COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, launched a bid for the U.S. Senate on Monday, joining GOP efforts to try to unseat Democrat Sherrod Brown next year.
LaRose, 44, is in his second term as Ohio’s elections chief, one of the state’s highest profile jobs. He has managed to walk a delicate line between GOP factions divided by falsehoods sewn by former President Donald Trump over election integrity, scoring a convincing 59% of the statewide vote in his 2022 reelection bid.
“Like a lot of Ohioans, I’m concerned about the direction of our country,” LaRose said in announcing his bid. “As the father of three young girls, I’m not willing to sit quietly while the woke left tries to cancel the American Dream. We have a duty to defend the values that made America the hope of the world.”
LaRose first took office in 2019 with just over 50% of the vote, and previously spent eight years as a state senator. He also served as a U.S. Army Green Beret.
LaRose already faces competition for the GOP nomination, including State Sen. Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, and Bernie Moreno, a wealthy Cleveland business owner whose bid Trump has encouraged.
Dolan made his first Senate run last year and invested nearly $11 million of his own money, making him the seventh-highest among self-funders nationally, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Although he joined the ugly and protracted primary relatively late, Dolan managed to finish third amid a crowded field.
Moreno is the father-in-law of Trump-endorsed Republican U.S. Rep. Max Miller, and was the 17th highest among self-funders nationally — in a 2022 Senate primary packed with millionaires. Republican J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist noted for his memoir-turned-movie “Hillbilly Elegy,” ultimately won the seat.
Next year’s successful GOP nominee will take on one of Ohio’s winningest and longest-serving politicians. Voters first sent Brown to the U.S. Senate in 2007 after 14 years as a congressman, two terms as secretary of state and eight years as a state representative.
But Brown, with among the Senate’s most liberal voting records, is viewed as more vulnerable than ever this time around. That’s because the once-reliable bellwether state now appears to be firmly Republican.
Voters twice elected Trump by wide margins and, outside the state Supreme Court, Brown is the only Democrat to win election statewide since 2006.
Brown’s campaign spokesperson, Reeves Oyster, said Republicans are headed into another “slugfest” for the U.S. Senate that will leave whoever emerges damaged.
