Despite being handily defeated in his run for reelection, long-time Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) claimed on Sunday that Sen.-elect Bernie Moreno’s (R-OH) flipping of his seat wasn’t “clean” and was fueled by “lies” from negative ads run during the election cycle.
Speaking with CNN’s Manu Raju, Brown was asked about what specifically went wrong in his Senate race in the Buckeye State, in which he lost to Moreno by over 3 percentage points, or around 200,000 votes, 50.2% to 46.4%. Brown had held his Ohio Senate seat since 2007.
Brown said that he “expected to win,” pointing to the “enthusiasm” he had seen in voters in his state and at his rallies, before pinning the blame for his lose on Vice President Kamala Harris, who drastically underperformed on Election Day, losing every key swing state and even the popular vote to President-elect Donald Trump.
“I expected to win because I’m out a lot and I talk to workers, I talk to people year-round. I come home, I listen to people, that’s where my ideas come from. I expected to win because of that. … What I didn’t see is the ad they did at the end where Trump said voting for Sherrod Brown is voting against me. And when the leader of your ticket runs 12 points behind almost, you can’t overcome that,” he said.
Raju suggested Trump then made the “difference” in Brown’s Senate race, to which Brown agreed but pivoted to focusing on the money and “nasty negative ads” in the election cycle.
“A lot of things made the difference. I’d say it’s the money and Trump. I mean that kind of money, for month after month after month, with nasty negative ads, all of which were found to be not true by neutral fact-checkers. I guess that’s how you win a race. You lie, you spend a lot of money, and then you, as my opponent, hope that your candidate [Trump] would win by a lot.”
Harris’s campaign has faced significant scrutiny in the aftermath of the election for how much money was poured into her candidacy. While Trump spent $378 million on advertising from July 22 to Nov. 5, Harris’s campaign and its affiliated committees dropped more than $654 million during that same time frame. Her campaign also made the decision to freeze payments to its senior staffers — despite previous promises to keep those employed on the pay rolls through December.
Raju then asked, “You don’t think Bernie Moreno ran a clean race,” to which Brown suggested Moreno didn’t by telling Raju he could look at the ads run during the campaign and “connect that dot” to answer his own question.
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“You can be the judge of that. I think when you run ads that are proven to be lies by fact-checkers. You’re a pretty smart analyst, Manu, and you can connect that dot and let you do it,” Brown said.
Republicans’ flipping of Brown’s seat was the decider for cementing their control of the Senate, the first time they have held the majority in almost four years.
