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Demographics and Elections Commentary tagged with Moreno

3/13/2024: [Ohio] If the presidential slate is set, will Ohio's GOP voters still show up for the U.S. Senate primary? [Ohio Capital Journal]


Photo credit: WCMH-TV

The photo shows the three GOP Senate candidates, Larry, Moe(reno) and Curly, during a recent debate. Leftist Matt Dolan is the stooge who is positioned on the right. Moreno isn't really a stooge of course, but he's certainly surrounded by them here. Speaking of being positioned on the right, the gaslighting article which accompanies that photo was written by an ultra-liberal NPR media twerp and therefore reads like a Dolan campaign commercial.


The past: In 2022 in many important statewide elections, there was nothing to vote for in the Democrat primaries because their nominee had already been anointed. The same is true in 2024. That means Democrat party puppetmasters and Democrat voters are free to spend time and money influencing the outcome of Republican primary elections for their own benefit.

Like Nimrod Haley did during the brief time when she was supposedly a viable presidential candidate, other liberal Republicans like Matt Dolan are desperately seeking Democrat votes in their primary battles against actual Republicans. This is nothing new for Dolan, a left-wing state legislator who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2022 and is running again this year. In 2022 he begged Democrats to vote for him in the GOP primary, because otherwise he stood zero chance against Trump-endorsed J.D. Vance.

That tactic came closer to succeeding than it should have. In polls taken only a few weeks before the 2022 Ohio primary, Dolan was barely cracking double-digits in what was essentially a three-way race with Vance and Josh Mandel. Mandel, the former state Treasurer, had been a milquetoast candidate against Sherrod Brown in 2012 and Brown mopped the floor with him. That happened despite the fact that the Republicans actually competed on nearly equal financial footing with the Democrat, which has become quite an uncommon occurrence in contested states since that time.

With the help of thousands of Democrat voters and the endorsements of other liberal Republicans, Dolan surged in the final voting to over 23%, just a fraction of a percentage point behind Mandel. Vance of course won that primary, but with barely 30% of the overall vote. Vance didn't break the one-third mark even though he had the endorsement of Donald Trump and the endorsement of former primary opponent Bernie Moreno. Moreno had dropped out of the race in February of 2022, heroically sacrificing his campaign in order to avoid a damaging split of the conservative primary vote.



The present: There's another three-way race in Ohio in 2024 for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate. Having patiently waited his turn, Moreno is back for another run and has Trump's endorsement. That endorsement was made in December but, oddly, has not resulted in a great leap forward for Moreno in the polls. The next poll after Trump's blessing actually showed Moreno with a smaller lead over liberal Dolan and moderate Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose.

Subsequent polls did show a small bump for Bernie, however a poll which came out this morning puts Moreno down by 3 points to the liberal Dolan with many voters still undecided less than one week from election day. That poll also shows incumbent ultra-liberal Democrat Sherrod Brown winning vs. all three GOP candidates though not yet breaking 40% against any of them.

Brown, like all Democrat Senate nominees in competitive states, has an astronomical advantage in campaign cash over his Republican challengers. LaRose in particular has practically nothing to work with compared to his opponents in both parties. As of the end of February, Brown had raised over $33 million with nearly $14 million of it still in the bank. Dolan and Moreno each are somewhere around $2.4 million while LaRose has the piddly total of $591,000 cash-on-hand. That's not enough to compete for a hotly-contested U.S. House race in a single district these days, nevermind trying to run a statewide campaign in Ohio on such a thin shoestring.

Article author Nick Evans, evidently writing on behalf of the Dolan campaign, describes the liberal legislator as "quite conservative". This causes the remainder of the article to be read through tears of laughter by anyone who is actually familiar with Dolan. In an attempt to make Dolan palatable to other supposedly conservative Trump-haters, Evans ludicrously claims that Dolan has worked feverishly to enact the "Trump agenda" in Ohio while at the same time distancing himself from the President as much as possible.

Insofar as a political candidate is known by the company he keeps, Dolan is supported by Rob Portman, the former senator and squish who is still highly regarded in RINO circles; and the highest-ranking squish in the state, wimpy Governor Mike DeWine. LaRose is doing just about as well with high-profile endorsements as he is with campaign fundraising (pretty much none at all of either one). LaRose does have the support of liberal Republican congressman Mike Turner of Dayton.

Moreno not only has Trump in his corner, but also solid conservatives such as Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, J.D. Vance, Tommy Tuberville, Marsha Blackburn and others with whom Moreno will work as part of the opposition (non-RINO) caucus in the Senate if he is elected. He is also endorsed by bigwigs such as Jim Jordan, Kari Lake, Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump Jr. and (oh well) Newt Gingrich. Like them or not, they are all conservative heavyweights or were in the past (Gingrich).



Insofar as a political candidate is known by what he has actually done legislatively, here is Matt Dolan's record:
  • Pro-abortionist
  • Anti-gun
  • Supported "contact tracing" and dictatorial powers for "health" officials during the plandemic
  • Opposed arming teachers (or any armed security) in dangerous urban schools or ghetto-ized suburban schools
  • Supports the Democrat vote-buying tactic of student loan "forgiveness"
  • Supports "green" energy mandates
  • Favors higher property taxes
  • Favors taxpayer-financed handouts in corrupt ghetto areas under the guise of "neighborhood development"

Yeah Nicky, he's quite the conservative.

