Sherrod Brown Launches Attack on Bernie Moreno over Idled Ohio GM Plant He Tried to Save

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is running a deceitful ad tying his Republican opponent in Ohio’s Senate race, Bernie Moreno, to the idling of a General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown in 2019.

On the contrary, Moreno, a successful auto dealer, actually proposed a plan that would have kept the plant’s doors open for up to another five years, the Detroit Free Press reported.

“Bernie Moreno proposed a real solution to continue one of the most essential and high-quality plants in General Motors’ network and save thousands of jobs,” Moreno campaign spokeswoman Reagan McCarthy said in a statement to Breitbart News. “Career politician Sherrod Brown’s repeat lies to cover up a Biden-aligned record that has cost Ohio jobs is why voters will retire him in November.”

Brown’s campaign posted the video to his X account on Thursday. In it, a former autoworker said, “Want to see the cost of Bernie Moreno’s lies? It’s an empty plant in Lordstown.”

The worker went on to say, “The Chinese cars Bernie Moreno sold are the same cars that led to our plant being shut down,” and he contended that Moreno did not stand up for autoworkers when he was a car dealer. The vehicle in question was the Buick Envision, according to a Spectrum News article cited in the ad.

However, per Detroit Free Press auto industry reporter Jamie L. LaReau in 2019, Moreno was behind a plan that “would have kept General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, running possibly up to five more years,” involving a vision for Chevrolet Cruzes: “He wanted to buy 150,000 to 180,000 Cruze cars to start a global ride-hailing company similar to Uber, various sources say. The company would buy the cars from GM and own the fleet of cars along with employing drivers, say sources.”

In November 2018, GM revealed that five North American facilities, including the Lordstown plant, would be idled. The next month, Moreno reportedly engaged in meetings about the plan, which would have kept the factory operating. However, LaReau wrote that “GM CEO Mary Barra rejected the deal, sealing the plant’s fate when the last Cruze rolled off the line” in March 2019.

One local union leader estimated that the deal could have preserved some 3,000 jobs at the plant.

What is more, Moreno stopped selling GM Envisions because of the plant’s closure. McCarthy told Spectrum News that he decided to “stop any new inventory of Envision’s from being sold at his dealership” in response to the plant’s closure, which is supported by email screenshots from the time reported by the outlet.

The attack on Moreno comes as the Republican has hammered Brown over the substantial loss of “200,000 manufacturing jobs” in Ohio since Brown began serving in Congress.