Pierre Damas Bel died after he walked in front of traffic. His family described the death as a suicide driven by dehumanizing immigration policies that revoked his legal status and put him into an ankle monitor to track his whereabouts.
Before a policy briefing hosted by the Ohio Mayors Alliance, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican who has found his city on the business end of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation and public shaming campaign, weighed in on the immigration crackdown. He criticized the Trump administration for its cruel enforcement and Congress for its failure to pass a comprehensive immigration law.
“People who come here to work, to raise families, to build a better life, deserve to be treated with humanity and dignity,” he said. “I ask congressional leaders and the administration to ask themselves whether placing ankle monitors on people who are no threat to the public serves any meaningful purpose.”
In the news
Community colleges the targets of fraud through ‘ghost employees:’ Campus leaders asked the state for more help in their work to beat the bad actors, including money for fraud prevention software and a database to help identify repeat offenders. Read more here from Signal Statewide’s Amy Morona.
Sugary beverages ban update: Ohio has paused its ban on the sales of sugary beverages using SNAP. The restrictions were set to go into effect on Oct. 1. Find out more here from Celia Hack.
Prosecutor: No felony charges for man accused of lunging at Acton: Mahoning County Prosecutor Lynn Maro, a Republican, told reporters that Patrick Havas never got close to Acton, David Skolnik reports for the Youngstown Vindicator. Maro also said there was no evidence that Havas had threatened Acton. Read more here.
Possible final edition of Blade announced: The owner of the Toledo Blade, which employs a Statehouse reporter, announced this week that the newspaper will close on Dec. 31 if it can’t find someone to buy the company. According to the Associated Press, Block Communications cited financial issues, similar to the explanation the company gave when it announced plans to close the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette earlier this year, although the Pittsburgh newspaper remained open after it was sold to a nonprofit news publisher. Read more here.