In a convincing victory, former car dealer Bernie Moreno won the GOP nomination over a 14-year veteran of the state legislature, Matt Dolan. Their battle served as a proxy between the far-right forces aligned with ex-president Donald Trump versus the more politically successful establishment figures close to Gov. Mike DeWine (R) and former senator Rob Portman.
Moreno will begin the race as a toss-up challenger against the vastly more experienced Brown, who has already run six statewide campaigns dating back to the early 1980s. Moreno very well might win the race, particularly if Trump defeats President Biden by the eight percentage points that he won Ohio by four years ago.
But there’s no mistaking that Republicans have taken the harder path, and that despite their state’s conservative drift, Ohio GOP voters might decide that it’s not as if they live in Wyoming — where Trump won by 43 points and Democrats last won a Senate race in 1970.
Democratic allies spent heavily in the campaign’s closing days with ads that called Moreno too conservative, designed to give him a boost in the primary. Once he won, Democrats released an ad highlighting Moreno’s GOP opponents raising issues of trust and covering up an investigation into his labor practices, along with his support for a national abortion ban despite Ohio’s overwhelming support for codifying abortion rights in a ballot referendum last fall.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, described Moreno on Wednesday as “an individual who is ethically challenged and has a number of policy positions that are completely out of step with a majority of people who live in Ohio.”
Republicans need to win a net gain of two seats for a clear majority next year, and with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W. Va.) retiring from that reliably conservative state they feel as if they have essentially already locked up their 50th seat. Their next two targets are Ohio and Montana, where Sen. Jon Tester (D) is also seeking his fourth term in a deeply conservative state.
A victory in either of those two states would put Republicans over the top and require Democrats to pull a major upset or two to have any chance at the majority.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee stayed neutral in the Ohio race, believing that any of the candidates could win. And GOP senators credited Moreno for winning by a double-digit margin when many thought Dolan might win.
“Last night was an overwhelming victory for Bernie Moreno. He won every one of Ohio’s counties, all 88. He had over 50 percent of the vote,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), chair of the NRSC, told reporters Wednesday.
But there’s a reason DeWine and Portman, along with their wives, shunned Moreno late in the race and jumped on board with Dolan, whose extended family fortune came from the cable industry and includes owning baseball’s Cleveland Guardians.
Those two know not just how to win, but to do so convincingly.
Portman’s 2010 opponent essentially dropped out of the race with less than two weeks to Election Day, giving his last bit of campaign cash to Ohio Democrats to spend in other races. He won by more than 17 points.
The situation repeated itself in 2016 when national Democrats abandoned their nominee with almost two months to go, leading to a 21-point margin for Portman’s second win.
Rather than relying on coattails from Trump, Portman’s very well-run campaign actually provided the get-out-the-vote infrastructure that turned Ohio from a toss-up race into a Trump win by eight points.
DeWine has run nine statewide elections, winning seven times, his only defeats coming to Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), an astronaut hero, in 1992 and then to Brown in the Senate race in 2006 — a horrible year for Republicans nationwide.
In 2018 — another bad GOP year nationally — DeWine won the governor’s race by almost 4 percentage points, even as Brown won his third Senate term by almost 7 points over a Trump acolyte.
The 2022 Ohio elections provided another key data point for the GOP establishment’s superior track record over MAGA-aligned candidates.
DeWine cruised to a massive reelection, winning by almost 25 percentage points, while Republican candidates in the Senate race all fought to win Trump’s endorsement and run as a far-right conservative.
J.D. Vance won the Trump nod and narrowly won the GOP nomination, but then ran what strategists in both parties considered a lackluster campaign. He did not raise nearly enough money and did not introduce himself to the more moderate general election voters until very late in the race.
GOP super PACs, initially planning to spend the money in other states, had to pour tens of millions of dollars into Ohio to shore up Vance’s campaign.
He did win by 6 percentage points in the end over Tim Ryan, a House Democrat from eastern Ohio who did not have deep roots in voter-rich Cleveland and its suburbs.
But a pair of MAGA-aligned candidates coughed up House races downballot, leaving the state’s congressional delegation more Democratic (10 to 5 for Republicans, instead of 12 to 4 two years ago) despite DeWine’s massive victory atop the ticket.
Two years later, as the Senate race took shape, DeWine and Portman saw Dolan as the more natural heir to the Reagan-Bush ethos those two practiced, particularly his support for the war in Ukraine that Vance has opposed since taking office last year. They both had a front-row seat to watch Brown, starting with his victory over DeWine in 2006 and the 12 years that Portman served alongside Brown in the Senate.
Moreno puts the seat at greater risk, while Dolan might have salted it away similar to the recent campaigns the establishment duo have run.
“He has the much better chance to beat Brown this fall,” DeWine told Politico’s Jonathan Martin, referring to Dolan.
In today’s hyper-polarized era, Brown will need to win up to 500,000 voters whose first choice on the ballot will be Trump — a tall feat in a state that will have about 6 million votes cast.
But Democrats believe that this race is better than two years ago because Brown is a much more experienced candidate than Ryan, and also because he will have dramatically more funds backing him.
Brown has already raised more than $33.5 million for his campaign — more than he spent in 2018 — and a Democratic super PAC has already plunked down more than $60 million worth of advertising reservations to promote Brown and go after Moreno.
In 2022, while Ryan raised and spent more than $57 million against Vance, a huge sum, the DSCC and the Democratic super PAC cavalry did not spend heavily and instead focused on a handful of core races that determined the majority.
Now Peters, who got encouraged to take over the DSCC in early 2021, views Ohio as a necessary linchpin to any chance of holding the majority.
“You have Sherrod Brown, who has a long track record in the entire state. Every time he has run, he has outperformed the Democratic base,” Peters said.
But Republicans believe that Ohio is now deep red, and that Moreno will do fine despite his MAGA leanings, abortion position and business practices.
Glenn’s 1992 victory is the only other Ohio Democrat to win a Senate race in the last 35 years. In that same time frame Ted Strickland, in 2006, is the only Democrat to win a governor’s campaign.
These Republicans aren’t guaranteeing a Moreno victory, but they are placing a bet largely on the state’s political direction rather than his political experience.
“I’m confident Bernie Moreno is going to make Ohio very competitive and will likely win that seat,” Daines said.
