Joe Maiorana/AP Photo
Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno speaks to constituents during a bus tour stop in Columbus, Ohio on Oct. 28, 2024.
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
NORTHEASTERN OHIO—Bernie Moreno is a Bogota-born junior oligarch with a long list of ex-employees, business partners and competitors who claim he amassed his mega-millions by cheating and stealing. He also falsely claimed to have an MBA and a “lower middle class” background, and his own party dubbed him “Ohio’s George Santos.” During the primary, the Democrats were sufficiently unafraid of his candidacy that the Senate Majority PAC plowed $3 million into ads knocking two of his competitors.
Now, somehow, this gazillionaire car dealer looks like he might beat Sherrod Brown, the disheveled populist and three-term senator who has represented Ohioans in one elected office or another since 1975, when he was sworn in as a 22-year-old legislator representing Lorain, a mill town just west of Cleveland. D.J. Byrnes, whose substack The Rooster covers Ohio state politics, got a bad feeling when he was chatting with a friend about the three-term senator and his six-year-old son excitedly piped up: “Sherrod Brown: he’s too liberal for Ohio!”
Byrnes blames the cash tsunami that has put the matchup on track to be the nation’s first half-billion-dollar Senate election. (To put that figure in perspective, it’s more than George W. Bush and John Kerry raised in 2004—combined.) Two weekends ago, his local Fox affiliate in Columbus missed the kickoff of the Cincinnati Bengals game against the Carolina Panthers to broadcast a commercial promising Moreno would “end inflation.” The station’s owner, Sinclair Broadcasting, recently revised its projected political ad revenue for the year by about sixty million dollars, largely due to the insatiable thirst for air time in Ohio.
Brown has raised more than $80 million, quadruple his haul during his last race in 2018 and nearly quadruple what Moreno has managed to raise himself. But dark money groups, financed most aggressively by three cryptocurrency giants, likely enthused both by Brown’s reluctance to embrace crypto deregulation and Moreno’s own status as a blockchain entrepreneur, have fallen over themselves to plow funds into anti-Brown attack ads. Even the senator’s supporters are worried the propaganda onslaught will prove too toxic to bear. “We finally have a really formidable candidate in Bernie Moreno,” says Dale Fellows, a GOP official in Lake County.
To an extent this is true. Where the last ultra-rich asshole to attempt to unseat Brown flew around the state in the borrowed private plane of a strip club owner buddy and looked a bit too much like the used car salesman his successor actually is, Moreno is articulate and polished, with an attractive family who look like sort of people who would spend time with Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff. But in an ocean of phonies, sycophants and brazen hypocrites, Moreno’s MAGA credentials are some of the most dubious around. He owes his fortune to foreign cars and DEI; his brother, who until 2020 was the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, literally negotiated free trade pacts on behalf of Colombia, the country of his birth; his deleted tweets from as recently as three years ago condemned Trump as a “fake Republican” exploiting “ignorance in our society” to “stoke hatred and fear” and who “deserves lots and lots of blame” for January 6.
And perhaps most surreally, the primary focus of Moreno’s campaign commercials, depicting a nascent transgender invasion of teenage girls’ bathrooms, sports programs and schools, is almost completely at odds with his long, well-documented history of gay rights advocacy. As early as 1995, after an irate reader wrote the Providence Journal in 1995 calling for a boycott of the Saturn auto brand over its ad campaigns in Out Magazine, Moreno responded with a letter wondering “how one could become so hateful of a specific group that it would affect their purchase of a product made available to that group… how many people are still left out there who would not consider purchasing a Saturn if they knew we advertised in Ebony and Jet.” Moreno also sponsored the 2014 Gay Games, co-authored a latter condemning an anti-trans hate crime at the community college where he served as a trustee, praised the ABC sitcom Modern Family for normalizing gay parenting, and turned up in a 2016 hack of the sex solicitation site Adult Friend Finder for having registered an account to solicit “1-on-1 gay sex”—though he claims that last part was the work of a prankster intern. While an undergraduate at Brown University, Moreno’s son Adam was the star of a gender-fluid pole-dancing troupe called the Poler Bears. “The show culminated grandly in a sensational performance by Adam Moreno ’18 in tall platform black combat boots to Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’ as a smoke machine blasted vapor across the stage,” reads a Brown Daily Herald review of a Poler Bears Christmas performance. “The crowd went wild.”
