Ohio Republicans’ Nasty Senate Primary Comes to a Close

The past week has been a whirlwind in Ohio Republican politics. On the ground in the Buckeye State and in Washington, Republican operatives are relieved that the drama is about to come to a close.

Ohioans will nominate on Tuesday their GOP candidate to take on Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown — setting the stage for what’s expected to be one of the most competitive Senate races in the country this cycle. Voters will choose between three high-profile Republican candidates: state senator Matt Dolan, Donald Trump–endorsed businessman Bernie Moreno, and Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose, all of whom have spent the past few weeks brutally attacking each other in ads and on the stump.

Polls suggest that while LaRose is certainly still in the mix, the race is a slightly more contested race between Trump-aligned Moreno, who is backed by Ohio senator J. D. Vance and many of the president’s out-of state-allies, and Dolan, a more traditional Republican candidate who is backed by Ohio governor Mike DeWine and former Ohio senator Rob Portman.

Along with Montana, a state Trump carried by 16 points last cycle, Ohio is seen as one of Senate Republicans’ best pickup opportunities in 2024. (West Virginia is now seen as a lock for Republicans following Democratic senator Joe Manchin’s announced retirement.)

The state has trended more Republican in recent cycles, though Brown is expected to be well-funded and put up a strong fight against the eventual GOP nominee.

The GOP primary race took a turn Thursday evening when the Associated Press reported that an old work email associated with Moreno was used in 2008 to create a profile on the website Adult Friend Finder, a site used to find casual sex partners. According to the AP, the account sought “Men for 1-on-1 sex” and included a post that said “Hi, looking for young guys to have fun with while traveling.” The account, which did not include a profile photo, was last accessed six hours after it was first created. Moreno, who is married and has children, has denied creating the account and has come forward with a statement from the candidate’s former intern, Dan Ricci, who said he made the account as “part of a juvenile prank.”

National Review could not independently verify the AP’s report, which kicked off a firestorm of negative advertising from the pro-Dolan super PAC, the Buckeye Leadership Fund. The group went on air over the weekend with an ad called “Creepy” that dismisses him as “damaged goods.” But as NR reported over the weekend, cease-and-desist letters written by Moreno’s legal team prompted some TV and radio stations to stop running the ads, raising questions about how much play the story is getting among GOP voters ahead of Election Day.

Trump, who won the state by eight points in 2016 and 2020, has come to Moreno’s defense on the ground. “We all know this man. He’s a hero, he’s a winner and we’re not going to let these people — these people are sick,” Trump said in a stump speech in Ohio over the weekend.

The ad wars have been vicious. Last week, Ohioans received mailers from the pro-Moreno super PAC Buckeye Values hitting LaRose on LGBT issues. “What team does Frank LaRose Play for?” says the mailer, which includes a photo of LaRose with a “Trans Rights Now” sticker super-imposed on his shirt. “Is he with us…Or is he with they/them?” The mailers were approved weeks ago, a senior adviser to the super PAC told NR, but didn’t hit mailboxes until last week.

Also this month, notably before the AP story broke, a pop-up PAC bankrolled by a a Chuck Schumer–aligned spending group pumped millions of dollars in the state boosting Moreno in TV ads as “too conservative for Ohio” — a common primary meddling tactic designed to boost the Trump-backed candidate among Republican primary voters. The move indicates Democrats view Moreno as the weakest GOP candidate to take on Brown in the fall.

“The person we nominate has to win in November,” DeWine told a crowd of Dolan supporters Monday evening in Columbus. “This is not going to be an easy race, folks. I’ve run against this man, so I can speak that it will not be easy, but it’s doable. Very, very doable. And of the three candidates, look, they all could win. But the person clearly that has the best shot at winning in the fall is Matt Dolan. I think our common sense tells us that. The fact the Democrats are working to prop up the weakest candidate tells us that.”

Under the leadership of Montana senator Steve Daines, Senate Republicans’ campaign arm — the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) — has spent the past year recruiting and endorsing strong Republican candidates early on in Republican primary contests to avoid ending up with damaged nominees in the general election. But the group has notably diverged from this strategy in Ohio, where Daines is staying neutral in the contested race to take on Brown in the general.

With that dynamic in mind, the NRSC has worked aggressively behind the scenes for months to prevent this primary from becoming a dogfight between all three high-profile candidates, a person familiar with the group’s strategy told National Review. That strategy was largely successful until the very end, especially when compared with the 2022 cycle, when candidates Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel nearly got into a fistfight onstage during a debate. That Senate primary was bloody from the start: Negative ads against then-candidate J. D. Vance started airing that cycle in October of the off-year.

The NRSC is fully prepared to back Moreno should he come out on top, a source familiar with the group’s thinking told National Review.

Democrats are sitting back as the drama unfolds.

“With Ohio it’s a very contentious primary,” Senator Gary Peters (D., Mich.), Senate Democrats’ 2024 campaign chief, told reporters last month. “And that’s good for us, because you usually get a damaged, flawed candidate that comes out of the primary that tends to be the most extreme person in the race, which allows us to paint an even clearer contrast between whoever the eventual nominee is and Sherrod Brown.”