Democrats won back the Senate in 2020 following historic victories in two hotly contested Georgia runoffs. Going into 2022, they had to hold Senate seats in three competitive Biden-won states to retain the majority (NV, AZ, and GA) — a difficult task for a party at the helm during a midterm. Despite President Biden’s unpopularity, Democrats ultimately expanded their majority.
However, the party will be hard-pressed to repeat that success this November. The biggest obstacle to continued Democratic Senate control is the map itself. If you count the open seat in Arizona and seats held by Democratic-caucusing independents in Vermont and Maine, there are nearly twice as many Democratic seats up for election this year as Republican ones. Adding to that uphill battle, Democrats have to defend three Trump-won states (WV, OH, and MT) and five Biden-won states that voted to the right of the nation in 2020 (AZ, MI, NV, PA, and WI).
Democrats have been overextended on the Class 1 map since 2006 when a strong blue wave helped them net six Senate seats. The party has remained strong in every six-year cycle since. In 2012, five Democrats won seats that backed Republican nominee Mitt Romney by double digits. Six years later, the combined effect of a blue wave and poor candidate recruitment helped many Trump-state Democrats win reelection, though four of them were still ousted by the tides of rising polarization.
Conventional wisdom suggests that this success streak could end in November. Crossover voting has declined conspicuously as of late, with states’ presidential results becoming a powerful predictor of their Senate outcomes every four years. In 2020, for example, Maine was the only state in the nation to elect a senator from a different party than its preferred presidential candidate. In 2016 there was no such crossover at all.
Senator Sherrod Brown is the last statewide Democrat standing in Ohio. Benefiting from a strong political pedigree, he has comfortably won three contested Senate races in an increasingly Republican state. Until now, we’ve viewed him as an underdog in the upcoming election.
Our outlook has since changed. After Bernie Moreno’s primary victory, we no longer feel comfortable with a Leans Republican rating in Ohio. Given Moreno’s potential weaknesses, and the fact that he will be facing a well-funded incumbent in Sherrod Brown, we’re moving Ohio into the tossup column.
Moreno’s rapid rise mirrors that of many emerging Republicans in the Trump era. Coming from a business background as the owner of multiple car dealerships, Moreno ran a populist and anti-establishment campaign. Despite being considered the weakest candidate in the primary field, President Trump’s endorsement ultimately won him the nomination.
Moreno has some skeletons in his closet. Shortly before the primary, he was confronted with questions about the existence of a 2008 profile on an adult website. Moreno’s lawyer claimed that it was created as part of a prank by a former intern, and it is unlikely to have any impact on the general election campaign.
Before announcing his run, Moreno was also involved in a series of wage theft lawsuits during which he was formally rebuked by a state judge for shredding potentially relevant documents. Moreno has taken a number of controversial positions; among other things, he has claimed that the election was stolen and described himself as absolutely pro-life — not necessarily a popular position in a state where pro-choice activists won two consecutive victories in 2023.
If Moreno’s issues do play a big part in the campaign after voters start to tune in, Brown could become an outright favorite. As we’ve previously shown, low candidate quality has been the GOP’s Achilles’ heel in multiple competitive Senate races. If every Senate race over the last three cycles had been contested by generic candidates, we would expect Republicans to have a 56-seat Senate majority. In other words, weak nominees have cost the GOP a net of seven Senate seats since 2017.
This candidate quality problem was on full display in 2022, particularly in Ohio. There, Trump-endorsed Republican J.D. Vance underperformed by five points relative to expectations. Vance could not beat Trump’s 2020 margins, and Democrat Tim Ryan exceeded Biden’s performance even in former Democratic strongholds along the lakefront and in Appalachia. As we’ve written before, Brown’s path to victory in a presidential year runs through turf that lies at the heart of the ongoing realignment.
While Brown’s 2018 WAR of D+1.2 is unimpressive, it doesn’t justify writing him off in November. Ohio Republicans may have a better environment and more money to play with this year, but Moreno could end up being a weaker candidate than Vance. This gives Brown a shot at re-election. The most recent polls show Brown with a steady lead against Moreno. In every single public poll between the two, Brown has led.
It’s worth pointing out that our model views Tim Ryan and Sherrod Brown as candidates of comparable electoral strength. Ryan’s 2018 and 2020 House WAR scores average out to D+0.1. This indicates that he was an average incumbent in the House, and suggests that most of his D+5 overperformance in 2022 came from Vance’s weakness as a candidate.
Brown’s WAR of D+1.2 in 2018 implies that he is a stronger candidate, if just marginally. This compounds with his incumbency, which should deliver an extra boost of roughly 3% in margin. If these adjustments were applied to the 2022 race, it would have been a dead heat (as the overperformance against an open seat baseline would come to around 9% — 6% from WAR and 3% from incumbency).
To create benchmarks for Brown’s path to victory in November, we used an average of county-level results from the 2018 and 2022 Senate races aggregated by region.
For starters, Brown probably won’t match his 2018 performance in the less-educated, Republican trending regions of the state (e.g., Lakefront, Appalachia, and the Farm Belt). But relative to his statewide margin, he does stand to make headway with suburbanites.
To actually win, he’ll first have to stem the bleeding as much as possible in ancestrally Democratic parts of the state. Doing about half as well as he did in 2018 in each of these regions would suffice under our rough benchmarks. Next, Brown will need to build on Tim Ryan’s performance in the suburbs, exurbs, and urban cores. Importantly, he doesn’t have to match his 2018 performance in any of these regions to pull off a narrow victory.
Given his weak performance in head-to-head polls, we do not feel comfortable giving Moreno the edge. While fundamentals certainly favor Republicans in Ohio, especially in presidential cycles, a tossup rating is currently the safest option. After our ratings change, Republicans are still favored to retake the Senate with a slim 51-seat majority.