Ohio
Analysis: Attacks against Bernie Moreno suggest he's leading Ohio's GOP Senate race
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno is finding out it’s not always a picnic being the frontrunner in politics.
Even if the world of Ohio politics is not sure that you really are.
Just acting like a frontrunner makes a candidate a target, with Republican opponents and Ohio Democrats throwing accusations at you, like tossing a pot of spaghetti against the wall to see how much sticks.
Moreno faces two GOP opponents in the March 19 primary — Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and State Sen. Matt Dolan of Chagrin Falls.
The winner of that primary election will face Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in the November election in a high-stakes contest which could very well decide which political party controls the U.S. Senate next year.
Moreno, the 57-year-old immigrant from Colombia, is fabulously wealthy, getting rich in the business of selling luxury cars and dabbling for a while in bitcoin, allowing him to loan millions to his campaign.
But that is not the superpower of his “frontrunner” status in the March 19 Ohio primary.
The wind beneath the Clevelander’s wings is getting the endorsement of Donald Trump, the criminally indicted former president who has won Ohio’s electoral votes not once, but twice.
ANALYSIS: Trump looks to go 2-for-2 in choosing Ohio’s next U.S. senator
Trump, on his social media platform, wrote that Moreno will “fight the corrupt Deep State that is destroying our Country.”
“President Trump’s endorsement is the most powerful and influential endorsement in Republican politics, and Bernie is proud to have earned it,” said Reagan McCarthy, communications director for the Moreno campaign.
“Hardworking Ohioans know that they were better off under President Trump, and our campaign has seen momentum following President Trump’s resounding endorsement of Bernie.”
The endorsement made Moreno one very happy candidate.
And it was a gut punch to LaRose, who seemed almost desperate at times to win Trump’s endorsement and the support of Ohio’s MAGA voters.
Dolan didn’t particularly care; he knew he was not going to get the Trump endorsement. When Dolan ran unsuccessfully in 2022 in a GOP primary for Rob Portman’s Senate seat, he was the only candidate in a crowded field who didn’t court the ex-president.
“I couldn’t be more grateful or more humbled to have the complete and total endorsement of President Donald Trump at this vital moment in the campaign,” Moreno said after Trump’s endorsement in December.
However, eight years ago, when Trump was running for president for the first time, Moreno wasn’t exactly on board the MAGA bus. Back then, he called Trump “a lunatic invading the party,” among other things.
But he’s not the first Republican to do a 180 on the subject of Donald Trump. J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist who was lifted out of a crowded field of Senate candidates two years ago by a Trump endorsement, also used to say nasty things about the ex-president.
Now, Vance is one of the most reliable Trump mouthpieces in the U.S. Senate and is even being talked about as a potential running mate for Trump in 2024. Vance, not surprisingly, also endorsed Moreno in the March 19 primary (and well before Trump did).
Moreno has another Trump connection — his daughter, Elizabeth Moreno Miller, worked for the Republican National Committee during Trump’s campaign and is married to Max Miller, a Trump White House aide who is now a congressman from northeast Ohio.
Moreno’s Republican primary opponents and the Ohio Democratic Party have attacked Moreno on lawsuits by employees of a Massachusetts car dealership claiming he didn’t pay them the overtime money they were entitled to.
ANALYSIS: Why did J.D. Vance endorse Bernie Moreno so early?
A few months before he entered this race, Moreno settled a dozen of the cases. That came after a jury ordered him to pay $400,000 to two former employees for not paying them overtime.
In a deposition in that case, Moreno admitted to shredding some documents after he had been told to preserve everything that might be relevant to the case. He was admonished by the judge.
Moreno’s communications director said both the media and his opponents are distorting the truth on the lawsuits.
“It’s no surprise that the leftwing media is running the same lie-filled playbook against Bernie’s business background as they have against President Trump over the past eight years,” McCarthy said in a written statement. “But what is both surprising and pathetic, is that Bernie’s two supposedly Republican opponents are so desperate to save their flailing campaign’s [sic], that they would repeat those very smears from the far-left media.”
The Ohio Democratic Party has been hammering at Moreno for his statements that, if elected to the Senate, he would vote for a national abortion ban after making statements in December saying abortion is a matter that should be left up to the states.
Moreno is not alone — LaRose and Dolan have said they could support a national abortion ban at 15 weeks.
