Republicans are counting on millionaires to flip the Senate
Since his rise to the presidency, Donald Trump has claimed enormous wealth as proof that he is an anti-establishment ally of the working class, not beholden to corporate donors or special interests.
The Republican Party, eyeing control of the Senate through this year’s election, is trying to mimic his success with a cohort of candidates who in the past might have been attacked as a bunch of rich men but this year will be sold as successful outsiders in the Trump mold.
The decision by Ohio voters Tuesday to nominate Bernie Moreno to take on Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, is the capstone of a year that has crowned nominees — or anointed clear front-runners — with remarkable wealth in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Montana and now Ohio.
That might match the party’s presumptive nominee, Mr. Trump, but with backgrounds in banking and hedge funds, properties in Connecticut and Laguna Beach, Calif., and education credentials from Princeton and the Naval Academy, some in the 2024 class feel more like the days of Mitt Romney, worth around $174 million, and John McCain, a Naval Academy graduate who married into a beer-distributing empire, than the current moment when blue-collar credibility is the currency of the realm.
The intentional decision by Republicans in Washington to get behind candidates with enormous personal fortunes will most likely give the party a boost as it struggles for campaign cash against the Democrats’ formidable grassroots fundraising operations. But the sheer affluence of the candidates — and how they made their money — is sure to be a factor in the fight for Senate control.
“That’s who they are,” Mr. Brown, who is worth about $263,000, said in an interview Wednesday, commenting on the lineup of millionaire Republicans arrayed against Democratic incumbents. “I guess I’m not surprised by that.”
Republicans say their candidates will make the case that they are successful political outsiders, running against career politicians who used their years in Washington to raise their net worth and enrich their families.
“We’ve recruited a roster of candidates with impressive backgrounds in business and, in many cases, military service,” said Mike Berg, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Democrats have a roster of career politicians with questionable ethics. We’ll take that contrast any day of the week.”
But if a clash over net worth comes down to numbers in bank accounts, the Republicans will have the bigger figures to answer for.
To call Mr. Moreno a former auto dealer, for instance, is to miss the scale of his business and investment fortune. In 2023, Mr. Moreno, a Colombian-born businessman, filed financial disclosure forms that revealed assets valued from $25.5 million to $105.7 million and an annual income nearing $6 million. Those assets include a $2.3 million Aston Martin Vulcan, one of only 24 ever made; a house listed in Ocean Reef, Fla., worth as much as $25 million; land in Zapotal, Costa Rica; condominiums in New York, Washington, and Columbus, Ohio; and a home in Avon, Ohio, valued at up to $5 million.
But like Mr. Trump, whose endorsement helped deliver his victory, Mr. Moreno is confident he can speak to the blue-collar voters who have been the backbone of Mr. Brown’s support since the Democrat was elected in 2006.
“We are not the party of the elites in big business,” Mr. Moreno told reporters Tuesday. “We’re the party of the working class.”
An unusually wealthy crop of candidates
Affluence has been a hallmark of the Senate perhaps since its inception, in both parties. The richest senator, Rick Scott, R-Fla., is running for re-election this fall and has shown a ready willingness to tap his fortune to ensure electoral success. The second-richest is a Democrat, Mark Warner of Virginia.
But the Republican Party, wary of the Democrats’ fundraising prowess in recent cycles, has recruited candidates from a significantly higher economic echelon than the working-class voters it is trying to woo in swing states. With Democrats holding 51 seats, Republican control is a hairbreadth away.
The retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., virtually assures the loss of one seat to that state’s governor, Jim Justice, whose days as a billionaire coal baron may have passed, according to Forbes, but who is still worth hundreds of millions.
In Pennsylvania, David McCormick, the former CEO of Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, is challenging Sen. Bob Casey. Mr. McCormick and his wife, Dina