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The remaining field of possible candidates is crowded and without an obvious frontrunner. Josh Mandel, the former state treasurer who lost the 2012 Senate race, is considering a bid and is expected to run. Jane Timken, the state GOP chair, is also considering running, and several members of the House delegation in the state are weighing their options.

Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and former Rep. Pat Tiberi both announced they would not run. But other statewide officials, including Secretary of State Frank LaRose, are potential candidates as well.

Republicans are favored to retain the seat in a state that has shifted rightward in the past decade: Trump carried it by 8 percentage points in November. But a crowded and potentially messy primary gives Democrats an opening they would not have had if Portman were running for a third term.

Jordan, who was first elected to Congress in 2006, was on the fringes of the House GOP conference for much of his tenure in the chamber, particularly given his fraught relationship with former House Speaker John Boehner, a fellow Ohioan. Jordan became more prominent in the Trump era, and was one of the founders and the first chair of the House Freedom Caucus, a hard-line group of conservatives who ultimately became close Trump allies after he won the presidency.

More recently, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who has worked to unite the establishment and far-right wings of the conference, had elevated Jordan to be the top Republican on two committees from where he bolstered Trump against significant allegations of wrongdoing: the Oversight and Judiciary committees. Jordan became ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee in March 2020 — after the president’s first impeachment trial, during which Jordan acted as an unofficial member of his legal team, tasked with defending Trump in public — and would be in line to chair the committee in 2023 if Republicans regain control of the House in next year’s midterm elections.

But Jordan was also one of the most prominent propagators of false and misleading information about the 2020 presidential election, and was among the many House members who objected to the Electoral College results. Five days after the Capitol was ransacked by rioters seeking, unsuccessfully, to stop Congress from ratifying now-President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, Trump awarded Jordan the Medal of Freedom.

Jordan represents a duck-shaped, gerrymandered district that snakes from the shores of Lake Erie in northeast Ohio, south and west to near the border with Indiana. Trump won about 67 percent of the vote there last November.