He is running for the Senate as an immigrant who made good, reaching out to Ohio voters with a stirring, only-in-America bootstraps story: arriving as a child from Colombia, taking a risk on a struggling business, and then turning it into a smashing success and himself into a millionaire 100 times over.
Running under the banner of Donald J. Trump’s populist political movement, Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown, humbly calls himself a “car guy from Cleveland” and recounts the modest circumstances of his childhood, when his immigrant family started over from scratch in the United States.
“We came here with absolutely nothing — we came here legally — but we came here, nine of us in a two-bedroom apartment,” Mr. Moreno said in 2023, in what became his signature pitch.
His father “had to leave everything behind,” he has said, remembering what he called his family’s “lower-middle-class status.”But there is much more that Mr. Moreno does not say about his background, his upbringing and his very powerful present-day ties in the country where he was born.
Persons:
Donald J, Bernie Moreno, Sherrod Brown, Cleveland ”, “, ” Mr, Moreno, ”
Organizations:
Senate, Republican
Locations:
Ohio, America, Colombia, Cleveland, United States