“Bernie Moreno has made it clear that he won’t fight for Ohioans and would overrule them by voting for a national abortion ban,” said Katie Smith, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Party.
Again, Moreno’s communications director said his position on abortion is being distorted.
ANALYSIS: Analysis: Can an anti-abortion rights Republican win a Senate race in Ohio?
“Bernie is proudly Pro-Life and believes in the three common-sense exceptions for abortion: rape, incest, and the life of the mother,” McCarthy wrote. “As Bernie has already said, if a 15-week bill came to the Senate floor with common sense restrictions (similar to the most liberal European countries) to stop late term abortions and included these exceptions, he would support it.”
It is reasonable to ask one question of all three Republican senate candidates on the March primary ballot: Why would you go out of your way to support a national abortion ban in a state where 57% of voters — Democrats and Republicans — voted last November for a state constitutional amendment on abortion rights?
Early voting in this campaign begins next Wednesday, running through March 19, Election Day.
If Bernie Moreno is, in fact, the frontrunner in this race, he has a little over a month to fend off attacks and prove it.
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Bloomberg – Quicktake
A wind-swept blaze at an Ohio hog farm complex caused “catastrophic” damage and left thousands of pigs dead, fire officials said, marking another devastating barn inferno contributing to the deaths of millions of animals in recent years.
The massive fire occurred on Wednesday, Feb. 25, at Fine Oak Farms in Union Township, Madison County, located west of Ohio’s capital of Columbus, according to the Central Townships Joint Fire District. Fire crews received a report of a barn fire shortly before 12 p.m. local time.
The incident was later upgraded to a commercial structure fire after Chief Brian Bennington observed a “large column of smoke visible from a distance” and requested additional resources. Multiple local fire departments, along with several other emergency agencies, were called to the scene.
“What our crews encountered upon arrival was a very difficult and heartbreaking incident,” Bennington said in a statement on Feb. 26.
The fire chief described the facility as a large farm complex used for hog production consisting of five large agricultural buildings, including four that housed about 7,500 hogs. When crews arrived at the scene, they found two of the barns engulfed in flames, Bennington said.
Crews were challenged by windy conditions that significantly impacted fire suppression efforts, according to Bennington. Three barns were destroyed in the fire, and about 6,000 hogs and pigs were killed.
Firefighters saved one barn and about 1,500 hogs, the fire chief added. No injuries were reported in the incident.
Bennington highlighted the assistance of the farming community throughout Madison and Clark counties, as multiple farmers responded with water trucks to help with water supply efforts. “Rural Ohio’s agricultural community is tight-knit, and they truly step up when one of their own is in need,” he said.
The incident remains under investigation, and the Ohio State Fire Marshal’s Office will determine the fire’s cause and origin. Bennington said there is no suspicion of arson and no ongoing threat to the public at this time.
‘Rapidly changing fire behavior conditions’
Heavy smoke from the fire could be seen for miles, and Bennington said first-arriving units were met with fire conditions coming from the opposite side of the hog farm complex.
The fire chief noted that the incident required extensive water-shuttle operations due to rural water-supply limitations in the area. Crews attempted to cut the fire off by deploying multiple handlines and using an aerial device, but “faced extremely challenging conditions throughout the incident,” according to Bennington.
Sustained winds of about 20 mph with gusts up to 35 mph accelerated the fire’s spread, Bennington said. The high winds made it “extremely difficult” to contain forward fire progression and created “rapidly changing fire behavior conditions” across the agricultural complex, he added.
After about four to five hours, the fire was contained by fire personnel from four different counties, according to the fire chief.
“Unfortunately, the fire resulted in catastrophic damage to the business,” Bennington said in an earlier statement on Feb. 25. “A significant portion of the agricultural structures were destroyed.”
Latest major fire to impact an Ohio hog farm
The incident at Fine Oak Farms is the latest major fire to cause significant damage to an Ohio hog farm in recent years.
In August 2024, about 1,100 pigs were killed in Versailles, a village about 50 miles northwest of Dayton, Ohio, according to data from the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute. In March 2022, about 2,000 hogs died in a barn fire at Kenneth Scholl Hog Farm in Brown Township, just west of Columbus.
Before the fire at Fine Oak Farms, the Animal Welfare Institute reported that other barn fires in Ohio this year killed 162 sheep, horses, cows, chickens, and other animals.
