The Campaign Ad Galvanizing the Midterms

When you spend enough time around great companies, you notice that the best ones treat trust as a growth strategy, not a box to check. Vanta helps companies build and prove trust from day one. Its agentic trust platform connects compliance, risk, and trust at enterprise scale. Vanta delivers a 526% return on investment over three years and pays for itself in just three months. Learn why over 16,000 of the fastest-growing companies use Vanta at Vanta.com. It's Thursday, October 22nd. Imagine the person who's caused you the most pain in your entire life. Now imagine your political rival putting them in an ad. We start here. A campaign video causes outrage in the Ohio governor's race. What appeared to be a political attack ad featuring Amy Acton's mother. Now other Republicans are being asked, Russia releases an American prisoner, but does that make Vladimir Putin a humanitarian? When you look up Vladimir Putin in the dictionary, you don't normally see humanitarian next to his name. The new controversy emanating out of Moscow and a hack of a major company is bad. This vulnerability could affect most of the websites in the world. It's a race against the clock because there's pretty good evidence that how to execute this attack is out there. How a catastrophe waiting to happen was finally uncovered. From ABC News, this is Start Here. I'm Brad Milkey. There are lots of things that can swing a campaign. One is what pollsters would call the fundamentals. Things that are kind of baked into the race, like what party is in charge, what's the national economic picture, what are the demographics of the electorate. Those are the fundamentals. The candidates matter too, of course. How do they address certain issues? How do voters feel about them? How smartly do their campaigns devote their resources? Between the candidates and the fundamentals, that pretty much decides an election. But then you have another possibility. An October surprise. Breaking news in the FBI's new line of questioning into Hillary Clinton's email server. An October surprise is an event that pops up that has the power to change voter sentiment, at least for a while. It doesn't have to be the most important issue of a campaign, but the closer it is to election day, the less time either candidate has to shape how voters will interpret it. Well, in just the last few days, we have watched the Ohio governor. And it's not just the governor's race, an important race, but maybe not at the top of everyone's list, ignite passions across the country. And it has made people ask whether a simple campaign ad might have just reshaped an election. ABC's Diana Paulson is one of our intrepid campaign journalists on the road who's been covering this for us. Diana, this is the race between the Democrat Amy Acton and the Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. A lot of people know him from his presidential run, but they're running for Ohio governor. What the heck happened here? Vivek Ramaswamy, the former presidential candidate businessman, is running against Dr. Amy Acton, who led the state's health department during COVID. This is a state Trump won by 11 points two years ago, but it's actually a much closer than I expected governor's race. We rank it as a toss up. Polling shows really, really close race. My name is Donna Arthur and I'm Amy Acton's mother. On Monday, this video started circulating on social media, what appeared to be a political attack ad featuring Amy Acton. It's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. Urging voters not to vote for her and saying that she's a liar who doesn't care about Ohioans and says she's going to make everything better, but will just make everything worse. Whoa. So it's her own mother in the ad? What was the response from Amy Acton? The response from Amy Acton was pretty simple. I haven't seen my birth mother. Since I was 12, she was removed from our custody. I know my team, everyone's been sharing court documents from that time. Amy Acton hasn't seen her mother in 48 years. The last time she says they saw each other is when she was in a courtroom testifying against her mother's husband as saying that he raped her. Amy Acton's mother was stripped of custody of her child. She went to live with her father and Amy Acton's mother stayed married to that man who her daughter had accused of molesting her. Until he died in 2004. My opponent is a serial liar. It feels almost like a projection at this point. You can see what he did during his presidential run. He is a man who's gone around saying my childhood is just something that was done to me. I'm complaining about. Amy Acton's response was was immediate and visceral. She released an ad with her brother who talked about witnessing this abuse, not just by her mother's husband, but by her mother. I'd neglect frequent visits to child social services. All of this throughout their childhood. I mean, I think it was a horrible and hideous thing to do, a sad thing, and I feel like it was an exploitive thing to do. But wait, so if we're talking about a moment that would be the most traumatic event of somebody's life, this is ostensibly calling into question not just Amy Acton's character, but like her very recollection of the trauma from the person who would have a lot to gain by saying, no, it never happened like that, actually, who I can't imagine. Like. Like being your own mother and then having them thrust back in your face after years of not wanting to talk to them. And by the way, if there was any doubt over whether this happened, I mean, Amy Acton has brought receipts about the event from back in the day. We've seen court records. We've seen