MAGA World trumped Mainstream Republicanism Tuesday night, when former car dealer Bernie Moreno outlasted Sen. Matt Dolan for Ohio's U.S. Senate nomination.
But the irony of Moreno's win is this:
Both Donald Trump and the Democratic Party got what they wanted out of the three-candidate GOP Senate primary — Trump got the candidate he endorsed, and Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown got what his party considers to be the weakest possible GOP candidate to run against in the fall.
"Here you have the Republican voters going with the side of the party that only won the Senate seat by six percentage points with J.D. Vance in a bad year for Democrats two years ago," said David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party.
"And this was the same year an establishment Republicans, Mike DeWine, won by 22 percentage points," Pepper said.
Ohio Democrats are convinced that Moreno is cut out of the same cloth as two of Trump's other disastrous choices for the Senate — Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia.
RELATED: Results from Ohio's 2024 primaries
And it mattered very much who won the three-way GOP Senate primary Tuesday because the winner takes on Brown in a contest that will be very expensive and may well end up deciding which party controls the U.S. Senate for the next two years.
Brown is one of only two incumbent Democrats running for re-election this year in states won by Donald Trump in 2020.
Brown has been a survivor throughout his nearly 50 years in Ohio politics; and the Senate Majority PAC, headed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has almost unlimited funds to spend in Ohio.
In fact, Schumer created a Democratic-funded PAC called "Duty and Country" to dump $2.7 million in TV ads to build up Moreno's candidacy. Schumer believes Moreno would be the easiest of Ohio's three GOP Senate candidates for Brown to defeat in the fall.
In a very real sense, this was a contest between Ohio's MAGA world — which helped Donald Trump win Ohio's electoral votes in the past two presidential elections — and the mainstream, traditional Republicans who have elected governors like Bob Taft and George Voinovich over the years.
One Ohio, two Republican factions. Going head-to-head in Tuesday's election.
ANALYSIS: Just how MAGA are Ohio's Republican voters? We're about to find out
One faction backed Bernie Moreno, who had the endorsement not only of Trump but of Trump's chief acolytes in the Senate, J.D. Vance; and House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan, whose mission in life appears to be to impeach President Biden on vague, unsupported "crimes."
The other, Matt Dolan, a Chagrin Falls Republican who wields considerable influence in the Ohio Senate, ran with the endorsements of more mainstream, establishment Republicans like Gov. Mike DeWine and former senator Rob Portman.
All of the polling in this race showed a vast demographic difference between the supporters of Dolan and Moreno.
The higher the education and income levels of GOP primary voters were, the more likely they were to support Dolan.
Both Moreno and Dolan are very wealthy men and they were able to self-fund their campaigns to a large extent by loaning their campaigns millions of dollars. In the case of Dolan, his fundraising was aided by millions in low-interest bank loans.
Moreno's late surge was apparently the result of a Saturday afternoon rally on the tarmac of the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, where the ex-president and 2024 GOP nominee appeared at a rally sponsored by the Buckeye Values PAC.
Trump barely mentioned Moreno in a rambling 90-minute speech, focusing on himself instead. But, for Ohio's Republican MAGA voters, it was enough of a reminder that their leader was backing Moreno in the primary.
RELATED: In Ohio, Trump says some migrants are 'not people' and warns of 'bloodbath' if he loses
Moreno has been something of a shape-shifter since he left the luxury car business behind and made winning a U.S. Senate seat his new mission in life.
Back in 2016, Moreno had nothing good to say about Trump, saying at one point there was "no scenario in which I would support Trump."
Well, in fact there was such a scenario, when Moreno decided he needed the four-times indicted and twice-impeached ex-president to win the 2024 GOP Senate primary.
Loyalty counts with Trump.
Moreno clearly won the endorsement because his daughter, Emily, worked on Trump's campaigns; and her husband, Max Miller, now a congressman from northeast Ohio, worked in the Trump White House.
What about Frank LaRose?
The endorsement came in December, after another candidate, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, had wasted months twisting himself into a pretzel trying to get Trump's blessing.
It was a gut-punch for the ambitious 44-year-old who had been dreaming of going to the U.S. Senate ever since he got into politics.
But gut-punches were nothing new to LaRose. He got plenty of them in 2023.
First, LaRose was one of the architects of Issue 1, a constitutional amendment the GOP forced onto an August 2023 special election ballot.
That ballot issue would have required any future Ohio constitutional amendment to pass with 60% of the vote, instead of a simple majority.
RELATED: Campaign finance filings show LaRose last in list of Ohio's 2024 candidates for U.S. Senate
LaRose and his allies were clearly trying to scuttle an abortion rights amendment that was headed to the November 2023 ballot.
The secretary of state was left with egg on his face when 57% of Ohio voters saw through it and rejected that idea.
The plan was doomed during the campaign when a video of LaRose speaking to a Seneca County GOP group, saying the 60% issue was "100%" about stopping the abortion rights amendment.
LaRose was treated to a second helping of facial egg in November when the abortion rights amendment he campaigned against passed by a similar margin.
It was all downhill for LaRose after that.
He ended up a distant third Tuesday night.
For Brown, it's 'the fight of his life'
The Ohio Democratic Party wasted no time, firing the starting gun for the race only minutes after Moreno's win was reported.
"Bernie Moreno has made clear throughout his career and his campaign that he only looks out for himself — not the people of Ohio," said Katie Smith, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic party.
"Whether by refusing to pay his employees the overtime they’d earned and deliberately shredding evidence to cover it up, promising to put in place a national abortion ban that would overturn the will of Ohioans, or coming out against the bill to crack down on fentanyl coming from China and Mexico, Moreno has already shown he will not fight for Ohioans," Smith said.
RELATED: One of the tightest Senate races in the country will play out in Ohio
Sherrod Brown, Pepper said, "is clearly in for the fight of his life, but he is in a good place tonight.
"It would help if President Biden made some trips to Ohio in the fall to help drive up the turnout in the big cities; that's what hurt Tim Ryan against Vance two years ago.
"But this is a winnable race," he said.
