First off, Mother Jones has a new piece out that exposes a false “pulled myself up by the bootstraps” narrative Bernie Moreno (R. OH) has been pushing on the campaign trail:
Moreno was, by all accounts, a highly effective car dealer whose energy and risk-taking helped him thrive in a cutthroat industry. But records from a nearly decade-old legal battle involving a dealership in South Florida tell a more nuanced story about Moreno’s rise, and the breaks he got along the way.
The 2014 complaint in the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings centered on attempts by the Infiniti division of Nissan to expand its footprint in the highly competitive South Florida luxury car market by opening a new Infiniti dealership in downtown Coral Gables. After the company announced that Moreno—who had opened nine dealerships for brands such as Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, BMW, and Saab—would be their guy, two neighboring dealers lodged an official protest with the Florida Department of Highway Safety, claiming that Nissan was infringing on their home turf and granting special favors to Moreno.
The South Florida case offered a glimpse of the breaks that helped Moreno climb to the top of the profession. He drew the ire of rival dealers by collecting millions of dollars in financial assistance from manufacturers to open new storefronts, and he testified that Mercedes-Benz had pulled strings to get him a sweetheart deal on his very first Ohio dealership. Ultimately, he secured his Florida “dream” project only after a top competitor was laid low by a scandal involving a failed drug test.
At the hearing that fall, Moreno was a star witness. He described how he got his start as a deputy to the New England car mogul Herb Chambers, an avid yacht collector who commuted to his Massachusetts headquarters by helicopter. They had a “father/son relationship,” Moreno said, but not long after vacationing together in the Caribbean, Moreno and Chambers had a falling-out, and the understudy went into business by himself, spending about $2 million in 2005 to purchase and overhaul a Mercedes-Benz dealership in North Olmsted, Ohio.
“I took every dollar that I had ever seen in my life and managed to save and bought the dealership,” Moreno testified. He even drained his 401(k)—“which is not a good financial move,” he conceded, “but that was my only choice.”
But Moreno did not just mortgage his property in Key Largo. He also got a bit of help. “[W]hat happened was they wanted a minority operator there,” he explained, in comments that were first reported by Business Insider in March. Mercedes arranged for the owner—billionaire automotive tycoon Roger Penske—“to sell that dealership for a dramatically reduced price in exchange for Mercedes giving Penske an open point in Chandler, Arizona,” Moreno said.
And the Ohio Capitol Journal has a piece out today that exposes Moreno as a faux economic populist:
When it comes to economic appeals, he’s preaching to the choir. In Chillicothe, his reference to the cost of meat was met with wide eyes and nodding heads. After campaign events, attendees regularly bring up the cost of groceries or worry about how their kids can start families of their own saddled with higher interest mortgages.
“The real American dream,” Moreno said in February, “is that you can go to a good high school, you can graduate, you can get a good job. You can get married, you can afford a home, you can afford a car. You can afford to have kids. Those kids can go to good schools in safe communities. And then you can retire debt-free and the government is in the background.”
“That’s the American Dream that we’re going to restore,” Moreno insisted. But his financial disclosure depicts a person far removed from the kind of concerns his supporters express.
Despite economic headwinds like higher interest rates, Moreno-connected entities have purchased five homes in the past year. He was also involved in the purchase of a nearly 25-acre parcel of undeveloped land next door to a popular outlet mall in Sunbury, Ohio.
Meanwhile, Moreno was able to loan his campaign $4.5 million — $1.5 million of which came from CF Bank. The campaign’s most recent quarterly report, which covers April to June, indicates he has not begun to repay himself from supporters’ contributions, but the financial disclosure, filed in August, makes no mention of the loan.
The New York Times pointed out back in May that Moreno has been lying constantly about his background:
Running under the banner of Donald J. Trump’s populist political movement, Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown, humbly calls himself a “car guy from Cleveland” and recounts the modest circumstances of his childhood, when his immigrant family started over from scratch in the United States.
“We came here with absolutely nothing — we came here legally — but we came here, nine of us in a two-bedroom apartment,” Mr. Moreno said in 2023, in what became his signature pitch. His father “had to leave everything behind,” he has said, remembering what he called his family’s “lower-middle-class status.”
