White Nationalist Nick Fuentes Endorses Democrat Amy Acton for Ohio Governor

White nationalist Nick Fuentes urged Ohioans on Thursday to vote for Democrat Amy Acton for governor, with early voting underway across the state.

The far-right streamer posted the all-caps appeal on X early Friday, days after in-person early voting opened across Ohio on Tuesday.

Fuentes directed his followers to the Democrat without qualification. “Early voting has begun in Ohio. VOTE AMY ACTON FOR GOVERNOR,” he wrote.

The flat endorsement escalated a position the far-right streamer first staked out in May, when he told viewers he had become a reluctant Democrat voter.

“We’re gonna have to hold our noses and we’re gonna have to vote Democrat,” Fuentes said at the time, according to the Western Journal, which reported that the commentator declared himself a “non-woke moderate Democrat” and called for President Donald Trump to be impeached.

Fuentes, who is from Illinois, has framed his opposition to Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy around the candidate’s heritage. The 27-year-old commentator claimed Ramaswamy, who was born in Cincinnati to Indian immigrants, “cannot become the governor of Ohio,” according to the New York Post.

The Ohio race is the only one the self-described Groyper leader has said he cares about. “We have to deny Vivek Ramaswamy the governorship,” Fuentes said during a livestream, Fox News reported, after Ramaswamy called him out by name at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest.

Republicans have moved to distance themselves from the streamer. Ramaswamy condemned Fuentes in a New York Times op-ed, and Vice President JD Vance said anyone who attacks his wife, Usha, “can eat s***.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) described Fuentes’s rhetoric as “blatantly antisemitic, racist and anti-American.”

Analysts have downplayed the endorsement’s effect. Dominik Stecula, an Ohio State University political science professor, told NBC4 that far-right support for Acton is unlikely to move voters, calling Fuentes “still a relatively fringe figure.”

The endorsement comes as Ramaswamy, who won the Republican primary in May with Trump’s “complete and total endorsement,” runs in a race that forecasters rate as competitive. Acton, the state’s former health director during the COVID-19 pandemic, ran unopposed for the Democrat nomination in a state that has not elected a Democrat governor in roughly two decades.