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An armed man rushed a Democratic Party tent at the Canfield Fair on Sunday and lunged toward Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for Ohio governor, knocking down volunteers and injuring several people before he was arrested, Acton’s campaign said. Acton was not hurt.
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Shop NowWayne Penny Jr., a Democratic candidate for Ohio’s 59th State House District, was at the tent, with PBS reporting, “He literally bull-rushed through the crowd, knocked our volunteers down, ran through, pushed and knocked the elderly gentleman over,” Penny said.
That man, according to accounts from the scene, has Parkinson’s disease and struck his head when he fell.
Chris Anderson, chairman of the Mahoning County Democratic Party, said the man was carrying multiple weapons. Brass knuckles were reported at the scene, and a gun was exposed after the man was taken into custody. The suspect has not been publicly identified, and no charges had been announced as of Sunday night.
Addie Bullock, communications director for the Acton campaign, said in a statement that “this kind of violence has no place in Ohio.”
Condemnation came from across the race. Connie Luck, communications director for Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, released a statement calling the incident “completely unacceptable,” adding that it “has no place in politics.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a term-limited Republican, was also among those who addressed the attack.
The incident lands in the middle of one of the most closely watched governor’s races of the 2026 cycle. Acton, a physician who served as director of the Ohio Department of Health and became a nationally recognizable figure during the early pandemic response, is running against Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate who carries an endorsement from President Trump and has posted record fundraising totals for an Ohio gubernatorial campaign.
County fairs occupy a specific place in Ohio politics. The Canfield Fair, held in Mahoning County in the state’s northeast, is among the largest in the country and functions as a retail-politics fixture, where candidates work rope lines and party tents with minimal security separating them from the public.
Neither the campaign nor local law enforcement had released a motive as of Sunday.
Investigators have not said whether the man targeted Acton specifically or whether he was known to organizers, and no account has been released describing what he said or did before he ran. The condition of the injured man who fell was not disclosed.
