New ad in crucial Ohio Senate race praises vulnerable Democrat’s work with Trump

CLEVELAND — A new ad in Ohio’s hotly contested Senate race draws a positive link between vulnerable Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown and former President Donald Trump, whose past election victories here reinforced the state’s strong Republican lean.

“He wrote a bill that Donald Trump signed to crack down on drugs at the border,” Scott, a Marine Corps veteran and retired detective who lost his son to opioid addiction, says of Brown in the point of Duty and Honor, a Democratic group linked to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Sherod’s work will prevent more families from having to go through what we went through.”

The ad, shared first with NBC News, will launch Friday on state TV and digital platforms and is backed by $2.4 million.

“Sherrod Brown worked to pass a bill that would increase law enforcement’s ability to crack down on the flow of fentanyl because he is putting the needs of Ohio families first,” said Duty and Honor President JB Poersch. in a statement. “Ohio deserves to know that Brown is an independent leader who will work hard to get things done for Ohio.”

Brown faces Trump-backed Republican Bernie Moreno, a former car dealer and blockchain entrepreneur, in a general election that is expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in spending. Brown and Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, another red-state Democrat up for re-election, are key to their party’s narrow majority in the Senate.

The Duty and Honor ad represents the first general election campaign in Ohio by a constellation of Schumer-aligned outside financial groups that includes the Senate Majority PAC. Another affiliated organization, Duty and Country PAC, ran an ad touting Moreno’s conservative credentials in the final days of the Republican Senate primary — a move widely seen as an effort by Democrats to influence the results and draw their preferred opponent into the general election.

Since the March 19 primary, campaigns and outside groups have spent or set aside more than $200 million to advertise in the Ohio Senate race through the Nov. 5 election, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking company . Democrats spent or set aside $112.2 million, Republicans $96.5 million. These numbers may change if airtime is cancelled.

The new pro-Brown ad references the Interdiction Lawwhich implemented new Department of Homeland Security measures to prevent fentanyl and other synthetic opioids from flowing into the US. Brown, a original co-sponsor of the Senate version of the bill, was among those in the Oval Office in January 2018 when Trump signed bipartisan legislation into law.

“Eleven people a day in my state of Ohio die from opioid overdoses,” Brown said in the signing ceremony, following comments from then-Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fl. “This is an important bill. The next step is to actually provide dollars to communities so we can scale up treatment.”

Most recently, the FEND Off Fentanyl Act, sponsored by Brown, was passed as part of a foreign aid package signed into law by President Joe Biden. To the extent that Brown introduced last year with Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., aims to disrupt fentanyl supply chains by imposing tougher sanctions and financial penalties on drug cartels and other fentanyl traffickers.

Brown, a longtime progressive, has sought to emphasize common ground with Trump in the past, particularly on issues such as foreign tradewhich both approach from populist perspectives.

Trump, who won Ohio by about 8 percentage points in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, criticized Brown’s efforts to project a collaborative relationship.

“He pretends he’s my best friend until he gets in and then he becomes radically left-wing all the time,” Trump said of Brown at a March rally for Moreno in Vandalia, Ohio. “You know, if you listen to his commercials, it sounds like he’s running against Trump. He is not.”