newspapers from the time that talk about this case in detail. You know, this is an incredibly well-documented case of child abuse. He was indicted. He was arrested. He didn't end up being convicted because, as her own mother says, she fled the state to avoid the criminal charges against her. Her husband. So then how is the Ramaswamy campaign dealing with it? Did they put out the ad? So at first it wasn't clear because this ad was disseminated through social media. It didn't have the little thing at the end where you're required to say, you know, I'm so-and-so and I approve this ad. And so for a day, Ramaswamy is kind of dodging the question of, like, is this your ad or isn't your ad? But at a campaign event on Tuesday, he said straight up, it is an ad from our campaign. He said voters deserve to know about my opponent's background. They deserve to hear from the. People closest to my opponent who say not to vote for her. To be clear, this is not new. Her mother has spoken out for years. And I don't know Amy Acton's mother and I've never met Amy Acton either. What I do know is that Amy Acton has been repeatedly and serially dishonest. And he defended using Acton's mother this way. Well, so then we know how Acton feels. We know how Ramaswamy is responding, basically saying, like, judge for yourself. Like, the ad has still been running. But, I mean, how are voters responding? And I guess how are other Republicans responding? Are they being. Are they being dragged into this? A lot of immediate backlash. The problem to begin here is that Ramaswamy went into this entire situation with the majority of Ohio voters not liking him in the first place. He has a huge favorability issue. Polling from earlier this month found 46 percent of Ohio voters had an unfavorable opinion of him. And I think this is reinforcing a lot of those negative beliefs about him and making him look like someone who's willing to do whatever to throw as much mud as he wants. The response from his fellow Republicans on the ticket has been pretty muted. Senator John Husted, who's also running in a really close race against former Senator Sherrod Brown, simply said, I would not have run the ad, but didn't respond to any of our follow-up questions about whether he thought Vivek should stop running the ad, whether he condemned the ad, and whether or not he thought Acton was, you know, as this ad describes, a liar about her childhood experience. Governor Mike DeWine, who was Amy Acton's boss when she was health director for Ohio, has not replied to any of our requests for comments, says he doesn't have a comment on this. And while we haven't heard a lot from Ohio officials, the man we've seen really defending Vivek Ramaswamy the strongest is the vice president. I have to admit that I'm a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States. He appeared on the campaign trail on Wednesday in Cincinnati and defended this ad, saying he thought Vivek, you know, it took a lot of guts, it took a lot of audacity to run this kind of ad, and defended going after Amy Acton this way. Yeah, and if we're talking about voter issues, I mean, sex abuse, specifically childhood sexual abuse, has been so much at the forefront of the American consciousness, not just this year, but the last several years. You wonder how that will land with voters in Ohio at this crucial moment of the race. Diana Paulson covering it all up close. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next up on Start Here, Stephen Hubbard is grateful, but even he's not using words like this. We're back in a bit. Next up on Start Here, Stephen Hubbard is grateful. head to abcsecretsavings.com slash start here and start sleeping easier today. That's abcsecretsavings.com slash start here. on investment over three years and pays for itself in just three months. Learn why over 16,000 of the fastest growing companies use Vanta at Vanta.com. There's no question that President Trump has been gentle when discussing Russia in recent weeks. If anything, he's had tougher words for Ukraine, questioning whether their leader should even remain in power. The question, of course, is why? What does Trump stand to gain from being nice to Russia here? A simple answer would be, well, he wants this war to end. He thinks Russia is going to win it anyway. Why prolong it any longer than necessary? Another reason could be energy prices. The more Russia and Ukraine bomb each other's infrastructure, the higher global prices are going to go. Not great for a U.S. president whose party is already facing angry voters. But there are lots of nuances at play here. Like on a given day, Russia could dangle the carrot of a trilateral meeting with China or perhaps the stick that is its treatment of Americans in Russian prisons. Vladimir Putin is known to make use. Of all the pressure points available to him. Well, yesterday, Russia freed an American citizen named Stephen Hubbard, a retired schoolteacher that had been captured by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine. Now, Hubbard's family is obviously thrilled to have him back. But some critics pointed out that the Trump administration went even further than it needed to here. No one needed to call Vladimir Putin a humanitarian. But that's exactly what Steve Witkoff, President Trump's envoy to Russia, did. Let's go to ABC's foreign correspondent, Patrick Rievel. Patrick, you don't just follow the U.K. You follow the case specifically of Stephen Hubbard. Who is he? Hi, Brad. Stephen Hubbard is a retired American teacher. He's 74. And he was living in eastern Ukraine for almost a decade when Russian troops crossed the border in 2022 and quickly overran the town where he'd been living. And