"Egregious lies": Dark money groups flood most expensive Senate race with "disinformation"

Ohio's dead-heat Senate race has become the nation's most expensive, with nearly $500 million spent on ads in this race alone — and more spending expected ahead of Election Day.

Ohioans have spent the home stretch of the 2024 election cycle inundated with TV and social media ads boosting and opposing incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and his Republican challenger, former luxury car dealer Bernie Moreno, who has earned the backing of former President Donald Trump. Democrats, Republicans and outside groups have spent $483 million on ads and both parties' ad spot reservations through to Nov. 5 in this race, AdImpact data showed, according to Axios.

The face-off between Brown and Moreno is one of the most highly anticipated congressional races in the nation as the Democrats fight to retain control over the Senate. But the swell of funds being funneled into the election — particularly from megadonors and interest-specific PACs — raises concerns about the effect such big spending can have on democracy, experts argued.

"It's too much money, it's just kind of flooding the campaign. And I think it's, for democracy, not a particularly good thing," Paul Beck, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University, told Salon in a phone interview. "Particularly when you move away from the candidate campaign ads into the PAC ads and the 501(c)4 ads — the so-called dark money — you get more and more negative advertisement."

Beck, who said he has donated to Brown's campaign, pointed to largely Republican but some Democrat-affiliated ads that have "not been factually accurate."

Several Brown attack ads have pegged him as a career politician whose radical left ideology makes him too liberal for Ohioans. They've taken aim at his Senate voting record on immigration and sought to connect him to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris despite his best efforts to distance himself from the top of the Democratic ticket.

Controversial ads from the Senate Leadership Fund, a conservative PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have accused Brown of voting to allow "transgender biological men to compete in girl's sports" and supporting "allowing puberty blockers and sex-change surgeries for minors."

The vote in question, however, was Brown's March 2021 Senate vote against including an amendment in the American Rescue Plan Act that would have stripped federal funding from Ohio schools if those schools permitted transgender Americans to participate in women's sports. Brown's campaign told WKYC that the comments on youth gender-affirming care the ad drew on were, instead, a call to keep politicians out of families' and doctor's decisions.

Senate Leadership Fund has spent upwards of $55 million in the Senate race, a majority of which went to opposing Brown, according to Open Secrets.

Similarly misleading ads continue to flood the airwaves.

"It's very hard to fact-check the ads, and the fact-checking that does occur probably doesn't get through to many of the people in the audience for the ads, and that's not a good thing," Beck said, noting their increased frequency as Election Day approaches.

The ads "are broadcasting disinformation, in some cases, really egregious lies about one candidate or the other — this confuses voters," he argued. "It may lead voters to be much more cynical about the electoral process and about politics in general."

Some ads against Moreno have swiped at his work as a Mercedes dealer, while others have bashed his support for a nationwide ban on abortion with no exceptions. Moreno has since tempered his abortion stance, backing a states-decide solution and some exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the pregnant person.

An ad from the Democrat-affiliated WinSenate super PAC, which has put more than $56.7 million into opposing Moreno, according to Open Secrets, brushed with anti-immigrant sentiment to accuse Moreno of funneling "our money" into "Latin American banks" with the help of his "powerful Colombian family." The claim drew on Associated Press reporting outlining the Moreno family's wealth, political connections and ties to international investing.

Last week, the Brown campaign also seized on the backlash from comments Moreno made last month calling suburban women "a little crazy" and single-issue voters for considering abortion access protections when casting their ballots. The clip characterized him as out-of-touch with Ohioans, who voted last year to codify a right to abortion access and reproductive care in the state's Constitution.

Beck said that having candidate-authorized ads — as opposed to ads from outside groups, which the Federal Election Commission prohibits from coordinating with candidates — has the benefit of requiring candidates to take responsibility for them. Ads from outside PACs and, particularly 501(c)4s or "dark money" groups can obscure or altogether conceal their donors, keeping the public from knowing exactly who their donors are.

