‘Biden’s Best Friend’: Ohio Republicans Confident White House Will Sink Democratic Incumbent Sherrod Brown

Ohio Republicans believe they have a simple strategy to beat three-term Democratic senator Sherrod Brown: tie him to President Joe Biden.

“He’s Joe Biden’s best friend in Ohio, and that’ll be the most serious headwind he’s ever faced,” Ohio GOP chairman Alex Triantafilou said in a recent interview. “We know he’s formidable. We’re not gonna take it lightly. He’s gonna have tons of outside money — special-interest money will pour into the state to help him. But it’s not going to be enough.”

Brown, as the New York Times recently pointed out, has been unusually lucky in recent election cycles. He first ran for Senate in 2006, a banner year for Democrats over voter frustrations with President George W. Bush’s second term and the war on terror. Six years later, Brown ran alongside Democratic president Barack Obama, who narrowly carried the state. Then came the blue wave in 2018, a midterm cycle when Democrats across the country romped to victory in backlash against President Donald Trump’s first term.

The political dynamics for Brown will look very different in 2024. To stave off a challenge from Republican nominee Bernie Moreno — a wealthy former car dealer who vastly overperformed the polls and cruised to victory in last week’s nasty three-way GOP primary — Brown will have to significantly outrun an extremely unpopular Democratic president who lost his red-trending state to Trump by eight points in 2020. (Trump carried Ohio by the same margin in 2016.)

The GOP is optimistic that Moreno, a political newcomer who carried every county in this month’s Republican primary, will overperform in Ohio’s white working-class enclaves like the Mahoning Valley, where blue-collar voters have trended away from Democrats in recent years.

Republicans working to elect Moreno are quick to point out that Brown — whose policy positions closely mirror Biden’s — is no party-defying politician like conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia or centrist Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine.

“What Manchin and Collins have in common are two things,” said Luke Thompson, a strategist for the pro-Moreno Buckeye Values PAC. “One, they represent small states, which means that you can have a meaningful interaction with a nontrivial share of the electorate. And two, they vote off all the time, including on big issues.”  

“Sherrod Brown is a down-the-line Democrat,” Thompson added.

In 2023, Brown voted with Biden 97.9 percent of the time, according to an ABC News analysis.

Republicans point to Democrat Tim Ryan, the former Ohio congressman who ran unsuccessfully for retiring GOP senator Rob Portman’s seat in 2022. Despite raising gobs of cash and distancing himself from Biden on the campaign trail, he still lost to Hillbilly Elegy author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance by a decisive six-point margin.

Vance, who like Trump endorsed Moreno in the primary, is expected to campaign heavily on behalf of the Republican nominee through Election Day. And he’s likely to continue helping Moreno in the fundraising department. The freshman senator helped raise more than $1 million for the Buckeye Values PAC in the lead-up to the primary, Axios reported. 

Like Vance, Moreno has been an outspoken critic of continued financial aid to Ukraine, suggesting that lawmakers should instead train their focus on domestic issues like immigration. Should Moreno win in November, Ohio would be represented by two GOP senators who are skeptical of U.S. involvement overseas.

Moreno kept foreign policy front and center in the primary, attacking his chief primary rival, state senator Matt Dolan, over his support for aid to Ukraine. “My obligation is to the people of Ohio, and then to the people of the United States of America,” Moreno said at the time.

“We’ve learned, over the last 50 or 60 years, that endless wars help the elites and hurt the working class,” he said. His criticism has gone even further, with the Ohio Republican going so far as to allege that Ukraine has a “dictator.”

Meanwhile, Brown said last month, on the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion, that “we must continue to stand with our allies.” 

Because many Republican voters view the Ukraine war as Biden’s war, uneasiness about supporting Ukraine amid Russia’s unprovoked invasion is in many ways reflexive opposition to the Democratic administration’s policies, said Matt Mowers, former senior White House adviser and State Department official under Trump. 

“There’s this growing sense that the world’s kind of on fire as a result of the policies coming out of the administration right now,” said Mowers, who now serves as president of Valcour LLC, a global public strategy firm.

Senate Republicans are banking on Moreno to help the party retake Democrats’ 51–49 majority. Weeks before Ohio Republicans picked their nominee in the March 19 primary, the Mitch McConnell–aligned Senate Leadership Fund and its allied group American Action Network reserved $83 million in post–Labor Day ads that will run through Election Day.

Around NR

• After the RSLC reportedly advised Republican candidates in down-ballot races to avoid making the election a singular referendum on Joe Biden in order to “learn from the missteps of the 2022 cycle,” Noah Rothman revisits the actual missteps from the midterms: 

Simply put, the GOP’s nominees did not err in 2022 because they sought to establish too sharp a contrast between themselves and Biden. . . . What seems to correlate directly with Republican losses in winnable races was the extent to which the GOP’s nominees endorsed Donald Trump’s myths around the 2020 election.

• With neither Trump nor Biden staring down a pleasant retirement, both candidates are likely to view the upcoming election as “existential,” Judson Berger writes:

There is no fallback or next chapter for either candidate. Trump is looking at the possibility of asset seizure and/or imprisonment, and the odds of the latter increase if he’s not in charge of the Justice Department, soon. If Biden loses, don’t expect a Trump DOJ and allied congressional Republicans to spare him further hassle over his family’s influence-peddling controversy.

• Chris Christie isn’t ruling out a third presidential run, this time with No Labels, as Audrey Fahlberg writes: 

Joining a No Labels ticket would mark quite the turnaround for Christie, who called the effort a “fool’s errand” last summer, shortly before he launched his 2024 GOP campaign. He’s spent the past few months walking back that rhetoric in his public remarks, first opening the door to a potential No Labels run in February, a few weeks after he dropped out of the GOP race.

• Michael Brendan Dougherty expresses skepticism of recent polling that finds Trump making inroads with black and Hispanic voters:

I absolutely believe that Biden has lower approval among these groups. I even believe that some black-male-voter sentiment can be getting slightly Trumpier. I have extended family who fit into the broader category of Hispanics for Trump. But it’s harder to convince me that all of these expressed sentiments will translate into voting behavior in the fall. 

• Noah Rothman warns that the GOP’s congressional campaigns shouldn’t be so confident in their 2024 prospects:

Republicans already have a lot going for them. As was the case in 2022, the Republican Party enjoys environmental tailwinds that favor its preferred issue set. . . . And yet, while this election cycle is a long way from over, the polling of individual U.S. Senate races does not indicate a banner 2024 is in store for the GOP.

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