Democrats are meddling in Ohio’s Senate GOP primary at the 11th hour to boost Bernie Moreno, the candidate former President Donald Trump endorsed to face vulnerable Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Duty and Country PAC, a group affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, is spending over $2.5 million to air with a TV ad that heavily touts Moreno’s support from Trump and calls him “too conservative for Ohio.” It will begin airing on Thursday and is set to run through Tuesday’s primary.
The group is funded by Senate Majority PAC, the top Democratic outside group focused on Senate races. The apparent goal of the ad is to boost Moreno with GOP voters, and their interference in the race is a sign that they believe he would be the weakest candidate in the general election.
In a statement, Moreno campaign spokesperson Reagan McCarthy invoked Democrats’ general feeling in 2016 that Trump would be the easiest candidate for Hillary Clinton to beat. “The same thing is going to happen to Sherrod Brown this year,” McCarthy said.
This is such a playing-with-fire tactic…
If y’all wonder why we’re constantly seeing races between the DNC candidates and extremist Trumpers, know that it’s at least in part because the DNC is boosting them. “Don’t vote for white supremacists” works better as a talking point if you make sure your opponents are white supremacists, but badly if your gambit doesn’t pay off.
And guess what… they got what they wanted.
Trump’s endorsee, auto-dealer magnate Bernie Moreno, beat State Senator (and Cleveland Guardians co-owner) Matt Dolan and Secretary of State Frank LaRose decisively on March 19. With over 96 percent percent of the expected vote in, Moreno is winning just over half the total votes and leading by Dolan by 18 percent. It’s a broad-based victory, since Moreno is ahead in all of Ohio’s 88 counties.
Of course Ohio has 88 counties…
“Now it’s on you, Ohio Democrat voters, to vote super hard to make sure a white supremacist isn’t elected in the General!” - Sincerely, the SuperPAC that helped put a white supremacist in the General
I hate this strategy so much. What it says is “Our candidate is so lackluster and uninspiring that they can only beat the most out there fringe lunatic”. Really shows the absolute shameful state of the Democratic party, the lengths they’ll go to to avoid catering to their base.
ignoring that i don’t think this applies to Sherrod Brown: Ohio is firmly a red state at this point which has trended rightwards in the past three presidential elections (and which voted for Trump by 10 points twice–presumably it will do so again in 2024) so… yeah. the path to victory here at this point just runs through winning over some Republicans and most Independents. pretending otherwise would be malpractice–the “base” is not sufficient anymore to win Ohio. so the easiest way to win now is to run against a fringe lunatic. and it’s not like there’s a meaningful difference in voting record in the Senate between so-called “moderate Republicans” and the “fringes” anyways–Murkowski and Collins still vote with their party on any actually good legislation and refuse to gut the filibuster that would allow for things to be passed by simple majority
The real issue here is that this has been a strategy of the DNC for years. As much as they’d like to deny it, they are responsible for the rise of Trump and extremism. But we’ll be asked to pretend that didn’t happen, again.
When you endorse racist fascists to win, you’re no better than those wh osupport them.
reducing voters to brainless automata who have no agency in the rise of fascism is a good way to completely neuter your ability to actually combat fascism because many Americans are active participants to the project of building fascism, not idly going along because of partisan voting. bluntly: if fascism had no base, elevating it wouldn’t work in the first place
Which is going to be impossible when those very Republicans and Independents think,
“Hey, didn’t they campaign against the more ‘moderate’ candidates like Dolan and LaRose, who I might actually have voted for?”
“Aren’t they part of the reason I don’t have a GOP candidate I support?”
“Did they force me into this position to ‘have’ to vote for them, on purpose? Well fuck that!”
i’m sorry but, at the scale of the general electorate essentially nobody thinks this way and you might as well be making someone up accordingly. most voters–probably a minimum of half or more in almost all states–simply do not pay attention to or care about primaries (and indeed most election cycles only see majority interest in the general election beginning in August or later), and most people who show up in November will likely have not have voted in a primary at all.
additionally, it is well established that extremist candidates pay a penalty for being extremist or perceived as extremist: see for example Split Ticket’s electoral wins above replacement model
That’s funny, because that is exactly what most Centrist Dems accuse Bernie voters of thinking and doing in 2016.
I think there is a tendency, especially on the Left, to downplay the political awareness of people, especially because it’s very appealing to believe that if people were aware, they would not be as apathetic as most people are. Not voting in a primary doesn’t mean you are ignorant of it. Nor does it mean you are completely politically detached until August or later. Most peoples’ political news sources are also their daily news sources, whether they be Fox, CNN, or local newspapers. They’re still seeing politics regularly. I would agree that most people are not politically active until very near to the general elections, but that shouldn’t be assumed to equate to a lack of awareness of goings-on.
That is sometimes true, but certainly not always (it was, as your link notes, far more true in 2022 than in 2020). Furthermore, it’s not some sure thing that you should be betting peoples’ lives on. Trumpers have won plenty of political races. They are a growing bloc. A Trump endorsement is not by any means a death sentence for a candidate, but it very much is an assurance that candidate will be attacking vulnerable groups if they win.
There is no defensible scenario for propping up violent bigots.
…as opposed to all of the non-Trump endorsed candidates who don’t do this in the Republican Party. i’m sorry but this is unironically just laundering the fake idea that there are shades of difference in the Republican Party. there aren’t! this doesn’t matter! there are no moderate Republicans! the only difference between these people is how open they are about how much they want the people they don’t like to die! kill the idea that this party can be saved by trying to let the “moderates” win out–all they want is a Kinder, Gentler Fascism that is harder to fight! literally every serious Republican politician is, at their core, a violent bigot–it’s the Republican brand and if they disagreed with violent bigotry they wouldn’t be Republicans!
I can believe that the GOP is a racist, misogynistic, homophobic den of vipers that needs to die in a fire, without reducing them each as persons into cartoon villains in my mind. I know (too many) Republicans, and some of them want the US to be a White Christian Straight Nation™ (aka, the “Faith and Flag” Republicans), and others are just stuck in a Boomer mentality of “Republicans understand fiscal policy, Democrats love spending money” (aka “Ambivalent Right”).
I don’t want any Republican in office, but I need to be able to see the daylight between Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, or I can’t actually strategize around persuading their respective voting blocs. If all Republicans are just Donald-Trump-in-a-mask, there’s no point even trying to strategize (and frankly, if you think this way you’re going to be led around by the nose by people who will exploit that, which it seems like the DNC is doing very well right now).
if you “reduced them to cartoon villains” they would literally be less evil than they actually are. Republicans writ large would gladly kill billions of people if it kept the fossil fuel money going—and we know this because they are actively choosing to do that by denying climate change and making it as difficult as possible to move away from fossil fuels as we speak