Politics

Bernie Moreno’s network of car dealerships is the building block of the Ohio Republican’s campaign for US Senate. Moreno, who is seeking to unseat three-term Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in one of the year’s tightest races, has acquired and eventually sold off more than two dozen dealerships between 2005 and 2022 and grew enormously rich in the process. He is worth as much as $105.7 million, according to financial disclosures—wealth that helped power him to victory in an ugly primary this spring. That private sector track record is also a part of his pitch on the campaign trail, where he describes himself as a self-made man who “mortgaged everything I own in life” to buy his first Nissan dealership in Cleveland and who built a successful company “with no partners.”

The up-by-the-bootstraps campaign trail story belies a more complicated reality. While Moreno describes his immigrant family as “lower middle class” and said they “came here with absolutely nothing,” a New York Times report in May detailed the Morenos’ powerful political and financial connections in Colombia, where one brother runs a major construction firm and another served as president of the Inter-American Development Bank. As he has attempted to position himself as a candidate for the working man, Moreno has been dogged, too, by questions about how he made his money. Earlier this year, my colleague Abby Vesoulis reported that Moreno shelled out more than $400,000 to settle a wage-theft lawsuit in Massachusetts in which “he was forced to admit to shredding overtime-­payment records.” He eventually settled more than a dozen claims of wage theft at his dealerships in the commonwealth, along with a host of other complaints from former employees—outcomes he has blamed on disgruntled workers and “activist” judges.