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**** October 29, 2024
The Populist and the Porsche Salesman
BY MAUREEN TKACIK
Democrats thought beating Bernie Moreno would be a cakewalk. After $500 million worth of crypto-fueled queer-baiting, Ohio may be too brainwashed to save.
NORTHEASTERN OHIO-Bernie Moreno is a Bogota-born junior oligarch with a long list of ex-employees, business partners [link removed] and competitors who claim he amassed his mega-millions by cheating and stealing. He also falsely claimed [link removed] to have an MBA and a "lower middle class" background, and his own party dubbed [link removed] him "Ohio's George Santos." During the primary, the Democrats were sufficiently unafraid of his candidacy that the Senate Majority PAC plowed $3 million into ads [link removed] knocking two of his competitors.
Now, somehow, this gazillionaire car dealer looks like he might beat Sherrod Brown, the disheveled populist and three-term senator who has represented Ohioans in one elected office or another since 1975, when he was sworn in as a 22-year-old legislator representing Lorain, a mill town just west of Cleveland. D.J. Byrnes, whose substack The Rooster [link removed] covers Ohio state politics, got a bad feeling when he was chatting with a friend about the three-term senator and his six-year-old son excitedly piped up: "Sherrod Brown: he's too liberal for Ohio!"
Byrnes blames the cash tsunami that has put the matchup on track to be the nation's first half-billion-dollar Senate election [link removed]. (To put that figure in perspective, it's more than George W. Bush and John Kerry raised in 2004-combined.) Two weekends ago, his local Fox affiliate in Columbus missed the kickoff [link removed] of the Cincinnati Bengals game against the Carolina Panthers to broadcast a commercial promising Moreno would "end inflation." The station's owner, Sinclair Broadcasting, recently revised [link removed] its projected political ad revenue for the year by about sixty million dollars, largely due to the insatiable thirst for air time in Ohio.
Brown has raised more than $80 million, quadruple his haul during his last race in 2018 and nearly quadruple what Moreno has managed to raise himself. But dark money groups, financed most aggressively by three cryptocurrency giants [link removed], likely enthused both by Brown's reluctance to embrace crypto deregulation and Moreno's own status as a blockchain entrepreneur, have fallen over themselves to plow funds into anti-Brown attack ads. Even the senator's supporters are worried the propaganda onslaught will prove too toxic to bear. "We finally have a really formidable candidate in Bernie Moreno," says Dale Fellows, a GOP official in Lake County.
Read the full story at the Prospect. [link removed]
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A new Pew survey shows the public thinks the Supreme Court is the single most partisan overseer and adjudicator of elections. BY HAROLD MEYERSON
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