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Former car dealer Bernie Moreno has won the Republican nomination, defeating Matt Dolan, a 14-year veteran of the state Legislature. Their battle served as a proxy between far-right forces aligned with former President Donald Trump and politically successful establishment forces close to Gov. Mike DeWine (R) and former Sen. Rob Portman. .
Moreno will enter the race as a challenger to the experienced Brown, who has already run six statewide campaigns since the early 1980s. Moreno has a good chance of winning the race, especially if he defeats President Biden by an 8-point margin compared to President Trump’s victory in Ohio four years ago.
But it’s a mistake that Republicans chose the harder path, and that despite Ohio’s conservative leanings, they may decide that not all Ohio Republican voters live in Wyoming. do not have. Trump won Wyoming by 43 points, the last time a Democrat won a Senate race in 1970. .
Democratic allies spent millions in the final stages of the campaign on ads criticizing Mr. Moreno as too conservative, aimed at boosting him in the primary. After his victory, Democrats released ads highlighting Moreno’s Republican opponents raising trust issues and covering up investigations into his labor practices, as well as a referendum on abortion last fall. He emphasized his support for a nationwide abortion ban, despite Ohio’s overwhelming support for codifying the right.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, said Wednesday that Moreno is “a person who is ethically questionable, who holds a number of policy positions; “Their position is completely inconsistent with that of the majority of people.” He lives in Ohio. ”
Republicans need to pick up a net two seats to secure a majority next year, with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-Va.) retiring from the reliably conservative state. Republicans essentially already feel as if they have secured 50 seats. The next two targets are Ohio and Montana, where Sen. Jon Tester (D) is also seeking a fourth term in the deeply conservative state.
A win in either of those two states would put Republicans in the lead, and Democrats would need one or two major upsets to have any chance of winning a majority.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee remained neutral in the Ohio race, believing any candidate had a chance of winning. And Republican senators credited Moreno with a double-digit victory at a time when many thought Dolan might win.
“Last night was a landslide victory for Bernie Moreno. “He won all 88 counties in Ohio. He had over 50 percent of the vote,” said NRSC Chairman Sen. Steve Daines. (R-Mont.) told reporters Wednesday.
But there’s a reason DeWine, Portman and their wives avoided Moreno late in the race and jumped on Dolan, who made his family’s fortune in the cable industry and owns baseball’s Cleveland Guardians.
These two guys not only know how to win, but they know how to win convincingly.
Portman’s 2010 opponent effectively withdrew from the race with less than two weeks to go before Election Day, giving his last campaign funds to the Ohio Democratic Party to use for other races. He won by more than 17 points.
This situation was repeated in 2016, when the national Democratic Party abandoned its candidate with about two months left in the race, giving Portman a second victory by a 21-point margin.
Portman’s very well-run campaign actually provided the voting base that turned Ohio from a close race to an 8-point victory for Trump, rather than relying on cajoling from Trump.
Mr. DeWine has run for statewide office nine times and won seven times, but his only losses were to astronaut hero Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) in 1992 and in 2006. It was Mr. Brown in the 2018 Senate race. This was the worst year for Republicans across the country.
In 2018, another bad year for the Republican Party nationally, DeWine even though Mr. Brown won a third term in the Senate by almost 7 points over Mr. Trump’s loyalists. He won the gubernatorial election by almost 4 points.
The 2022 Ohio election provided another important data point demonstrating the Republican establishment’s strong track record against MAGA-allied candidates.
Mr. DeWine won reelection by a landslide margin of almost 25 percentage points, while all of the Republican candidates in the Senate race fought to run as far-right conservatives with Mr. Trump’s support.
J.D. Vance narrowly won the Republican nomination with Trump’s support, but then ran what strategists in both parties considered a lackluster campaign. He barely raised enough money and did not introduce himself to more moderate general election voters until late in the race.
The Republican super PAC had originally intended to spend the money in other states, but needed to funnel tens of millions of dollars into Ohio to shore up Vance’s campaign.
In the end, he won by 6 percentage points over Tim Ryan, a House Democrat from eastern Ohio who did not have deep roots in Cleveland and its suburbs.
However, even though two MAGA-aligned candidates voted no in the House election and Mr. DeWine won by a landslide and received the winning votes, the state’s legislative caucus leans Democratic (up from the Republican Party two years ago). (12-4 to 10-5).
Two years later, as the Senate race took shape, Dewyne and Portman saw Dolan as a more natural heir to the Reagan-Bush ethos that the two had practiced, particularly support for the Ukraine war that Vance had opposed since taking office last year. admitted. The two had a front-row seat to watch Brown through the 12 years Portman served in the Senate with him, starting with Brown’s 2006 victory over DeWine.
Mr. Moreno is putting his seat at greater risk, while Mr. Dolan may have salted it away, similar to the establishment duo’s recent campaigns.
“He has a much better chance of beating Brown this fall,” Dewyne told Politico’s Jonathan Martin, referring to Dolan.
In today’s era of hyperpolarization, Mr. Brown needs to win over up to 500,000 voters whose first choice on the ballot is Mr. Trump, which would mean about 6 million votes cast. This is an extremely difficult task in the state.
But Democrats believe this race is better than it was two years ago because Brown is a much more experienced candidate than Ryan and there will be dramatically more money to support Brown. ing.
Mr. Brown has already raised more than $33.5 million for his campaign, more than he spent in 2018, and the Democratic super PAC has already raised more than $6,000 to promote Mr. Brown and pursue Mr. Moreno. They have spent more than $10,000 worth of advertising reservations.
In 2022, Ryan has raised and spent a huge amount of money, more than $57 million, against Vance, but the DSCC and the Democratic super PAC cavalry have not spent much money, instead relying on a few core races to determine the majority. focused.
Peters, who was urged to take over the DSCC in early 2021, now sees him as the linchpin needed for Ohio State’s chances of winning a majority.
“We have Sherrod Brown, who has a long track record across the state. He has outperformed the Democratic base every time he has run,” Peters said.
But Republicans believe that Ohio is currently deep red and that Moreno will do well despite his MAGA tendencies, positions on abortion and business practices.
Mr. Glenn’s victory in 1992 makes him the only Ohio Democrat to win a Senate race in the past 35 years. During the same period, Ted Strickland was the only Democrat to win the gubernatorial election in 2006.
These Republicans are not guaranteeing Moreno’s victory, but they are betting primarily on the state’s political direction rather than Moreno’s political experience.
“I’m confident that Bernie Moreno will make Ohio competitive and possibly win that seat,” Daines said.
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