But there is much more that Mr. Moreno does not say about his background, his upbringing and his very powerful present-day ties in the country where he was born.
Mr. Moreno was born into a rich and politically connected family in Bogotá, a city that it never completely left behind, where some members continue to enjoy great wealth and status.
While his parents left Colombia in 1971 to start over in the United States, where Mr. Moreno fully transplanted, some of his siblings eventually returned. One of his brothers served as Bogotá’s ambassador to the United States. Another founded a development and construction empire that stretches across the Andes from the Colombian interior to its Caribbean shores.
And now this rich fraud has to put up the money to lie more to the voters:
The Ohio Senate race is one of the biggest in the country, but Republican nominee Bernie Moreno has been very quiet on the airwaves since winning the March primary. Until now.
Five months later, he’s finally going on air with a massive ad blitz — a $25 million buy that will include TV, radio, digital, mail and streaming platforms.
His first message: immigration. The 30-second spot, shared first with POLITICO, accuses Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of “voting with radicals like Kamala Harris” to give undocumented immigrants taxpayer-funded stimulus checks, health care and social security. It touts Moreno’s endorsement from former President Donald Trump and promises he will deport “illegals” and build the southern border wall.
Moreno has only spent about $2 million on ads since the grueling March 19 primary in which he beat Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Matt Dolan. That increasingly nasty race left him with depleted funds, and he needed time to regroup. Avoiding that dynamic was a major part of why national Republicans this cycle put so much money and effort into quashing messy primaries and instead maneuvered to boost their preferred candidates easily to the nomination. The lone exception was in Ohio. Democrats meddled in the GOP primary to boost Moreno, their preferred opponent. And they have spent or reserved a whopping $148 million in ads since the primary to help Brown, one of just two of their incumbents seeking reelection in a state that Donald Trump won.
Moreno’s spending will help close that gap. Republicans have booked $136 million since the primary, according to AdImpact, but that is largely from super PACs. Moreno is able to purchase air time at the cheaper candidate rate and thus can run ads more efficiently.
Also, the Crypto industry really wants to replace Brown with Moreno:
Ron Conway, a prominent Democratic donor and tech billionaire, has severed ties with a network of crypto super PACs after they pledged $12 million to defeat Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) without his prior knowledge.
The move, Conway argues, jeopardizes ongoing efforts to pass crypto-friendly legislation in Congress, a mission he's been actively supporting through his connections with key Democratic lawmakers, Politico reported Monday.
Conway, who contributed $500,000 to one of the PACs in December, expressed his outrage in an email to other influential figures in the crypto industry and PAC members, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.
In the email, Conway reportedly criticized the decision as "short-sighted and stupid," particularly at a time when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is working to push a crypto regulation bill through the Senate.
But the unions are hitting the campaign trail reminding voters in Ohio that Brown is the real workers populist:
A coalition of Ohio labor unions is hitting the road this week to support Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown – and to draw attention to their concerns about his Republican opponent, Trump-endorsed northeast Ohio businessman Bernie Moreno.
While it's likely Ohio will end up choosing former president Donald Trump, the U.S. Senate race is likely to be close. While union membership is down slightly in Ohio, unions will be among those groups weighing in to influence working Ohioans.
The Ohio AFL-CIO's bus tour will highlight wage theft lawsuits that Moreno settled with former employees, his stated opposition to a minimum wage and other union concerns.
Mike Knisley with the Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council, which is part of the AFL-CIO, said Brown's support for the bipartisan infrastructure law and the $280 billion law that Intel pushed for as it builds a huge manufacturing plant outside Columbus makes him the clear choice.
"It's definitely Sen. Brown who supports the Infrastructure Act, supported the Inflation Reduction Act, was pivotal on getting the CHIPS Act through that is benefiting not only central Ohio, but will have a ripple effect on the different manufacturing chains for Intel," Knisley said. "He's supporting veterans, who is supporting strong defense, who is trying to keep VAs closing. It’s Sen. Brown. It's hands down. It isn't somebody who has been convicted of wage theft or is looking just for power and nothing more than that.”
Health, Democracy and Freedom are on the ballot next year and we need to get ready to flip Ohio Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with Brown and his fellow Ohio Democrats campaigns:
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