Donald Trump greets Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno at a March 16 rally. Scott Olson/Getty
During a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, over the weekend, Donald Trump spoke of a coming “bloodbath” for the auto industry and for the country should Republicans lose big in 2024 and not be able to impose their policy agenda.
But there was another bloodbath playing out in front of the embattled former president facing 88 criminal charges: a messy, jab-throwing, three-way Republican primary for the Ohio Senate seat Democrat Sherrod Brown has occupied since 2006.
Bernie Moreno, a Trump-endorsed former luxury car dealer, emerged victorious as the GOP nominee for Senate Tuesday night, pulling in upwards of 46 percent of the vote as of 9 pm ET. Moreno defeated Matt Dolan, a state senator and scion of the family that owns the Cleveland Guardians MLB team, and Frank LaRose, the Ohio secretary of state who last year futilely attempted to block reproductive health rights in two separate state ballot initiatives. Final polling ahead of Tuesday’s contest had shown Moreno with 38 percent of voters’ support, versus Dolan’s 29 percent and LaRose’s 12 percent.
Ohio’s race has been expensive monetarily, with $40 million in ad spending as of Monday—trailing only the presidential race and the California Senate primary in the 2024 cycle. (Both independently wealthy, Dolan and Moreno contributed more than $11 million and $5 million to their own campaigns, respectively.)
The competitive contest has also been costly to the GOP candidates’ political reputations. In assailing Dolan and Moreno to help their respective candidates in the short-term, various conservative groups have thrown around plenty of material for Democrats to capitalize on heading into November.
“Whoever survives that pretty bruised primary is going to come out of there a little damaged. No question about it. Especially because they had to spend an awful lot of money to get that victory,” says David Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Akron. “The other candidates have done a great job doing opposition research that the other party’s going to use come to the general election.”
Moreno won the primary despite a late-breaking Associated Press report alleging an email address linked to him had in 2008 created a profile seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” on a site called Adult Friend Finder. Republicans had been talking about the alleged account for weeks before the AP reported its existence. When the AP asked Moreno about the gossip, the candidate’s lawyer said a former intern of Moreno’s created the account as a prank and that Moreno “had nothing to do with” it. (The lawyer provided the AP with a statement from the former intern, taking responsibility for the account.)
A super PAC supporting Dolan, Buckeye Leadership Fund, quickly canvassed the state with ads referencing the AP story. “Breaking news: A new AP report suggests that Bernie Moreno, a married man, trawled the internet ‘seeking men for one-on-one sex,'” a narrator says. “Creepy, huh?”
Moreno also withstood attacks from the left and the right about lawsuits alleging he withheld wages from his car dealership employees. In 2022, Moreno was found liable by a GOP-appointed judge for withholding at least $53,500 in overtime wages from two employees between 2015 and 2018 and shredding company documents relevant to the lawsuit while the case was ongoing. He later settled at least a dozen more cases over wage theft. Facing Moreno in the November election bodes well for Brown, who often discusses the dignity of work and the dignity of workers, says David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati: “It sets up a really nice contrast for [Brown] to run against a car dealer with unfair employment practice decisions against him.”
Dolan’s Achilles heel was the accusation that he is not conservative enough. The state senator, endorsed by moderate Republicans like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and former Sen. Rob Portman, was lambasted by Trump on Saturday for the name-change of his family’s MLB team, from the Cleveland Indians to the Cleveland Guardians in 2021. “He’s easily pushed around by the woke left lunatics,” Trump said at the Ohio rally, where he touted Moreno as better on crime and the border.
Meanwhile, Moreno sought to closely align himself with Trump at the Saturday event outside Dayton, throwing a dig at Dolan, who has expressed more support for Trump’s policies than for Trump himself. “I am so sick and tired of Republicans that will say, ‘I support President Trump’s policies, but I don’t like the man.’ This is a good man. This is a great American,” Moreno said.
Democrats are already capitalizing on the Trump-Moreno kinship. Duty and Country PAC, a group affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, was on pace to spend more than $2.5 million to play an ad arguing that, “[i]n Washington, Moreno would do Donald Trump’s bidding.”
Formerly one of the most closely watched swing states in the country, Ohio went for Trump in 2016 and 2020 by about 8 points each year, with Trump-aligned Republican J.D. Vance winning Portman’s old Senate seat in 2022 by a 6-point margin. But in 2023, a ballot measure legalizing possession of marijuana in Ohio won while GOP attempts—advocated by LaRose—to block an initiative protecting reproductive rights were unsuccessful.
The abortion ballot measures hurt LaRose’s chance of winning the Senate seat, experts say. But those results also signaled that while Ohio voters may increasingly identify as Republicans, they don’t necessarily hold conservative values. “You ask [voters] about policies, and they prove themselves to be fairly moderate or even liberal on the issues. You put candidates in front of them and they prove themselves to be reliably Republican,” Niven says. “Sherrod Brown’s task here is to capture the people who already agree with him not to vote Republican.”
That’s an easier assignment when up against the more conservative candidate—whom both Trump, and Democrats, wanted to win the primary.
“There’s no question that Moreno is a juicier target for the Sherrod Brown campaign,” says Cohen. “He is the Trump candidate, he’s the MAGA candidate. And that is great for super conservative Trump-supporting Republicans. It’s not so great for the general election vote.”
