47 Days to Go: Sen. Sherrod Brown

Sep 19, 2024

Who: Sen. Sherrod Brown

Where: Ohio

Why: 270toWin, a nonpartisan website that aggregates political polls, now has only one Senate contest in the “toss-up” column—the one in Ohio. (Last week, 270toWin moved the Montana Senate race to “Leans Republican.”) Sen. Sherrod Brown, who has devoted his career to public service—as Ohio Secretary of State, a U.S. House Representative and now Senator—is a three-term incumbent in a state where Trump twice won by eight points. Can he continue to defy expectations?

Recent polls show Sen. Brown slightly ahead, but crypto companies backing the Trump-endorsed challenger, Bernie Moreno, are spending heavily against Brown. Moreno, a businessman who owned luxury car dealerships, has never held office. Apparently he’s still figuring out whether he’s opposed to abortion. In 2022, he said he was “absolute pro-life, no exceptions,” but now he says he never used the word “ban.” Yet at the same time he blames the passage of a 2023 ballot measure to codify abortion access in the state Constitution on evangelical Christians failing to show up to vote against it.

Moreno immigrated to the U.S. from Bogota, Colombia with his family as a child. But at an appearance in Springfield on Saturday, he called for the protected status of legal Haitian migrants living there to be revoked and for them to be deported back to their country, which is unsafe due to civil unrest and widespread gang violence.

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