NORTHEASTERN OHIO—Bernie Moreno is a Bogota-born junior oligarch with a long list of ex-employees, business partners and competitors who claim he amassed his mega-millions by cheating and stealing. He also falsely claimed to have an MBA and a “lower middle class” background, and his own party dubbed 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 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 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. (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 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 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, 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.