at that point, he fell into Russian captivity. We have spoken with former Ukrainian prisoners. And they said he was a prisoner of war, who say they spent time with Hubbard. And they describe him being treated just like them, severely mistreated, being tortured, that the people there were being starved, that he was beaten. They beat everyone, of course. And I would say they were especially cruel to the American because he was an American. They put him on trial and they accused him of fighting for Ukraine and said he was a mercenary. And they convicted him and sentenced him to life in prison. to more than six years in prison. Now, the Ukrainians, as well as Hubbard's family, say it's not true that he was fighting. They say he was a civilian. It's just a lie. It's an excuse to kidnap Americans and not just torture them and beat them and do all this, but also for pawns. Steve is nothing but a pawn for Russia. By all accounts, he was just an older man living in Ukraine when he was taken. But clearly, he became, yet again, a political pawn for Vladimir Putin, who decided that he was useful as someone who could be traded for something with the United States. Well, the trading is the question here, because what was interesting about this to me was this was not a prisoner exchange like the ones we've seen with other Americans, where, well, you give us 10 of our spies back for your one American tourist or whatever. This was Putin saying, well, take him. Why did he do that, I guess? Yeah, this is unusual, although it's increasingly becoming a pattern with the Trump administration. The other day, I was talking to Vladimir Putin about settling his war with Ukraine, which I think we're getting closer to, by the way, maybe now the closest we've been. But I mentioned, could you let Stephen Hubbard out, please? And he agreed to do it. The Russians seem to have realized that releasing American hostages, of who they now have had a growing number, is a very simple way to, keep the Trump administration sympathetic to them. They know that it's an easy win for President Trump, that President Trump can wave this person around and say, look, my relationship with Russia is great. Only I can achieve this. I did it. It really took place on a phone call at the end of last week with President Putin. So we appreciate it very much. Stephen Hubbard was someone who just fell into their hands, who they mistreated, and giving him up cost them absolutely nothing. He was not a key American spy or something like that. I don't think, I don't think, I don't think anyone believes that this was a humanitarian gesture by Vladimir Putin. Clearly, they thought by releasing Hubbard that this would gain them something. But that's what the word humanitarian came up. Steve Witkoff, the president's envoy over in Russia, told Putin he's a humanitarian for doing this. We're talking about the same Vladimir Putin, right, Patrick? The one that invaded a neighboring country and killed women and children to do it? Yeah, this was a pretty extraordinary moment and has obviously attracted a lot of criticism in the US, obviously in Ukraine as well, You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir. I mean, to call Vladimir Putin a humanitarian who is not only waging an aggressive war, but currently is in the process of bombing Ukrainian cities, trying to take out their heating and power, specifically so that the civilian population will suffer and that Ukrainian cities will become unlivable. Obviously, when you look up Vladimir Putin in the dictionary, you don't know. You don't normally see humanitarian next to his name. And I think, you know, obviously the Trump administration is making the argument that by speaking nicely with Putin, by playing nice, and we've seen this repeatedly from Steve Witkoff when he's gone to the Kremlin, they believe that this is ultimately making Putin more disposed to compromise. How is leaving those sanctions on Russia to secure the release of Hubbard not giving something to Russia? Are you a stupid person? Who do you work for? ABC News. You're a stupid person. But at the moment, what we see in reality is that each time the Trump administration makes these unilateral concessions, for example, again, lifting sanctions recently, the Russians don't moderate their demands and, in fact, have been escalating their attacks on Ukraine, trying to put more pressure because the message the Russians are receiving is that the U.S. is turning away from Ukraine and, therefore, Vladimir Putin believes that he's winning. You know, you're seeing criticism, people saying they're embarrassed to see, you know, you're seeing criticism, but there's also the real question of how effective is it? I think what is interesting is it is effective in getting the Russians to free Americans because the Russians know this is an easy win. But is it effective in trying to move the war towards a conclusion? I think that's much more doubtful. Right. It seems like Putin's goal is, like, can we just go back to being treated like a normal country? Like, you might not like us, but you recognize us. You recognize our legitimacy. You deal with us on the regular. That is what a lot of countries have been avoiding. And the long term, I think, the longer that this war goes on, you wonder if that is a possibility, whether for President Trump or for other countries. Patrick Rievel, covering Moscow, as always. Thank you. Thanks, Brad. It was a big tech story yesterday. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, was ordered to pay $25 billion, that's billion with a B, for its part in a privacy breach back in 2016. Should be a clear warning to everyone in big tech. Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta, social media companies, This was a case that 48 other states had settled with Meta once upon a time, but New Mexico said it was pressing ahead on its own. Well, not only did New Mexico win, they've now got $25 billion to spend, pending appeals, of course. An unambiguous message to anyone in Silicon Valley and beyond that New Mexico will stand strong and go to court and go to trial, unlike other states. And yet, to web programmers, that was not even the biggest tech headline of the day. No. That came when U.S. authorities issued an urgent warning to websites, saying a security flaw had been discovered that could affect 70% of the world's websites. Let's bring in ABC's Matthew Glass, who covers technology. Matthew, I didn't know 70% of the world's websites had anything in common to exploit. Apparently, a lot of them run on this coding system called PHP. What is it? And how are we all apparently using it without knowing it? Yeah, absolutely. So PHP is one of the most widely used tools for building dynamic web pages. If you think of a website like a restaurant and you're the customer, your browser might be the dining room. So a static web page that doesn't use PHP, that's just what we call HTML, the code that allows you to see what you see on a page, that would be like a buffet. Everybody gets the same food. It's ready-made. Everybody gets that option. But what PHP allows websites to do, think of it as a chef. So you order something unique, whether that means logging in or checking an order or searching something, that information is sent to the chef. The chef prepares all the ingredients, from the refrigerator, puts together this amazing meal just for you, delivers the meal to you, and you get this custom experience. Well, PHP is the web tool that allows websites to deliver that custom experience, like a custom meal. Otherwise, everybody would just see the same thing. Now, there's other ways to do that, but PHP is one of the most popular. And as you said, it accounts for 70% of the internet. And WordPress, one of the most popular web platforms, is about 40% of that. And so many people may not know PHP, but they have, heard of WordPress. I was going to say everyone who's ever had a personal website It's like, oh, yeah, I used WordPress for that and a lot of other much bigger companies as well. So what was the actual warning, though? Like, what was this vulnerability that could have been so catastrophic? So there was actually two vulnerabilities that they identified, and both of them allow unscrupulous actors to take control of the server and do what they call remote code execution. But basically, that means they can insert the kind of code they want. If we go back to our restaurant analogy, imagine somebody else telling the chef what you're going to have. You order a steak and you get fish every time because somebody inserted themselves into the ordering process. So it's similar to that. Somebody is able to execute commands on these servers that the people who are running them don't want. And it could be something as little as putting new text on the page saying, long live the king. But it could also be used to capture credit card information, to capture profiles. It could be used to capture personal data, to hack into other people's accounts. And so this isn't just a company problem. This is a consumer problem because any of these vulnerabilities, any of these websites that are vulnerable, potentially could be vulnerable to collecting your information. So the universal recommendation from law enforcement, cybersecurity experts, researchers is patch this up ASAP. If you can't do that, they're actually recommending that you take down that service. Take down. Take down that website. Take down that web app. And we're seeing that actually happening in some parts of the world. In Europe, Finland, for example, is taking down their public websites until they can repair it so that they don't risk any sort of bad actors infiltrating their systems. And so the FBI was very firm about doing this quickly. And if you can't do it quickly, taking those systems offline. Yeah, I was about to say, it's not a given that every website automatically updates between when we learned this and now, right? Like as a consumer, we have to be careful, you're saying. Yeah, absolutely. And that's. That's where we're at now. The fix came out yesterday morning, but now it's a race against the clock because there's pretty good evidence that how to execute this attack is out there. You know, initially it was it was kept between OpenAI, which discovered how to do it and the PHP developers. But now it's pretty clear that people in the wild know how to do it. And so it's a race against the clock to update these systems before bad actors take advantage of these vulnerabilities. And everybody who has a server that runs PHP is going to have to do the update. Unfortunately, some of the older versions and PHP has been around for decades may not work with this fix and they may have to just take down their site and start from scratch. Wait, you mentioned OpenAI being at this like in the inner circle as this was discovered. Was it an AI program that helped suss this out in the first place? Because we're always talking about like the risks of AI and like how you could be hacked by AI. This sounds what like AI was the thing that that found this before hackers did. Yeah, I think in this case, this is an AI success story. AI has gotten a lot of bad publicity lately. But what happened in this case was that the developers of PHP in 2024, they knew that they had a theoretical problem. They knew that this was a potential vulnerability, but they couldn't