“You turn on the TV and It’s basically like, Sherrod Brown’s gonna dig up your dead grandfather and turn him trans,” laughed Josh Sponsler, a Toledo manufacturing worker who says he is far more worried about Brown’s race than that of his beloved congresswoman (and Brown’s longtime ideological comrade) Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), who is seeking a 22nd term in the House. “But Sherrod is way too decent of a guy to use any of that stuff against him.”
PERHAPS INEVITABLY, THE BROWN CAMPAIGN has also steered clear of dragging Moreno’s soon-to-be-ex son-in-law, Max Miller, into its attack ads, even though the young real estate scion’s 2022 marriage to Moreno’s daughter Emily at Trump’s Bedminster Golf Club appears to have sealed the MAGA endorsement for his Senate campaign. Miller was one of the former president’s favorite aides, despite or perhaps because of his lifelong penchant for violent outbursts and misogynistic insults. While working in the White House, Miller dated a fellow staffer who later accused him of physical abuse; an in-depth Politico profile published a month before the wedding detailed multiple episodes of him violently assaulting women; and over the summer Emily accused him of abusing drugs and threatening her safety and moved with their infant daughter out of the house they had shared into another house Miller accuses the Moreno family of having purchased secretly for her.
Somehow, the only campaign ad that makes any mention of the sordid tale is an online commercial produced by the shoestring operation of Dennis Kucinich, the former presidential candidate who is running a long-shot campaign to unseat Miller from the suburban Cleveland district he won with Trump’s help in 2022. The spot makes no mention of Moreno, who “basically sold his daughter to get Trump’s endorsement,” in Byrnes’ joking characterization.
“You turn on the TV and It’s basically like, Sherrod Brown’s gonna dig up your dead grandfather and turn him trans,” laughed Josh Sponsler, a Toledo manufacturing worker.
The tawdriest attack ad Democrats have produced on Moreno is a somewhat confusing spot, “Shady Projects”, that accuses the car dealer’s family of funneling “our tax dollars” into “so-called development projects” in Latin America, then investing the proceeds of those projects into “the perfect cover”—Moreno’s auto empire, which comprised 55 dealerships at its peak—until Moreno began selling them off to finance his crypto car titles business. The commercial, which was produced by a Democratic Super PAC, has not been in heavy rotation, and it’s hard to say how effective it would be if it were. So much about the Moreno family’s riches, and the motivation behind their MAGAfication, is still unclear. “The negative campaigning against Bernie Moreno hasn’t been as vicious as I would expect,” a Republican official in northeastern Ohio told the Prospect. “He is widely disliked in the auto sales world, and that’s not coming through.”
Instead, Brown has mostly focused his messaging around some obnoxious comments Moreno made about abortion rights (“Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like…‘If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ OK. It’s a little crazy…especially for women who are like past 50, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you..’”) along with his vow to restore “the dignity of work,” a motto he first embraced while briefly testing the waters for a presidential campaign in 2019.
Maureen Tkacik
One day's worth of 2024 election mailers is seen on the floor of a voter from Warren, Ohio.
The phrase, which Moreno has panned on the stump as a “fake slogan”, elicits an eyeroll from Byrnes: “‘Work is cool’ doesn’t really resonate to me, especially from a guy who has literally never had a job,” he quips. But the Republican official, who supports Brown privately but is hesitant to do so publicly for fear of antagonizing their own supporters, says that critique is unfair. “That man works,” they said of Brown during a recent conversation at a cafe in Warren, Ohio, a charming town fifteen minutes north of Youngstown. “His constituent services are truly the gold standard. For Ohio to lose him would be… a real blow.”
