Tucker Carlson Says Ukraine Isn’t Important. These Key GOP Voters Beg to Differ.

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Ukrainian Americans are an important bloc of voters in Ohio, whose Senate race this year could help decide which party controls the chamber.

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But isolationist strains in the GOP have rattled some in the community. In 2020, Donald Trump won the heavily Ukrainian Cleveland suburb of Parma — despite his rhetorical resistance to U.S. interventionism and skepticism toward NATO, local Ukrainians point out that he did more than the Obama administration in aiding their ancestral country with lethal weapons against Russian aggression. But other Cleveland-area Ukrainian Republicans publicly backed President Joe Biden.

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“Isolationism absolutely, absolutely is not something the community grasps or will ever support,” Futey says.

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If the Senate choice is between an engagement-oriented Democrat like Rep. Tim Ryan, who has called for sending Ohio-built tanks to Poland to deter Russia, or a Tucker Carlson-style Republican like Mandel, Marko doesn’t know whom he will pick. He regularly watches Carlson’s show, on which the host has declared Ukraine “strategically irrelevant to the United States,” questioned why the United States should side with Ukraine over Russia, and wondered “why the emphasis [in Washington] on Ukraine’s borders and not ours?” Marko says this kind of rhetoric has “gotten his nerves going a little bit,” and that he’s seen Republican friends condemn it on Facebook.

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