figure out how anybody might actually exploit it. And they toyed around with some fixes, but they found that those fixes had other problems and they just sort of let it drop, which they admit now they probably shouldn't have. But they entered an OpenAI program called Patch the Planet that uses AI models to basically do security audits of the code. And it not only confirmed that this was a problem. It actually showed them the instructions for how someone might exploit the problem. And so AI, in this case, was able to give them the foundation for coming up with the patch. And once they realized how significant it was, they expedited that and got the patch out yesterday. Although I wonder if you only could have done the thing if you had AI servers to do that, to do the hacking for you as well. AI versus AI. All right. Matthew Glasser, thank you so much. You're very welcome. Thank you, Brad. OK, one more quick break when we come back. You want your Winnie the Pooh doll returned? Oh, bother. One last thing is next. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25 percent off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just twenty dollars at BJ's dot com. Splash mesquite and save ten cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's home of the save. When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure, especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC 2 ISO 27001 and more and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. Hyperbound, a YC backed startup, used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowfire got audit ready. It closed a multi-million dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at Vanta dot com. And one last thing. All these arguments give me a kind of rumbly in my tumbly. Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh, cubby little cubby all stuffed with fluffies. You might know Winnie the Pooh, perhaps one of the most famous animated children's shows in history, is based on a series of books and stories by the British author A.A. Milne. What you might not have known is that Milne had based those stories on a real stuffed bear he had bought for his son, who, by the way, was named Christopher Robin. Christopher Robin came to own several other stuffies at home that he called Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger and Kenga, which all, of course, became characters, too. Those toys are actually still around today. In fact, they were donated to the New York Public Library in the 1980s. But here's the thing. Britain wants them back. This week marks the hundredth anniversary of Pooh Bear's literary debut. And in advance of that, Queen Camilla herself made a trip to the New York Public Library, one to pay homage to the institution, but two, reportedly, to try to arrange a repatriation. We might even describe it as an enchanted place in that it has similarities with the hundred acre wood where Winnie the Pooh and his friends lived before they began their pilgrimage to set up home in this very building in another cultural exchange. And yet, despite the British place, the library has said these toys aren't going anywhere. In a special video series, curator Michael Inman says they're still the most popular exhibits in the building. When people go into the gallery, they make a beeline straight for that case. They bypass the original copy of the Bill of Rights. There's a Gutenberg Bible. All these wonderful treasures we have in the gallery. They make that beeline straight for the case. This argument apparently goes back decades. In 1998, as British members of Parliament made public demands to return these plush relics, Prime Minister Tony Blair was asked about it on Good Morning America during an official visit. Are you going to raise that with the president? And are you worried about it? I think it'll come slightly down the agenda. I mean, if you don't mind me saying so. Rudy Giuliani, the New York City mayor at the time, did a reading at the library with kids in attendance and gave a wink as they pretended to feed Pooh Bear some honey. This is to show his friends in England that he's being fed well. And he enjoys New York cuisine. I mean, he's a big fan of Pooh Bear. He's a big fan of Pooh Bear. The Brits say the character of Pooh himself has really become a celebration of a distinctly English sensibility, whimsy and wisdom rolled into one with a dash of humility. But with that in mind, perhaps it's only appropriate that 100 years later, he still finds himself in sticky situations. Even if we give them Pooh, I feel like we should at least get to keep Tigger because his vibes are very American. I've always said it. Hey, remember, we always love ratings. We especially love reviews. I wanted to call out one recently from CallLive. Colleen, who wrote in to say, I began listening to Start Here soon after the program began. It became especially important to me to remain informed when I entered law school three years ago. As I enter bar preparation, I will particularly appreciate your organization sifting through the tsunami of information developing each day so that I can stay up to date on facts without sacrificing critical study time and time with my family. Colleen, that is so nice to hear. And can we all just say good luck on the bar exam? And I've heard just this week how hard that can be to pass. I'm Brad Milkey. Ta-ta for now. Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo! Vanta delivers a 526% return on investment. It's based on investment over three years and pays for itself in just three months. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJs.com/Mosquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's, home of the save.