Hundreds of thousands of animals killed in barn fires each year
Data from the Animal Welfare Institute shows that hundreds of thousands of animals are killed in barn fires across the country each year. Since 2013, over 9 million farm animals have been killed in barn fires, according to the organization.
As of Feb. 26, the Animal Welfare Institute reported that 118,738 farm animals have died in U.S. barn fires this year, including the incident at Fine Oak Farms. The majority of farm animals killed were chickens in separate incidents in North Carolina and Georgia in January, and another incident in Missouri earlier this month.
“Most fatal barn fires occurred in colder states, particularly the Upper Midwest and the Northeast. New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois had the highest number of barn fires, respectively,” according to the organization. “The amount of cold weather a state experienced appeared to be a greater factor in the prevalence of barn fires than the intensity of a state’s animal agriculture production.”
In an updated report on farm animal deaths due to barn fires in 2025, the Animal Welfare Institute said more than 2.53 million farm animals were killed in barn fires from 2022 to 2024. The organization noted that the high death toll was “driven primarily” by fires at large operations that housed several thousand to over 1 million farm animals.
The majority of deaths in these incidents during that period, over 98%, were farmed birds, such as chickens and turkeys, according to the Animal Welfare Institute. But in 2023, a massive fire at a west Texas dairy farm became the single deadliest event involving livestock in the state’s history and the deadliest cattle fire in America in at least a decade.
18,000 head of cattle perished in the fire at the South Fork Dairy farm near Dimmitt, Texas. At the time, Roger Malone, who is the former mayor of Dimmitt, called the incident “mind-boggling.”
“I don’t think it’s ever happened before around here. It’s a real tragedy,” Malone said.
Contributing: Rick Jervis, USA TODAY; Shahid Meighan, Columbus Dispatch
Trump announces ‘War on Fraud’ at State of the Union 2026
President Donald Trump announced a “War on Fraud” during his State of the Union address, saying it’d be spearheaded by Vice President JD Vance.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose discussed voter fraud and Ohio’s efforts to prevent it during a recent radio appearance.
LaRose appeared on “The Bill Cunningham” radio show, where he defended the state’s efforts to minimize voter fraud. A clip posted on X shows audio of LaRose arguing that policies aimed at preventing voter fraud are necessary even though cases are rare.
Here’s what to know.
Secretary of State Frank LaRose says voter fraud in Ohio is rare, compares prevention efforts to TSA security
In the clip, LaRose says that Democrats claim voter fraud is rare, and should be ignored.
“The left claims that voter fraud is rare, so we should just ignore it,” he said. “Well, airplane hijackings are also rare — we don’t abolish the TSA. The reason why we keep voter fraud rare in states like Ohio because we do these very things that they’re trying to take away from me.”
LaRose announced the inaugural meeting of the new Ohio Election Integrity Commission, which replaces what he called the flawed Ohio Elections Commission, in January 2026. The new committee, he says, will be used in “enforcing Ohio’s election laws, reviewing alleged violations, and ensuring accountability in matters relating to voting.”
In October 2025, LaRose said that he forwarded more than 1,000 cases of voter fraud to the U.S. Department of Justice. The cases involved 1,084 noncitizen individuals who appear to have registered to vote unlawfully in Ohio, and 167 noncitizens who appear to have also cast a ballot in a federal election since 2018.
In February 2026, President Donald Trump said Republicans should “nationalize” elections. He also accused Democrats of bringing migrants into the United States to illegally vote, a claim that is not backed by evidence, USA TODAY reports.
Voter fraud in the U.S. is considered rare nationwide, according to NPR, but there are still debates from both political sides on how frequently it occurs.
What is voter fraud?
Electoral fraud is defined as illegally interfering with the process of an election, according to Ballotpedia. This includes in-person voter fraud, absentee or mail ballots and illegal voter suppression.
Criminal penalties can include fines or imprisonment for up to five years, according to U.S. code. In Ohio, election interference can carry a felony of the fourth degree, according to Ohio Code.
Voter fraud is often a topic of debate among Democrats and Republicans, where organizations such as the conservative Heritage Foundation maintains a database claiming to show nearly 1,500 cases of election fraud since the year 2000.
Meanwhile, research by law professor Justin Leavitt published in 2014 found 31 cases of in-person voter fraud among billions of ballots cast from 2000–2014, according to Ballotpedia.
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