Sia: Great piece by Andy Borowitz. He is not always a jokester.

The GOP's Worst Nightmare is Coming TrueTBR Midterms HQ

by Andy Borowitz - Sep 6

Republican Jon Husted wishes voters would forget about his association with the First Energy bribery scandal. Good luck with that.

Happy Labor Day weekend—and welcome to The Borowitz Report’s newest premium feature, TBR Midterms HQ. Between now and November, we’ll offer deep dives into the midterm races you need to know about—and make a few predictions.

Today we’ll examine Republican Jon Husted’s increasingly desperate struggle to hang on to his US Senate seat in Ohio—a state crucial to the GOP’s chances of keeping their majority. But our story begins, oddly enough, in Hungary…

On Sunday, April 12, Hungarian voters made history by bringing the 16-year rule of its Trump-loving strongman, Viktor Orbán, to a humiliating conclusion. There were a host of reasons for Orban’s thumping: his vandalism of democratic norms, his coziness with Vladimir Putin, and his inexplicable decision to campaign alongside the human repellent known as JD Vance, notoriously as lethal to political candidacies as he is to Popes.

“We have got to get Viktor Orbán reelected as prime minister of Hungary, don’t we?” the sweaty veep begged a crowd in Budapest. Five days later, they gave him their answer: um, no. The party led by Orban’s opponent, Péter Magyar, captured a supermajority in parliament, cementing Vance’s reputation as electoral kryptonite.

But besides JD’s preternatural talent for nauseating voters, there was another reason Hungarians sent Orbán packing: corruption. On May 26, the Associated Press reported that Magyar’s government would investigate alleged misdeeds of the Orbán regime, including the suspected plundering of public funds. “We will put all corruption and abuses of power on full display,” Magyar declared. “The Hungarian people have the right to know who benefited from their money, who stole their money, who got rich from the vulnerability of the people.”

And this brings us to the incumbent Republican senator fighting for his political life in Ohio. Because the questions Magyar is asking about Orbán are strikingly similar to those dogging Senator Jon Husted.

In 2025, Lieutenant Governor Husted filled the Senate seat vacated by none other than the Hillbilly Effigy, who had just ascended to the position of Vice Chancellor in Trump’s Fourth Reich. But Husted headed for Washington with some heavy political baggage: during his 2017 primary campaign for governor, he had received a whopping $1 million dark-money donation from an electric utility company called FirstEnergy.

Football fans may dimly remember that the Cleveland Browns sold the naming rights of their stadium to FirstEnergy, likely the team’s second-worst decision after giving Deshaun Watson $230 million to be its hapless quarterback. (Bleacher Report named the Watson trade the fourth-worst in all of sports this century. They were being kind.) Away from the gridiron, FirstEnergy has earned a dubious place in Buckeye State history: its executives masterminded what US Attorney David M. DeVillers called "likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio." FirstEnergy shoveled $60 million in bribes to lawmakers to pass House Bill 6, which David Roberts of Vox called “the worst energy bill of the 21st century.” That’s no exaggeration: HB6 showered the company with $1.5 billion in benefits, while costing consumers hundreds of millions in rate hikes. In other words, it was the public-utility equivalent of the Browns’ trade for Deshaun Watson.

Though Husted hasn’t been charged with a crime related to the scheme, his torrid bromance with the FirstEnergy sleazebags is not exactly catnip for Ohio voters struggling to pay their electricity bills.

On April 19, the Associated Press reported, “Husted was recently called to testify as a defense witness in the related criminal trial of two former energy executives, testimony he might have to reprise after a hung jury led to a mistrial in the case in March. A judge in Akron scheduled the retrial to begin Sept. 28, meaning Husted could be back on the witness stand a week before early voting begins for the November elections.”

The same month as the AP report, the highly regarded and nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved Ohio from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up.” And the latest polls suggest that a state the Republicans had been counting on to maintain their Senate majority may be slipping away: a new one released by AARP shows Husted trailing his formidable opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown, by three points.

Brown would like to fatten that lead, so he’s using the FirstEnergy scandal to hammer his flailing rival. “Jon Husted's corruption caused electric bills for Ohio families to jump more than $600 a year,” the Democrat posted on Facebook. Drawing a sharp contrast with his Trump-stained opponent, Brown has said, “People want somebody that will fight back. And fighting back means taking on the drug companies, taking on Wall Street, taking on the insurance companies and taking on big oil. And Jon Husted has sided with them on everything, and that’s a big reason prices keep going up.”

Will Jon Husted follow in the footsteps of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán? I’m not in the business of giving politicians advice, but I have one suggestion for Sherrod Brown: if you really want to seal your victory this November, get Husted to campaign with JD Vance.