Nasty Ohio GOP Primary Could Hurt Party’s Odds of Flipping Senate

Trump gives his candidate Bernie Moreno a last-minute boost with an Ohio rally. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Republicans are generally seen as having the upper hand in the struggle for control of the U.S. Senate in November. Democrats currently have a 51-49 advantage in the chamber, counting independents who caucus with them, but they are defending three Democratic seats in states Donald Trump is expected to win handily. One of the races is in West Virginia, where Democrat Joe Manchin’s retirement means Republican Jim Justice will almost certainly flip the seat. In Montana Democrat Jon Tester will face aerospace entrepreneur and former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, a prize GOP recruit. And in Ohio, the identity of Sherrod Brown’s Republican opponent will be determined in a March 19 primary.

That race may present a problem for Republicans. While in Montana the GOP was able to more or less clear the field for Sheehy, Ohio has turned into a messy bloodbath exposing MAGA and non-MAGA fault lines in the party.

In 2022 Ohio had a complicated multi-candidate Senate primary to choose a successor to retiring GOP Senator Rob Portman. Trump was chased by most of the candidates for an endorsement. One, wealthy auto dealership owner Bernie Moreno, dropped out after meeting with the former president and deciding he wasn’t going to get the MAGA nod. Indeed, Trump chose J.D. Vance and that gave the Hillbilly Elegy author just the nudge he needed to win the primary and subsequently a Senate seat.

This time around it was Moreno who won Trump’s backing, as well as endorsements from MAGA politicians like Kristi Noem and J.D. Vance himself, and hard-core Senate conservatives like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee. The one 2022 candidate who did not kiss Trump’s butt, Matt Dolan, a state senator and part-owner of the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, is back as well, and has won the support of non-MAGA politicians like Portman and current Ohio governor Mike DeWine. The self-funding Dolan and Moreno campaigns have outspent a third initially viable candidate, Ohio secretary of State Frank LaRose, into near-oblivion; he’s running a poor third in recent polls.

Naturally, Moreno and Dolan have begun going after each other with tire irons, with the race being enlivened by two late developments. First, Trump made a showy intervention in the race with a late rally to boost Moreno, which was all but overshadowed by the former president’s non-Ohio-related warning of a post-election “bloodbath” if he’s not returned to the White House. But second, rumors about Moreno’s personal life burst into public view last week when the Associated Press broke a lurid story linking him to a hook-up site:

Moreno — who has shifted from a public supporter of LGBTQ rights to a hardline opponent — is confronting questions about the existence of a 2008 profile seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” on a casual sexual encounters website called Adult Friend Finder.

“Hi, looking for young guys to have fun with while traveling,” reads a caption on a photo-less profile under the username “nardo19672,” according to an Associated Press review of records made public through a massive and well-publicized data breach of the website. Records also show the profile was last accessed about six hours after it was created. …

[T]wo days after the AP first asked Moreno’s campaign about the account, the candidate’s lawyer said a former intern created the account as a prank. The lawyer provided a statement from the intern, Dan Ricci, who said he created the account as “part of a juvenile prank.”

Whether or not anyone believes that Moreno was actually trawling for gay sex in 2008, the timing is terrible since Ohio Republicans anticipate a tough general-election fight with Brown and don’t want a candidate vulnerable to some sort of own-goal implosion. Dolan, meanwhile, has outspent Moreno down the stretch. At the same time, Moreno has benefited from Democratic meddling: a Democratic Party–backed super-PAC is running ads calling him “too conservative for Ohio,” following the well-worn path of past Democratic efforts to help Republicans they want to face win primaries by attacking them. General-election polling has indeed shown Brown doing better against Moreno (whom he leads by five points in the RealClearPolitics polling averages) than against Dolan (Brown’s lead against him per RCP is just 1.3 percent).

It’s unclear what will happen on March 19. Moreno leads Dolan by two points in the RCP polling averages of the primary but has a bigger lead in the latest poll from Emerson (nine points, but only four points when “leaners” are added in). If Moreno wins, Republicans will clearly have an uphill battle to topple Brown, who has bucked Ohio’s red trend for years. If it’s Dolan, Republican unity could be a problem. Though Dolan has tried to reduce MAGA hostility to him by endorsing Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy, Moreno hasn’t exactly made it easy for his backers to reconcile themselves to a loss to his chief rival:

For his part, Trump has said of Dolan: “He’s trying to become the next Mitt Romney.”

Regardless of the outcome, national Republicans could take a long look at this race and decide their path to flipping the Senate more profitably runs through Montana, or perhaps other winnable races in places like Arizona and Nevada.