The last time I spoke to Bernie Moreno, a few weeks ago, he felt he had his campaign for the Ohio senate seat against long-time Senator Sherrod Brown well under control. And regarding ad buys, you can’t turn on the TV or the internet without getting bombarded with a positive Bernie Moreno ad. Bernie and his team are indeed working hard, which is what he told me way back in September of last year, way before this election of 2024. I had just stepped off a plane from Japan and privately sat with Bernie and his people about this upcoming election. At the time, I wasn’t convinced that Bernie Moreno would be able to beat Sherrod Brown, let alone win in a three-way race with two other Republicans in an upcoming primary. At that time, I supported Frank LaRose. But after many questions and measuring how Bernie Moreno answered those questions, I became a supporter. Now, here we are a year later, and most of the polling shows Bernie overtaking Sherrod Brown by two points, which is quite a feat in and of itself. Bernie Moreno has essentially done everything he told me he would do at that little dinner, and I’m very happy about it. I’ve wanted to see someone knock off Sherrod Brown in an election for a long time, and now someone is poised to do it. Sherrod Brown has held that senate seat for over 30 years, and his voting record is among the worst progressives in government. However, he was very popular among the labor unions until the past couple of years when Trump broke that wall in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan due to the massive letdowns in the car industry and the Biden EV mandates. The unions have pulled away from supporting Sherrod Brown, and now there is a real vulnerability to losing his seat from Bernie Moreno, who is looking great for election day.
Again, we don’t want to take anything for granted when we talk about polling. But it’s much better right now to be Bernie Moreno than Sherrod Brown. Brown would be in a prevent defense if this were a football game, hoping to hang on to a lead. Bernie Moreno is the hot-handed quarterback who can’t miss and is driving down the field to score a last-minute field goal with no time on the clock to win the game. One thing that impressed me at that dinner a year ago was that he told me weeks before it happened that Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle would endorse him and that he was friends with them. That I thought was astonishing because one thing the Trumps are, they don’t have a lot of tolerance for losers. And to have personal affiliations as dinner friends means they didn’t think of Bernie Moreno as anything but a winner. So that was impressive. And Bernie also told me that Charlie Kirk and J.D. Vance would endorse him, which impressed me even more. And now, over the last year, I have watched J.D. Vance personally put his arm around Bernie to carry him with direct support. I’ve seen J.D. Vance and Bernie Moreno together many times since, and things have been lining up nicely for a major upset in the Ohio Senate race. To make matters even better, Trump has not had to come to Ohio to defend himself or Bernie because the internals show that Bernie Moreno is well positioned to win, which Trump personally cares about. That he hasn’t had to do many Ohio rallies says a lot about how good the Bernie Moreno ground game has been.
The math works, as I have said about the Trump campaign nationally. It will all come down to voter engagement and Democrats; all Democrats would have a hard time showing their numbers in 2020 this time around. There aren’t that many voters out there who can do what they did to beat Trump the last time. I’ve said since then just about every day that the Democrats cheated with mail-in ballots, and their loose COVID rules at the time allowed for the introduction of mass chaos, which they exploited to win several races across the country and push Trump out of the White House. But now they have a problem, they have to at least perform at the 2020 levels. Trump can; his voter engagement is excellent; we know at least 75 million people across the country will show up to vote for Trump. In Ohio, Trump is somewhere around +8 in head-to-head polling. This means voter engagement for a much more exciting candidate will increase. In most cases, people who show up to vote for Trump are also going to vote for Bernie Moreno. Even Democrats who typically would vote for Sherrod Brown will likely cross over and vote for Trump and, subsequently, Bernie Moreno. There won’t be many who will vote for Trump but then Sherrod Brown. Because Brown is associated with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden by default, the union vote is peeling away toward all Republicans.
During that nice dinner with Bernie and my head clear from travel in Japan, where I could step away from the American news cycle enough to see things with the big picture, we talked about this EV mandate issue that Sherrod Brown had been affiliated with. And a year later, the results are pretty obvious. The EV mandates were a killer for Brown; he didn’t try to protect Ohio jobs from an overreaching Joe Biden administration. They thought they would never have to win another election at the time, and Brown got caught up in the hype. And here was Bernie to break him by winning a race with Trump supporting the heavy lifting. And the whole way, because of his relationship with Don Jr. and the future Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance, Bernie has worked his ass off. He has been great on the campaign trail, so things look great for him to win. To be two points ahead, but even better, to be on the plus side of the engagement gap, show Bernie is well positioned on election day to beat Sherrod Brown. People still need to vote in vast quantities, at least as they did in 2020. But if they do, Republicans, not just in Ohio but all over the country, are going to destroy Democrats. Because they cheated in 2020 with mail-in ballots, they won’t be able to duplicate that effort again. Too many people are paying attention this time to get their total vote count much higher than in the 60 million range. Essentially, at this point, for Democrats, it becomes a math problem, and they don’t have enough heads for the math. As things look, Republicans can pick up 13 senate seats added to the 38 that are not up for reelection this time, putting them at 51, gaining control. And Bernie Moreno is poised to be one of them and to bring with him support of the Trump platform in spectacular ways that seemed impossible a year ago, but now, he is poised to do great things just as he told me he would do way back then. What I have learned about Bernie Moreno is that he keeps his word and does what he promises. And I can’t wait for him to be Senator Moreno with a solid majority.
Rich Hoffman
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