Capitalizing on anti-immigration sentiment is a well-worn tactic of recent Republican political campaigns in Ohio, especially in the race for the White House. 

But Ohio Democrats are showing signs of testing the same waters when it comes to the U.S. Senate race here.

A warm-up speaker at a Sen. Sherrod Brown campaign event on Friday wove a derogatory reference to Bernie Moreno’s background as a Colombian immigrant into her brief remarks. Peg Watkins, the Democratic Party chair in Delaware County, where the event was held, accused Moreno of coming to the United States to “take advantage of America’s wealth and greatness.”

“So we are doing everything we can to stop him from invading our Senate,” Watkins said of Moreno, who moved to the United States when he was about five years old. 

The term “invasion” is one Republicans, including Moreno, routinely have used to characterize illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Watkins’ comment is relatively obscure. But it comes as WinSenate, a major national Democratic PAC, blankets Ohio’s airwaves with ads that also describe Moreno’s immigrant backstory ominously. The ad accuses Moreno of funneling “our” money to “Latin American banks,” via his “powerful Colombian family.” The claim is a reference to an Associated Press report detailing Moreno’s wealthy, politically connected family and its ties to international financing and investing.

It shows photos of Moreno’s family members stuck on a bulletin board connected by pieces of string – like how a detective might map out an investigation on a police procedural TV show. 

The ad hits a common Democratic trope when attacking a wealthy Republican. But David Arredondo, a former Lorain County Republican Party chairman, said it also hints at stereotypes about Colombia being home to organized crime figures. 

“It’s implying in some respects that Bernie’s parents were maybe cartel-related,” said Arredondo, who is Mexican-American and criticized Republican U.S. Sen. JD Vance for some of his immigration-rhetoric during his campaign in 2022. 

Watkins and the Brown campaign didn’t respond to messages seeking comment for this story. Brown dodged questions about Watkins’ remark at a campaign event on Tuesday. But he said he is always respectful of immigrants. 

“It’s blatantly racist,” Moreno said at his own campaign event Tuesday. “…If I was a Democrat and a Republican was running that ad, you guys [the news media] would be out of your minds saying it’s racist.”

Hannah Menchoff, a spokesperson for the Democratic PAC behind the ad, called Moreno’s response “feigned outrage.”

“Whether it’s stealing his workers’ overtime pay and shredding documents to cover it up or using his powerful family to profit off rising home prices, Bernie Moreno has made a career of looking out for himself at the expense of others,” Menchoff said. “Now that Moreno’s in trouble for calling women who are angry at his support for an abortion ban ‘crazy,’ he’s desperately trying to feign outrage that Ohioans are learning more about how he made his money.”

The references show how Democrats are describing Moreno’s immigration story and offer hints about how they view voter sentiment ahead of the Nov. 5 election. Polls have shown that illegal immigration consistently tops lists of voter concerns, even though the U.S.-Mexico border is thousands of miles away and Ohio historically has relatively low levels of immigration. Republican campaigns meanwhile consistently have described undocumented immigrants as safety threats and drains on public resources, following the lead of former President Donald Trump, who’s made the issue the cornerstone of his political career. 

Moreno, the first Latino to be nominated by a major party in Ohio for statewide office, himself has called attention to his Colombian heritage only sparingly, such as by criticizing the news media by saying his history-making status would get more attention if he were a Democrat. He comes from a wealthy and influential family in Colombia and has been accused of underselling that fact to present himself as more of a self-made man.

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Meanwhile, he’s campaigned as a “legal immigrant” and mirrored former President Donald Trump’s Trump’s electoral positions and harsh rhetoric, such as calling for military action in Mexico, even though Moreno as recently as 2016 publicly supported a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants. Like Trump and other Republicans, Moreno last month mirrored Sen. JD Vance’s false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, although quickly deemphasized the topic after supporting evidence failed to materialize.

Democrats, meanwhile, initially positioned themselves against Trump’s nativist rhetoric in 2016 by being sympathetic toward immigrants and criticizing his border wall plan. But as polls have shown voters are concerned about the issue this year, Brown and other Democrats have pivoted toward favoring greater border security.
One pro-Brown ad touts his support for the bipartisan border bill that congressional Republicans killed, calling it the “most conservative” border security bill in decades. Another from Brown’s campaign shows him on a boat talking with border security with a large rifle prominently visible in the shot.