“Without Ohio, Democrats have no hope”: The race between Brown and Moreno will decide who controls the Senate

Sherrod Brown's U.S. Senate seat has long been considered one of the most likely seats to be won this election cycle, as a loss in Ohio could give Republicans control of the upper chamber. Along with Senator Jon Tester (Democrat of Montana), Brown is the only other Democrat defending a seat in a deep-red state. He faces a Trump-backed challenger, Bernie Moreno, who is neck and neck in the polls.

“Without Ohio, the Democrats have no hope. It's just impossible,” David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati, said in an interview. “It's hard to imagine they can get 51 seats, so they're playing for 50 and hoping to be vice president. To get to 50, they need Ohio.”

Brown's race is one of several high-profile Senate races in 2024 that are mostly Democratic seats crucial to maintaining the party's razor-thin majority, and one of the most hotly contested. The retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has essentially already given Republicans one seat. If former President Donald Trump retakes the White House in November, an additional Republican senator, along with the vice president's tie-breaking vote in the upper chamber, would give Republicans the majority needed to take control of the Senate and potentially pass a MAGA agenda.

In addition to Ohio, Democrats are banking on their candidates winning open seats in Michigan, Arizona and Maryland, so that a potential Vice President Tim Walz could be the deciding vote. Without a Brown victory in November, their chances of retaining the majority would be significantly lower.

The challenge facing the Ohio Senate race is the state's political demographics. Ohio has leaned Republican over the past decade, voting for Trump by 8 percentage points in the last two presidential elections. Since 2013, Democrats in Ohio have had just one statewide victory: Brown's last re-election campaign in 2018.

“The reason you'd think it should be super close is because there's a string of Republican victories against the only Democrat still running in Ohio,” Niven told Salon. “That sounds like it should be close. I don't think Brown has a comfortable or relaxed lead, but he has enough of a lead that this race isn't anyone's top priority.”

Unlike other candidates in his position, Brown is not as vulnerable as the map suggests, thanks to his status as a fixture in Ohio politics – and Moreno's poorly managed campaign.

The latest RealClearPolling average shows Brown with a 3.6-point lead over Moreno, a millionaire Cleveland businessman who is campaigning on an immigration record of his own making despite his family's wealth and political connections. The Decision Desk HQ and The Hill averages have him ahead by just 3.2 points, figures that are within the polls' margin of error. The Cook Political Report called the race “tied.”

The race is likely to become more exciting in the coming weeks, said Jacob Neiheisel, a professor of political science at the University at Buffalo and a native of Ohio. The candidates will then be practically neck and neck.

“What makes the race more of a neck-and-neck race and less of a Republican-majority race, like potentially the Montana race, is that Sherrod Brown is a pretty popular guy and he has the power of the incumbent behind him,” Neiheisel said. His opponent is also the Democrats' preferred choice “because of his experience and his ideological leanings and a number of other aspects,” Neiheisel told Salon. And while Trump has outperformed compared to the polls in previous races, polls have often “overestimated” support for Republicans at the bottom of the pack, he added.

To bolster his candidacy, Moreno has begun latching onto the former president, most recently capitalizing on the anti-immigrant chaos in Springfield, Ohio. He supports Trump's hardline stance on the U.S.-Mexico border, supports a federal 15-week abortion limit and has said the minimum wage was “never intended to be a living wage.”

The luxury car dealer has also faced numerous legal problems related to his business: last year, a jury ordered him to pay two employees more than $400,000 in back overtime pay, and he has settled 14 similar cases with undisclosed amounts.

A mainstay in Ohio politics since the 1970s, Brown has held the office three times and has served in the U.S. Senate since 2006. He has built a reputation as a champion of the working class and has been able to appeal to a broad Ohio electorate by appealing to workers from urban centers to the Rust Belt and Appalachia. His economic platform revolves around defending what he calls the “dignity of work” and protecting Ohioans from special interests: He is fighting against free trade agreements that send jobs overseas, making it easier for workers to form unions and raising the minimum wage.

The senator's ability to be “relentlessly Sherrod Brown” in this way – that is, to stay true to his message and his role – allows him to “rise above Ohio's politics” as it has become more of a red state, Niven said.

As part of his strategy this time around, Brown has made it a point to distance himself from his party's top candidates. He canceled the Democratic National Convention last month and avoided defending Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden's stance on the U.S.-Mexico border. Republicans hope voters' disapproval will cloud Brown's chances.

Instead, he focused his election campaign on strengthening his form of economic populism. He is trying to create a direct contrast to his opponent's image as a car dealer tycoon, which is made easier by the controversy surrounding Moreno's Mercedes empire and inconsistencies about his background. He is also struggling to appeal to Republican voters, as evidenced in part by his lukewarm statement on the threats to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, which does not even mention the issue of immigration.

Brown's localization strategy has traditionally worked to his advantage, as he appeals to “a moderate electorate that tends to appeal to Ohioans,” according to Neiheisel. But given the rightward shift in the state's political landscape and the nationalization of American politics over time, appealing to the “hometown” community is no longer so easy.

“You're a representative of the brand, and the brand of both parties is a national one right now,” Neiheisel said. “So it's much harder to be a politician who is able to localize and personalize a campaign. It's not impossible … but I think it's become much more difficult over the last few decades.”

But Moreno has also failed to give his campaign a national presence, focusing on raising his profile among voters and telling his story as a Colombian immigrant who built a lucrative career and achieved the American dream rather than emphasizing his connection to the Republican Party.

“His campaign seems to have misunderstood the task because they're talking about Bernie Moreno, and that's useless,” Niven said, arguing that Moreno's campaign would have “difficulty beating Sherrod Brown” because the incumbent is obviously popular. in the state. Moreno's message “should be strictly about Democrats versus Republicans” and he should try to get Republicans who are considering splitting their votes between Trump and Brown “to come back. I don't think they fully understand that the party is their asset. Bernie Moreno is not their asset.”

Moreno's ads, which he recently boosted by $25 million for the final phase of the campaign, feature what Neiheisel described as “uncontrolled” communication compared to Brown's “more disciplined” communication.

As the election approaches, Ohioans are being inundated with ads from both camps. According to Axios, the parties have already spent or reserved nearly $400 million on ads for the Ohio Senate race as of September 9, and that number is expected to grow over the next six weeks.

Republicans have increased their spending this month and are expected to spend 2.4 times as much as they did in August on video ads supporting Moreno's Senate run. Outside groups have also increased their ad spending in support of Moreno. Crypto companies alone are expected to spend more than $800,000 a day through September to oust Brown, a vocal critic of crypto who serves as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

But Niven believes that Brown's Republican challenger will have a hard time painting a negative picture of the 18-year-old president in the coming weeks.

“I don't think he understands that he's not just running as a Republican in Ohio. He's running against Sherrod Brown and he hasn't quite figured out how to do that,” he said. “You're not going to change people's minds about Sherrod Brown. He's been a part of Ohio politics his whole life. You're not going to rewrite that book, so you're going to have to get people to think about something else if you want to overturn this election.”