Gary Click keeps announcing that Republicans are with him. The Republicans keep answering in public.

The most recent to do it is a local councilman, and he did it in the comments of Click’s own campaign page.

“My focus is entirely on serving our community without partisan bias,” Tiffin 3rd Ward Councilman Kevin Roessner wrote. “Engaging with candidates and attending local events reflects standard civic participation, not an endorsement. I exercise independent judgment, decline to enter campaign disputes, and will not be endorsing any candidate in this race. Please adjust your messaging accordingly. Thank you.”

Adjust your messaging accordingly. That is a Republican officeholder in Seneca County asking a sitting Republican state representative, in writing, to stop putting his name in the campaign’s mouth.

599 votes in a 30-point district

Click has carried the 88th District by 25.8 points, 35.6 points and 33.2 points in his three general elections, according to Ballotpedia’s district records. In 2024 he beat Democrat Dianne Selvey 35,367 to 17,762.

In May, in that district, against a first-time candidate, he survived by 599 votes — 6,859 to Eric Watson’s 6,260, out of 13,119 cast. He lost Seneca County 54% to 46%. He held the nomination on the strength of Sandusky County, where he lives.

Nearly half the Republicans who voted in his district voted against him. Three months later, he has offered no public account of why, and no one who left has come back.

The councilman who would not be counted

On Friday, July 3, Click’s campaign page posted a photo captioned: “I am honored to have the support of Tiffin City Councilman Kevin Roessner.” Roessner chairs City Council’s Finance Committee and is listed among elected Republicans by the Seneca County Republican Party.

Later that month Roessner told TiffinOhio.net he had not endorsed Click, said the shirt in the photo was supplied by the campaign for a community event marking Tiffin’s 250th anniversary, and said he keeps his voting choices private. The post stayed up, unedited, for three weeks.

Over the weekend of Saturday, Aug. 8, Click escalated. He posted that “The Democrats have been peddling fake news for the last month that I somehow misled you about the support of Tiffin City Councilman Kevin Roessner,” and added: “A picture is worth a thousand words. No one forced him to wear my T-shirt and hat or to pass out my merch. In fact he was eager to do it. That is support.”

Roessner answered underneath it. Click answered back, publicly, at a member of his own party:

“Kevin, I didn’t ask for an ‘endorsement’ and never claimed one. You could have declined to show support by wearing my gear, walking with the Republicans and passing out campaign materials if you truly wanted to be neutral. I would have respected that more. I would have even respected you more if you just came out and supported my opponent. But backtracking and changing your story to fit the democrats narrative is in itself partisan. If anything I said is factually inaccurate please say so. But making me out to be dishonest is not a neutral act. I value my integrity more than votes or an election. If you support the other candidate, just say so and wear his shirt. But don’t play these coy games.”

The words are worth pinning down, because Click is right about them and it does not help him. His July caption said “support.” It did not say “endorsement.” Roessner denied an endorsement in July and again in August, and never addressed the hat, the merchandise, whether he was eager, or whether he walked with an organized Republican contingent.

So the dispute is real and it is not a misunderstanding. Click’s position is that a Republican who wears the gear owes him the label. Roessner’s position is that he owes him nothing. And a state representative three months out from a general election spent a weekend instructing a councilman from Tiffin to either put on his opponent’s shirt or quit playing “coy games.”

The handshake that never came

Primaries end with a call and an endorsement. This one got the call.

Watson conceded on election night, confirmed he had phoned Click to congratulate him, and stopped there. “The topic of endorsements will not be discussed at this time,” he said, closing with a line that has since aged into a standing threat: “This is not the last the people of District 88 have seen of Eric Watson.”

By late July it was settled. Watson said he would never endorse Click, describing a post-primary meeting that left him unconvinced on data centers and digital identification.

Click took the meeting and did not close it. The challenger listened, disagreed, and put the disagreement on the record.

Graded by his own side and found wanting

The organizational damage came first and none of it has been repaired.

Ohio Gun Owners, which calls itself the most aggressive Second Amendment group in the state, gave Click a C-minus while rating Watson its top-tier candidate, then dropped him to an F five days before Election Day, citing what it described as undisclosed money from gun-control lobbyists.

End Abortion Ohio endorsed Watson after he scored 100% on a candidate survey Click declined to complete. Click called the group “clowns” on Facebook and said he would not take its endorsement under any condition. Self-identified supporters argued with him in his own comment section.

In April, Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor removed Click from its endorsements page, restoring him roughly two hours after this outlet reported it. On primary night, all three down-ticket candidates Click endorsed lost.

Click has spent six years building a fundraising operation aimed elsewhere. A TiffinOhio.net review of his contributions found that less than 14% of his money since 2020 came from individual donors inside the district, with more than 65% from corporate PACs and industry groups. That is the machinery that got him to 52%. It is not the thing that gets a councilman in Tiffin to say a kind word about him.

He is fighting Democrats instead

Whatever Click has done since May, reconciliation with his own party has not been it.

On Friday, Aug. 7, he deleted a post that accused three named Democrats — Seneca County Democratic Party Chair Gina Grandillo, Democratic nominee Aaron Jones, and Fremont City Councilwoman Angie Ruiz — of donating to Watson’s campaign, and issued a correction calling the claim one “made in error.” The correction named no one. State campaign finance filings show none of the three gave a dollar.

“Eric Watson’s campaign finance reports are public. Aaron Jones isn’t on them, I’m not on them, and Angie Ruiz isn’t on them — not one dollar, from any of the three people Representative Click named,” Grandillo said. “He could have checked in ten minutes before he posted, and he didn’t.”

“Incumbents who feel secure don’t spend August posting about their opponents,” she added. “This just adds to a concerning pattern of Gary Click peddling lies and misinformation.”

Watson went at the logic.

“Gary Click loves to lie, but the math doesn’t add up here,” he said. “The number of voters who pulled a Democratic ballot in the district actually increased this year. If Democrats were supposedly crossing over in significant numbers to vote for me in the Republican primary, you’d expect the opposite.”

“Throughout the campaign, Gary portrayed me as ‘further to the right and in the ditch,’” Watson said. “Now he wants everyone to believe Democrats were secretly trying to help elect the candidate he claimed was even further to the right than himself. Which is it?”

And on the result: “The truth is much simpler: nearly half of Republican primary voters rejected Gary Click. We took Seneca County strongly, beating an incumbent state representative in his own backyard, and came within roughly 600 votes of defeating him districtwide despite being massively outspent. That wasn’t Democrats—it was Republican voters who wanted a change.”

The crossover post was the fifth Click claim since February contradicted by church records, archives or named sources. It was the first one he took down.

The pattern he cannot post his way out of

Every one of these fights has the same shape. Click makes a public claim about who is with him. Someone with a name and a title says otherwise. Click responds by questioning their motives rather than withdrawing the claim.

The gun group said he was not what he said he was. The abolitionists said it. The governor’s campaign quietly took his name down. Watson said it after taking a meeting. Roessner has now said it twice, the second time on Click’s own page, and Click’s answer was to tell him to wear the other guy’s shirt.

An incumbent who had made peace with his party would not need to keep introducing his allies to the public. Click is still doing it in August, and they keep declining the honor.

He faces Jones on Tuesday, Nov. 3.