There is only one logical conclusion, and it's addressed to only one candidate though it's probably already too late to have a significant effect:

Drop out now, Mr. LaRose, and endorse Bernie Moreno. Don't be the person responsible for giving the puppetmasters, the media, and other Democrats a win-win in November.

Tags:

2024 Senate Ohio Moreno & the Two Stooges Win-win for Democrats


1/28/2024: [Ohio] Trump ally rises as top GOP candidate against Ohio's Sherrod Brown [The Hill]

The headline is premature since no polls (yet) show what the title claims. But it's never too early for the liberal media to begin focusing their attacks on a Republican candidate, and tying one to Trump is -- they think -- a winning strategy. It usually is, but not always. Like just two years ago in Ohio, for example.

Dysfunctional Republicans have a habit of shooting themselves in the foot via divisive primaries in critical statewide elections -- mainly because the liberal wing of the party will never back a conservative in the general election and will often actually work against one; lukewarm support like J.D. Vance got here in 2022 is pretty much all that a non-liberal GOP candidate can expect. The establishment, which controls the all-important purse strings, much prefers a liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican, and in '22 they got their way in critical Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Alaska, came close in Wisconsin and North Carolina, and only grudgingly made a token effort to help in Ohio.

This sort of fracturing and backstabbing is something Democrats never go for. First of all, they make certain that the field is clear for their chosen candidate in a Senate primary in any winnable state, thus avoiding the divisiveness. Then they support their nominees with the vast resources of their campaign finance money laundries. Deliberately sabotaging one's own nominees is idiotic, which is why only Republicans do that and not Democrats.

In a state which is not winnable for Democrats, like Missouri in 2022, they let the losers battle it out with their own money in the primary to see which one gets the honor of being stomped in the general election. They don't waste time or money on lost causes, while the Republican party, with its comparatively limited resources, starves winnable candidates in order to waste cash on ludicrously unlikely pipe dreams in places like Colorado and Washington (both of which were lost by two touchdowns), as they did in '22.

Also, the Rats do not care how outrageously liberal a candidate is and they quite obviously do not demand that only the most squishy centrist be their party's choice. If a supposedly moderate candidate can't beat a drooling liberal (see the 2022 Senate Democrat primary in Pennsylvania, for example) then the drooler is the nominee and the entire party apparatus immediately gets in line behind him.

Need proof? We've published this data before, but here again are the campaign spending figures for the swing-state Senate races in 2022. All figures shown are in millions of dollars:

StateDemocrat $Republican $
Arizona$192.4$15.5
Georgia$326.1$68.7
Nevada$64.4$18.6
New Hampshire$42.2$4.2
North Carolina$38.9$15.7
Ohio$57.7$15.6
Pennsylvania$75.7$49.4
Wisconsin$41.8$35.7


In 2022 Senate races in North Carolina and Ohio the anointed Democrats were basically unopposed in their primaries and were very well-supported financially; unlike GOP Senate candidates everywhere, who were drastically outspent. The Rats lost those two races anyway, but did (almost) everything possible to win them.

In the 2020 Senate elections they cleared the field in Colorado, Georgia twice and North Carolina, were fully united, and picked up 3 of those 4 seats.

In 2018 the same applied to Arizona and Nevada and both were successful pickups. Now in 2024 the liberal GOP establishment is, as usual, ramming "moderates" down our throats and marginalizing the supporters of "can't-win" conservatives in West Virginia and Montana and to some extent Ohio, which are the only three states where Republicans have a viable chance of flipping Senate seats from D to R. WV is a sure pickup no matter who the Republicans nominate (they still greatly prefer the squishy old Governor over the young conservative Rep.) and MT and OH are tossups at best.

In Ohio, with pro-abortionist/anti-2A state senator Matt Dolan clearly on the left no matter what fakes to the center his campaign tries, and Bernie Moreno supposedly on the right, Secretary of State Frank Larose is in the middle and will be the deciding factor in the GOP Senate primary -- can he take enough votes to win, and if he doesn't quite accomplish that then which of the other two candidates does he steal the most from to deprive them of the win? Does he split the center-right vote and make Dolan the nominee, or does he split the center-left vote and inadvertently help Moreno? Dolan, a la Nikki Haley, will beg for (and get) support from Democrat interlopers voting in the Republican primary; that is a scheme which he also used in 2022.



The most recent poll in this race is over a month old and favors Moreno -- but with merely 22% for him, and 44% still undecided. None of the three frontrunners are remotely close to pulling away from the others yet, and that may never happen unless one drops out. Larose is currently coming up way short in the money battle, but even Dolan and Moreno combined have less campaign cash-on-hand than liberal incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown.

Trump endorsed Moreno back in December, a few days before Christmas. Trump's blessing is usually good as gold in a primary (and normally a lead balloon in all but the safest general elections, cherry-picked "winning percentage" aside), and no polls have apparently been taken since that endorsement of Moreno. Bernie ought to get a nice bump in the next one. If or when he becomes the clear favorite however, the media will begin to savage him even harder than the linked article at the top of this commentary does.

Tags:

2024 Senate Ohio Bernie Moreno for the win!