Ian Vandewalker, the senior counsel of the Brennan Center's elections and government program, said in a phone interview that the 501(c)4s concealing their donors can create opportunities for politicians to engage in "backroom deals" should they be elected and a donor calls them with a request.

A similar problem can arise with megadonors to super PACs, he added.

"If I've given a super PAC $10 million to elect you, and you get elected, you're going to take my phone call in a way that you're not for the average constituent or the average voter," he told Salon. That dynamic "seems to imply that the people who have the most money have the most influence over policymaking in Washington when, theoretically, we have a democracy with one person, one vote."

Vandewalker also underscored that these super PAC megadonors often aren't residents of the state whose race their money has been used to influence.

"In as much as you think residents, who are the people who have the right to vote for and against these people, should have an influence over their policymaking, someone who lives in New York and just happened to give millions of dollars getting influence over that person is a concern for democracy," he argued.

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The crypto and blockchain industry has made efforts to influence the Ohio Senate race outcome in its favor, lending massive financial support to Moreno, who has a background in crypto as the founder of Champ Titles, which puts car titles on a blockchain.

Open Secrets data shows Defend American Jobs, a super PAC affiliated with cryptocurrency industry super PAC FairShake, has put more than $40 million behind boosting the GOP candidate and taking down Brown, the Senate Banking Committee chairman and a vocal skeptic of the industry. The ads from the group boast Moreno's positions on illegal immigration, Social Security and energy but do not mention cryptocurrency, according to Spectrum News 1.

Conor Dowling, a University at Buffalo professor of political science, told Salon PAC-purchased ads also present the issue of voters not knowing what the entities stand for and support based on their names alone.

"Defend America Jobs, for example, doesn’t on its face sound like something that is backed by the crypto industry, so an ad sponsored by them could come across differently to voters who see it as 'sponsored by Defend America Jobs' rather than, say 'sponsored by the crypto industry'," he explained in an email.

He added that, while massive spending like what the Ohio race has seen can make a difference, each dollar spent typically comes with "diminishing marginal returns" and "tends to even out" when parties' spending is balanced.

As of last week, Republicans had outspent Democrats in the race by around $29 million, according to local outlet WTOL11, demonstrating the party's confidence in its ability to flip the Senate seat.

Vandewalker said that in the hyper-partisan era, individual candidates in congressional elections "are less important than party control of either chamber," which often leads to megadonors and partisans flocking to spend their money in the most competitive Senate or House races.

The Ohio Senate race is one of the most contentious in the nation as the Democratic Party fights to retain control over the upper chamber. Sen. Joe Manchin's, I-W.Va., seat is expected to flip to Republicans as he retires at the end of the term. As Democratic incumbent senators fight for seats in states like Pennsylvania, Montana and Wisconsin, the party is banking on maintaining at least 50 seats and holding out hope that Vice President Harris will win the presidency, allowing running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, to be the deciding vote in the Senate that puts them up to 51.

Brown's reelection bid has become the fight of his political life as he faces an election map that favors his opponent. The last decade has seen the Buckeye State go from purple to ruby red, with Ohioans electing Trump by over eight points in the last two presidential contests.

That rightward shift in Ohio's political ideology has left Brown, a progressive who has held office in the state since the 1970s, the only statewide Democratic elected official — except for some Ohio Supreme Court Justices — and at much higher risk of being ousted by wealthy businessman Moreno.

The incumbent had a five-month head start in filling the airwaves with ads but in the six weeks before the election, Moreno, the GOP and his backers are kicking their ad spending into high gear and have closed the gap between the candidates, making it a toss-up by most polls' standards. Brown leads Moreno by 1.6 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight's polling average.

"Sherrod Brown is very vulnerable, and these groups see that. They recognize that if they can defeat him for reelection, there's a very, very good chance the Republicans will control the Senate," Beck said. "And once you control the Senate, there are all kinds of things you can do legislatively you can't do if you don't have that kind of control."