Heading into the Ohio Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, there was some rumbling and grumbling in Donald Trump’s orbit about the suitability of Trump’s chosen candidate, Bernie Moreno.
Moreno is a smooth-talking Clevelander who made his money selling cars and has been a down-the-line advocate of MAGA positions since he ran in last cycle’s Senate primary, which was ultimately won by Trump’s endorsee, current Sen. J.D. Vance. After meeting with Trump, Moreno dropped out of that race before voting began, setting himself up as the favorite in this year’s race.
The problem: Last week, the Associated Press wrote a story which revealed that in 2008, an account seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” was created using Moreno’s email address on a website called Adult Friend Finder. The present moment is not an LGBTQ-friendly one in Republican politics, and Moreno had campaigned as an enemy of gay-rights “indoctrination,” slamming one of his opponents for supporting a bill that would have prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Moreno denies setting up or using the account and has put out a statement attributed to a former aide who says he created it as a prank, but some within the party didn’t believe that explanation:
Even before publication of the AP story, Moreno had begun losing some of his polling lead over his next-closest competitor, Matt Dolan, a lawyer and member of the family that owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team.
Trump himself nonetheless stuck by Moreno, holding a rally to support him in Dayton over the weekend, and on Tuesday night that paid off with an easy victory. Moreno outperformed his polls and, with most votes counted, leads Dolan by 18 points.
Where do Tuesday’s results leave The Donald Trump (Ohio joke!) and his Republican Party going forward? Some Democrats believe that Moreno will be a weaker candidate against incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown than Dolan would have been because Dolan is not a 2020 election denier and would have appealed to moderate and independent voters. Your correspondent is not quite sure about that; while it’s true that Trump-endorsed candidates did poorly in 2022 general elections, most of them (Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano) came across as extreme and just plain weird in a way that Moreno does not. The man ran a chain of Mercedes-Benz dealerships; he knows what upper-middle-class suburban sensibilities are all about.
The more concerning possibility for Trump may be that some college-educated center-right Ohioans aren’t going to vote for him. Fourteen percent of Ohio Republican primary voters cast their ballots for Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race two weeks ago, and three percent voted for Ron DeSantis, who may be legally deceased. (When’s the last time someone checked on Ron?) According to exit polling highlighted by ABC News, 10 percent of GOP primary voters in the state said they would rather vote for Joe Biden than Trump in November. (Anyone in Ohio can choose to vote in either party’s primary, but doing so is considered a choice to formally register as a member of that party; it’s referred to as a “partially open” system.)
Trump’s biggest potential problem in the general election is that some swing voters consider him (or will remember that they consider him) a criminal who tried to overthrow the government. He is not exactly doing his best to work around that weakness by saying, for example, that one of his first acts in office would be to pardon the members of the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. His primary results going forward will likely all be clean sweeps like Tuesday’s, but the seeds of an eventual defeat may still be blowing in the spring winds.
