Brown Versus Moreno

Hey, guys, how about an Italian-American third-party candidate named Maronne? 😃

Incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio will face MAGA Republican Bernie Moreno, and the common meaning of their surnames is just about all they have in common.  Brown is a traditional Hubert Humphrey liberal who supports a strong industrial policy to help workers and who backs unions and workers' rights.  Moreno is a Trump wannabe who has a big auto-dealership network, and that's all you need to know about him.  And being a MAGA man may be all he needs to win Brown's Senate seat in November.

Brown was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006, the first - and only - Democrat to be elected to the Senate from the Buckeye State since John Glenn won his last term in 1992.  Ted Strickland was elected governor of Ohio in 2006, but since then no Democrat other than Brown has won statewide in Ohio, mainly because the national party keeps relying on a coalition of Ivy League ethnic-studies professors, Wall Street bankers, and latte drinkers with a running tab at their local Starbucks.  Democrats have become spectacularly toxic in Ohio because of all that, which is why Brown - who is neither an Ivy League ethnic-studies professor or a Wall Street banker and prefers a good ol' cup of diner coffee - has been able to distinguish himself from the national Democratic leadership.  

But this time, Brown's luck may have run out.  As the Democratic Party in Ohio has atrophied, Brown has found himself increasingly isolated from political trends in his home state as well as from the party elites in Washington.  Ohio has become so deeply Trumpist that not even a Democrat who runs on working-class concerns and issues and has his own blue-collar bona fides, like Tim Ryan, can win a statewide election.  This explains why Ohioans keep sending morons like Jim Jordan to the House and James David Vance to the Senate. 

I still can't understand how Ryan could have lost his 2022 Senate bid,  but it may be for the same reason Brown may lose his bid for a fourth Senate term; Ohioans are just plain sick of the Democrats. They're so full-blown MAGA that Brown will likely lose and (like Tim Ryan did in 2022 and like the Ohio Democratic Party did long before 2022) become politically irrelevant.  And if that happens, as I have said on this blog before, Ohio will be as Republican, as MAGA, and as hostile to Democrats as Florida.

And so having a university named Miami won't be the only thing the two states have in common.