Everything happened so fast.

Two days after the primary, Attorney General Dave Yost announced May 7 that he was resigning, effective June 7, to take a leadership position with a Christian conservative legal advocacy group.

Four days after that, Gov. Mike DeWine said he was appointing Andy Wilson, director of the Ohio Department of Public Safety and a member of his administration for more than seven years, as Yost’s successor.

DeWine, a former attorney general, said: “It was very important for me to make this decision quickly. The new attorney general, frankly, has to start conversations today with the men and women in the AG’s office and certainly with the AG. There’s a lot (that) goes on in that office and time was moving fast.”

With Wilson, DeWine gets someone he trusts will properly operate the attorney general’s office for the last seven months of Yost’s term.

It will be a year ago Saturday that Yost announced his withdrawal from the Republican primary for governor. President Donald Trump, the Ohio Republican Party and several state officeholders backed Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire biotech entrepreneur, over Yost.

When he quit the race, Yost said it was “apparent that the steep climb to the nomination for governor has become a vertical cliff. I do not wish to divide my political party or my state with a quixotic battle over the small differences between my vision and that of my opponent. I am simply not that important.”

What was particularly interesting is that just 24 days before Yost quit the race, he told me there were “a lot of similarities” between him and Ramaswamy. But “I’ve been doing this for the state for the last 14, 15 years and people don’t have to guess whether I’m going to follow through on my promises. They can look at what I’ve actually done.”

I asked Yost if there was anything that would get him out of the governor’s race. He said: “I can’t even imagine what it would be.”

Less than a month later, he imagined something and got out.

Yost also said he had originally planned to retire after his attorney general term ends Jan. 11, 2027. But he told me people asked him to run for governor, a position he admitted wasn’t a “lifelong dream” of his.

Yost said: “I don’t really need a job. I could earn a lot more money in the private sector.”

He’s about to do that.

Yost announced May 7 that he would start June 8 as vice president of strategic research and innovation for the Alliance Defending Freedom. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the ADF focuses on cultural issues such as religious liberty, private school vouchers, restricting abortion access as well as opposing LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriages.

Under state law, DeWine, a Republican who is also finishing his final term as governor, gets to appoint a replacement for Yost.

DeWine had two options.

He could have selected a placeholder or named state Auditor Keith Faber, the Republican nominee for attorney general, to the job.

Every Republican I spoke to in the short period hours before Yost’s official resignation until DeWine’s decision said the governor would appoint a placeholder, which he did.

The issue with Faber is it would have triggered a domino effect with three other executive branch offices because of the musical chairs Republicans are playing with those positions.

DeWine said: “The idea of appointing one or maybe all of the statewide officeholders, which was certainly a distinct possibility and certainly was an option, just didn’t seem right to me. We have an election coming. We’re only six months away from the election. For me to step in as governor and literally appoint every single statewide officeholder, it just didn’t look right to me. It didn’t seem right to me, didn’t seem like something that I should do.”

If DeWine had appointed Faber, it would have created a vacancy for the state auditor position he’s held for more than seven years. Secretary of State Frank LaRose is the Republican nominee for auditor on the Nov. 3 ballot. If DeWine appointed LaRose, Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, would have been appointed to succeed him. That would have resulted in the treasurer seat being open and DeWine then naming former state Rep. Jay Edwards, who won Tuesday’s GOP primary for that position.

That would have made those four Republican nominees the incumbents during the Nov. 3 general election.

It would have also meant that DeWine would be the only statewide executive branch official actually elected to his seat by voters in the 2022 election.

David Skolnick covers politics for the Tribune Chronicle and The Vindicator.