Former car salesman Bernie Moreno decisively won the Senate Republican primary in Ohio on Tuesday evening, capping one of the party’s most competitive and important Senate primaries of the cycle and demonstrating Donald Trump’s continued grip on Republican base voters in the state that he carried by eight points in 2016 and 2020.
The Associated Press called the race shortly after 8:30 p.m., and Moreno was leading by double digits at 9 p.m.
Trump-endorsed Moreno, a wealthy former car dealer, handily defeated second-place finisher state senator Matt Dolan, a Ukraine hawk who ran unsuccessfully for his party’s Senate nomination in 2022. Dolan scored eleventh-hour endorsements in the final weeks this time around from the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, and former senator Rob Portman. Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose, who spent the final weeks of the race lagging in the polls, came in a distant third.
Moreno’s victory means Republicans now officially have their nominee to take on three-term democratic senator Sherrod Brown in November, and it hands another primary victory to the wing of the GOP that is skeptical of U.S. involvement overseas.
The GOP nominee had spent the race campaigning alongside first-term Ohio senator J. D. Vance, one of the loudest voices of the Senate Republican conference who opposes sending additional aid to Ukraine amid Russia’s unprovoked invasion.
Unlike Moreno and LaRose, Dolan was the only candidate who did not seek Trump’s endorsement. The former president campaigned in Ohio over the weekend for Moreno and sought to play down concerns about a bruising story published by the Associated Press. On Thursday, the AP reported that in 2008, an old work email associated with Moreno was used to create a profile on the website Adult Friend Finder seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” and “young guys to have fun with while traveling.”
Moreno, who is married and has children, has denied creating the account — which was last accessed six hours after it was created — and has come forward with a statement from the candidate’s former intern who took responsibility for making the account as “part of a juvenile prank.”
Ohio is seen as one of the GOP’s best pickup opportunities of 2024, when Republicans are hoping to flip Democrats’ 51–49 majority in the Senate. The state has trended more Republican in recent cycles and is widely seen as a state that Senate Republican should be able to flip in November with the right candidate, along with red-leaning Montana and West Virginia.
Republicans are also hoping to win a handful of other tougher Democrat-held battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan.
In the final weeks, Moreno had ratcheted up his attacks on his wealthy state-senator rival as a pawn of the “RINO establishment” — a reference to “Republican in name only.”
Diverging from its aggressive recruitment strategy in contested battleground Senate primaries elsewhere, Senate Republicans’ campaign arm — the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) — stayed neutral in Ohio’s three-way contest. But behind closed doors, the group spent months privately urging candidates to temper the intensity of their attacks on each other so the party wouldn’t end up with a badly damaged candidate in the general election, a person familiar with the NRSC’s strategy told National Review.
That advice didn’t stop the pro-Dolan super PAC, Buckeye Leadership Fund, from blanketing the state over the weekend with TV ads that called Moreno “creepy” and “damaged” goods in the aftermath of the Associated Press story.
National Democrats have also spent recent weeks training their fire on Moreno. Earlier this month, notably before the AP story broke, a pop-up PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer poured millions into the state propping up Trump-endorsed Moreno in television ads as “too conservative for Ohio.” That last-minute advertisement campaign suggests that Democrats believe Moreno is the weakest candidate to take on Brown in the general and indicates the party may have troves of anti-Moreno opposition research on hand for the general election.
Republicans insist publicly that fears about a damaged eventual nominee are overblown.
State GOP chairman Alex Trianfilou predicted in an interview midday Tuesday that turnout would hover around 20 percent. “I just don’t think a lot of people are paying attention,” Trianfilou said, “and that’s why I don’t think that some of this negativity has really sunk in the way that you would think so as to make one candidate incapable of winning a general.”