MAGA Faces Tough Test in Ohio

The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement's chosen candidate for the Republican Ohio senate nomination faces a tight race on Tuesday.

Bernie Moreno, who has earned the support of key MAGA figures, will go up against the GOP establishment's pick of state Sen. Matt Dolan as Republican voters head to the polls in the Buckeye State.

"Bernie Moreno had the courage and the integrity to state the obvious: Trump was right, and there will be a bloodbath in the auto industry under a second [President Joe] Biden term," wrote Ohio's Republican Sen. J. D. Vance, who was elected in 2022, on Monday night.

MAGA candidate for Arizona governor in 2022 Kari Lake said Moreno "is going to be a GREAT fighter for the people of Ohio," while Donald Trump Jr., the former president's son, said the Republican establishment feared Moreno "because they know he will put AMERICA FIRST."

After weeks of polls that saw the two trade places, the latest survey gives Moreno a lead of nine points over Dolan. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose is also contesting the nomination to take on Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in November, but has fallen behind in the polls.

Yet while the Emerson College poll of 450 likely Republican primary voters, conducted between March 17-18, gave Moreno 38 percent support to Dolan's 29 percent, when undecideds were taken into account, this shrank to just a four-point lead for Moreno—within the poll's margin of error.

Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said that generally, Dolan was leading among voters with postgraduate degrees, while Moreno led among voters without a college degree.

Despite Trump's self-certainty that he will easily clinch the Republican presidential nomination, with him no longer facing any meaningful opposition, the Ohio race could serve as a test of whether his influence can still attract voters who remain hesitant about the former president leading the GOP into another election.

Both he and incumbent Biden have suffered in polls that suggest they are viewed apathetically among their own voters—and even more so by the wider electorate—with analysts warning that both face poor voter turnout in November.

While both men are effectively their respective parties' nominees—promising a rematch of the 2020 election—their campaigns will likely be watching how their candidates perform among undecideds who could sway the election, either by crossing over to another party or staying home on polling day.

Amid the polls that showed Moreno and Dolan separated by a matter of points, Trump himself traveled to Ohio at the weekend in a final attempt before the primary to curry favor. In a speech, he denigrated Dolan, while calling Moreno a "fantastic guy" and a "hero," according to Politico.

The visit also came two days after The Associated Press published details of an account created on a casual sexual encounters website Adult Friend Finder in 2008 under Moreno's name seeking "men for 1-on-1 sex." Moreno's lawyer provided the outlet with a statement from the candidate's intern at the time, who said he had created the account using the Moreno's email address as a "prank."

Correction 03/19/24, 11.55 a.m. ET: This article was updated with a correction to the spelling of Emerson College.