CLEVELAND, Ohio — As of today, now just 41 more days until the 2024 election and thankfully the end of the onslaught barrage of campaign ads that in Ohio are dominated by the race between incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent Bernie Moreno, who made his fortune owning auto dealerships.
Forty one days maybe should have been followed by an asterisk. That is because it’s now being said there’s a very good chance the winner of the Presidential race, which features Sen. JD Vance’s bid to be Vice President, may not be determined election day…it may be election week.
In Ohio, the winner of the state’s other two biggest races should be determined election night. Those are the Brown v. Moreno U.S. Senate race and Issue 1 on Gerrymandering/district drawing.
A marathon of often back-to-back Brown v. Moreno ads are hard to avoid on the airwaves. Both candidates tv ad budgets appear to be well bankrolled. Senator Brown seemed to have started his ad campaign far earlier than Moreno who has now caught up with his own deluge.
As with all campaigns, some of the ads are not coming from the candidates themselves, but from third parties supporting the candidates.
Some third party ads supporting Moreno, attacking Brown have already been fact-checked as being incorrect. For instance, a super PAC backing Bernie produced a negative ad claiming Brown supported sex-change surgeries for minors and voted to let transgender men participate in women’s sports. WKYC fact check by Stephanie Haney, whose also an attorney, found both claims were false.
While both Brown and Moreno have run the standard stream of ads for the most part, Brown’s campaign has recently been mixing it up with some self-deprecating humor. One ad deals with the sound of the Senator’s voice and has voters doing impressions of it. Brown’s newest ad shows him getting his hair dyed gray, ironing his shirt and trying to sing in a church choir.
The joking ad showing rumply Sherrod ironing his shirt, dying his hair gray delivers a more serious message: “Special interest supporting Bernie Moreno spending more then $100 million in negative ads against me…they think they can buy Ohio…Jokes on them.”
