Bernie Moreno’s stumbles show just how ill-prepared for the Senate he is: Brent Larkin

CLEVELAND - In close election campaigns, all mistakes are harmful and large ones often fatal.

Less than seven weeks before an election that might decide which party controls the United States Senate, Bernie Moreno made a mistake for the ages. By mocking older women and suggesting millions of others who support abortion rights might be "a little crazy," Moreno showed how shockingly out of his depth he is as a candidate for high office.

Moreno can't connect with voters. People who served with him on important Cleveland area nonprofit boards found him utterly unlikeable. He can't raise money for his campaign, relying almost entirely on Washington-based Republicans and Donald Trump toadies. And if he somehow beats Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown on Nov. 5, he'll be nothing but a puppet for the people who filled his head with extremist ideas and bought him the election.

It's stunning that Ohio has become a place so out of touch with political realities, a place where so many voters embrace bald-faced lies peddled by snake-oil hucksters. Only in a state as red as Ohio would Moreno have a chance of winning.

On Sept. 20, Moreno said this to a group in Warren County, about 25 miles northeast of Cincinnati, "Sadly, by the way, there's a lot of suburban women that are like, 'Listen, abortion's it. If I can't have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.' OK. It's a little crazy by the way − especially for women that are past 50, I'm thinking to myself, 'I don't think that's an issue for you.'"

A video recording of Moreno sabotaging his own campaign landed in the hands of NBC4 anchor Colleen Marshall, the brightest star in Columbus television. The damage was catastrophic, with even Republican women like former Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery and longtime U.S. Rep. Deborah Pryce piling on. Nikki Haley took to X, asking Moreno, "Are you trying to lose the election?"

No. He's just an awful candidate. In most elections, about 53% of those who vote are women. A little less than a year ago, 57% of Ohio's voters approved an abortion rights amendment that is now part of the Ohio Constitution.

A few days after Moreno's abortion remarks in Warren County, a 2023 audio recording surfaced of Moreno saying the Founding Fathers would "murder you" for supporting abortion rights .

"Could you imagine if we could go back into the DeLorean, we popped into the DeLorean out there and you went back and met Madison and Hamilton and Washington, and said, 'Hey, are you in favor of abortion?' They would murder you," Moreno said in March 2023. "Are you kidding me? These are the most Christian people on earth. It would never even occur to them."

What's likely to occur to many women is not to vote for Moreno. If he loses a close election, this campaign will join the ranks of other Ohio elections where big political blunders played a major role in headline-grabbing loses.

The most memorable of all those blunders is, and may always be, that moment in 1974 near the end of a sometimes contentious (by 1974 standards) Democratic Party primary for the U.S. Senate between John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum. Days before their City Club of Cleveland debate, Metzenbaum was critical of Glenn's lack of private sector experience, saying the astronaut and war hero had never met a payroll.

Glenn's response, timed for the City Club, was devastating . "You go with me to any Gold Star mother and you look her in the eye and tell her that her son did not hold a job," Glenn said to Metzenbaum, sitting just to his right. "I tell you, Howard Metzenbaum, you should be on your knees every day of your life thanking God that there were some men – some men – who held a job."

Glenn won the debate, the primary election, and later that year, the Senate seat, beating Cleveland Mayor Ralph Perk in the general election by a million votes.

In the 1990 campaign for governor, abortion again became a major issue when Democrat Anthony Celebrezze Jr., then state attorney general, reversed his lifelong opposition to abortion, explaining that "after examining my thoughts and beliefs," he had decided to support a right to, and public funding for, abortions. At the time, Celebrezze trailed Republican and former Cleveland Mayor George Voinovich in the polls, and some prominent Democrats predicted his change of position might result in a victory for the Democrat, who nine years earlier had said of abortion, "I happen to think it's murder."

Voters saw through the flip-flop. Voinovich won in a landslide.

There were others. In a losing campaign for the Senate in 1988, Voinovich aired absurd commercials suggesting Metzenbaum, the incumbent, was soft on child pornography. On Election Day, voters turned soft on Voinovich. Two years earlier, former four-term Gov. Jim Rhodes wrapped up his campaign to unseat Gov. Dick Celeste with a series of gay-bashing tactics so vile that even his running mate, Bob Taft, distanced himself in embarrassment. Celeste won by 651,000 votes.

But what differentiates Moreno from all these others is his unwavering support for Trump, a man who has turned large swaths of this country into a landfill of toxicity. Moreno is no fool. He knows better than most - and has acknowledged as much in the past - that Trump is a pathological liar, a race-baiting bigot.

As time passes, perhaps Moreno will come to regret the shame he has inflicted on his family name with this contrived allegiance to a man so immoral that virtually his every word and deed in public life reeks of an irredeemable depravity.

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