Warren is the seat of Trumbull County, the single “swingiest” county in Ohio and home to perhaps the largest population of Obama-Trump voters in America. Obama won Trumbull by 23 points in 2012 and Trump won by 11 points in 2020; between 2012 and 2016 the Democrats lost 25 points. But back in 1992, 25 percent of Trumbull County voted for Ross Perot, making it the only place in Ohio where Perot outperformed Bush.
Deindustrialization is a core memory in northeast Ohio, says Josh Nativio, the manager of a beloved comic book shop on Warren’s main drag who, like many people the Prospect has encountered in its travels, terrifyingly intimate with the ins and outs of state politics.
“This area has been in recession since 1977,” Nativio says, referencing the devastating shutdown of Youngstown Sheet & Tube that is widely understood as the hard launch of deindustrialization. “People here have gotten accustomed to the cycles of absorbing and adapting to macroeconomic shocks. At this point you have people in their thirties mourning the loss of steel mills that shut down before they were born. They’re still not happy about it.”
Ohio lost nearly four in ten of the 1.1 million manufacturing jobs that fled the Midwest between 1990 and 2019, and no one I spoke to in northeast Ohio believed that was reversible. But merely acknowledging that pain and loss provided a kind of catharsis, said a Democratic poll worker in Youngstown who identified herself as Jackie. “Trump was talking a lot of sense when he first came on the scene,” she said while handing out sample ballots to residents stopping by an early voting station.
In 2017, the former president visited Warren and warned attendees not to sell their houses, because he was going to save the local Lordstown General Motors plant, which had been hemorrhaging jobs since the 1990s. “I don’t think anyone actually took him seriously,” says Nativio. The plant manufactured compact sedans; Trump relaxed fuel efficiency requirements and GM shut it down entirely in 2019. “But only Democrats were actually mad about that,” recalls Nativio, whose own politics are leftist. What Trump had discovered, he believes, was that wave after wave of economic dislocations had produced a collective trauma that could be wielded as a kind of eternal culture war issue with very little consequence.
Almost no one in northeast Ohio talks about Trump without bringing up late Youngstown congressman Jim Traficant, an amazingly coiffed populist Democrat who successfully defended himself against federal racketeering charges and savaged the “carnage of NAFTA” before getting expelled from the House and ultimately imprisoned for taking bribes and filing false tax returns in 2002. But Traficant earned the adoration of his constituents through a genuinely heroic confrontation with the deep state: As sheriff of a county with the nation’s highest unemployment rate during the collapse of the American steel industry in 1982, he refused to carry out foreclosure orders on behalf of banks and bashed Ronald Reagan for gutting his community. The media lambasted him with a contemptuous zeal that is in hindsight dismayingly familiar. “It was the morally correct thing to do,” says the anonymous Republican legislator, who was in elementary school at the time but remembers vividly how “my grandparents absolutely adored Jim Traficant.”
“I’m 36, and I’m pretty resigned at this point to the fact that I’ll probably never own a house,” says Sponsler. “But the people at work who are just a little older than me, they remember the people who trained them: they had houses, and pensions, legitimately nice lives. I recall Trump in 2016 saying a lot of things that those people wanted to hear; I mean, however you want to interpret the coded language ‘make it how it used to be’; to those people it is pretty straightforward. And a lot of them thought, we’ll give this a shot because Obama didn’t do anything for me,” he said. “And then the Democrats never wanted them back. They’d rather have ten suburban wine moms than ten guys who wear steel-toed boots.”
What Trump had discovered, he believes, was that wave after wave of economic dislocations had produced a collective trauma that could be wielded as a kind of eternal culture war issue.
AFTER THE 2016 ELECTION, DEMOCRATS INVESTED invested considerable effort into winning back Ohio’s Obama-Trump voters. The party ran candidates in all 99 districts represented in the state house in 2018; Byrnes, who made a living at the time blogging about Ohio State football, got his start in state politics after being drafted to run in one, an experience memorably captured in the 2021 documentary Touch the Boulder. After blocking a Republican-sponsored amendment that would have canceled Trump’s steel tarriffs, Brown won his election that year by 7 points, against Republican congressman Jim Renacci, who had accumulated a net worth of nearly $100 million running nursing homes and Harley-Davidson dealerships. The author Brian Alexander, whose heart-wrenching book Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town about the private equity bust-out of a glass factory in central Ohio had hit shelves just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, recalls numerous Democratic operatives inviting him in those days to speak to politicians and pundits about the problems of financialization and the malaise of the working class Obama-Trump voter.
At the time, he recalls, both Brown and Kaptur invited him to brief their staffs on potential policy solutions to private equity disinvestment, but Kaptur, whose politics are essentially identical to Brown’s, voiced more frustration. “She put her hands on my shoulders and asked me, ‘How do we get the national Democratic Party to care about these problems?’ And I said, ‘Madam, you’ve been in Congress nearly 40 years, if you don’t know how to do it, I don’t know if it can be done,” Alexander said.
Kaptur, who appeared in Michael Moore’s financial crisis documentary Capitalism: A Love Story and was one of a handful of Democratic politicians who endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2015 while Brown endorsed Clinton, had spent her entire career struggling to convince party leadership to prioritize the problems of the working class. She made enough of an impression that Ross Perot had approached her to be his running mate for his 1996 candidacy—she declined—but cycle after cycle, she’d been marginalized and shut out of leadership spots, which were invariably reserved for members in deeper-pocketed districts on the coasts. Still, she persevered, winning elections despite repeated attempts by state Republicans to gerrymander away her district, which currently stretches thinly across the top of northwest Ohio to the Indiana border. The 9th District voted for Trump by four points in 2020; prior to then it was a Democratic vote sink that stretched all the way east to Cleveland, putting Kaptur into the same seat as Kucinich. Kaptur prevailed in that Dem-on-Dem race.
Sponsler, who lives in Toledo, predicts Kaptur will keep winning elections by comfortable margins—she beat her last opponent, an amateur rapper who lied about serving in Afghanistan, by more than 13 points—until she decides to retire, solely on the basis of the loyalty she had engendered in 41 years in office. He recalled how helpful her staffers were when he worked as a letter carrier and their labor union needed help navigating budget cuts. “Her staff was like, scarily well-informed about the plight of the postal carriers, and that’s just such a typical story about her. You fill a small room with people from Toledo and someone will have a story along those lines.” At the same time, he wonders if Kaptur’s lack of association with Democratic Party leadership liberates her un-woke fans to support her more openly: he’s seen a lot of Trump/Kaptur lawns in the suburbs, he said, and sent the Prospect a photo of one.
Trump-Brown voters are harder to find. “There was a guy here last week from Bloomberg, and he went two whole days looking for a Trump-Brown voter and I don’t think he found anyone,” said Dave Bell, a retired teacher campaigning for a Democratic county commissioner outside the Youngstown early voting center. But the anonymous Republican official in Warren who plans on voting for Brown promised the Prospect that others like them exist, as did Andrew Six, an Akron supermarket butcher who has spent the past several weekends canvassing members of his labor union. More than 80 percent of them told him they were voting for Brown, while only “one or two” said they were voting for Kamala. (“A lot of them actually left the president spot blank,” he said; a few more were voting for Trump.)
Six himself cast his presidential vote for Claudia De La Cruz, an activist running on the Party for Socialism and Liberation ticket, in protest of the genocide in Gaza. But he campaigned for Brown despite the senator’s AIPAC endorsement, because the rumpled senator “is a real person, not some awful ghoul like Kamala Harris or Bernie Moreno.”
