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In today’s edition … Border security deadlock heightens risk of government shutdown … Some voters are in denial about a dreaded Biden-Trump rematch … but first …

The campaign

Ohio’s ugly Republican Senate primary

Whether Republicans control the Senate next year could depend on Ohio, an increasingly red state represented by longtime Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. The state also offers Republicans a chance to pick up a key House seat.

But first, voters must chose their Republican nominees on Tuesday. And some candidates could be more likely than others to beat battle-tested Democratic incumbents in November. 

The GOP Senate primary

The Ohio Senate primary between three candidates — former high-end car dealership owner Bernie Moreno, state Sen. Matt Dolan and Secretary of State Frank LaRose — has been exceptionally ugly.

Tuesday’s winner will take on Brown, who is running for his fourth term and has proved an extremely effective campaigner and candidate even as the state turns redder. 

Ads costing about $40 million have been run in the primary, according to tracking firm AdImpact. Polling shows Dolan, who has spent the most money, surging in the final days, placing him neck and neck with Moreno, according to a handful of Republicans who have looked at public and internal polling in the race. But a plurality of voters remain undecided, they say, which makes the final hours until polls close even more unpredictable. 

The Trump factor

The fight between Moreno, Dolan and LaRose has been personal and dirty and has revealed the common divide in the party between Trump Republicans and the more anti-Trump establishment wing of the party. 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has tipped the scales in many Senate races across the country, stayed neutral in the race as Trump endorsed Moreno after being lobbied by Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio to do so. (Moreno ran in the primary against Vance in 2022 but dropped out after a meeting with Trump.) 

Trump rallied for Moreno on Saturday night on the tarmac at the Dayton International Airport, where he called Moreno “one of the good” ones and attacked Dolan as a “weak RINO,” or Republican in name only. 

Trump allies are rallying around the political outsider. Vance and Republican Kari Lake, who is running for U.S. Senate in Arizona, campaigned for Moreno on Sunday night. 

Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, which Trump has taken issue with over its name change from the Indians, is the most centrist candidate in the race. He received endorsements from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and former senator Rob Portman last week. 

• “Clearly, he’s going to be the strongest candidate against Sherrod Brown in the fall,” DeWine said on CNN's “State of the Union” yesterday. 

Democrats would prefer a Moreno win. He’s untested and cozied up to Trump, which Democrats think reeks of weakness.

Duty and Country, a Democratic-backed super PAC, is spending $3.5 million in ads intended to boost Moreno with Republican base voters through Election Day, according to AdImpact, calling him “too conservative” for Ohio. 

It’s personal

The final weekend of campaigning has culminated in personal attacks representative of the past several months of bitter campaigning. 

Dolan and LaRose have painted Moreno as a shady character who has been inconsistent with his positions on LGBTQ issues, guns and immigration since he started running for Senate. 

• Campaign text messages sent to Ohio Republicans over the weekend obtained by The Early call Moreno a “closet liberal” who supports immigration “amnesty” and another that calls him a “political moderate with a pro gun control stance.”

A super PAC backing Dolan, Buckeye Leadership Fund, launched a television and radio ad on Friday, citing an Associated Press story that alleges Moreno opened an account on Adult Friend Finder, a gay dating site. “Moreno is damaged goods,” the ad says. (The Washington Post has not independently verified the AP report. The candidate’s lawyer provided the AP with a statement from a former Moreno intern, who said he created the account as “part of a juvenile prank.”)

One super PAC backing Moreno, Buckeye Values PAC, sent ads in the mail seeming to imply LaRose is gay. “What team does Frank LaRose Play for?” says the mailer, obtained by The Early. The back of the mailer says: “Is he with us…Or is he with they/them?”

Ohio's 9th District

The other big primary on Tuesday is in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District. 

Republicans breathed a huge a sigh of relief when J.R. Majewski, an extremely flawed but popular candidate with the Republican base, dropped out two weeks ago. 

While Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and the congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC affiliated with House Republicans, are backing state Rep. Derek Merrin in the race, they say former state representative Craig Riedel can win in November, too. 

Ohio’s 9th has been one of Republicans’ longtime targets. Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur is running for her 22nd term in the district, which voted for Trump by three points. (She beat Majewski in 2022 by 13 points.)

Democrats, however, say Merrin is a flawed candidate and too extreme for the district. They point to his support of antiabortion legislation, including a bill that would impose felony charges on doctors performing abortions once cardiac activity is detected, with no exceptions for pregnancies via rape or incest. They say his support for anti-union “right to work” legislation in union-heavy Ohio will be problematic in a general election.

The Merrin campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

Businesses backing paid leave take action today

More than 70 businesses and organizations are participating in a day-long work stoppage today to support the effort for paid family leave. 

The one-day action in the middle of Women’s History Month is to draw attention to the issue of paid leave, still out of reach for many workers in the United States.

• “We want to symbolize the value of women’s work,” Dawn Huckelbridge, founding director of Paid Leave for All, said. “We know how important business voices are for this issue for putting it over the finish line.”

The United States is one of a few countries that does not offer a federal paid parental leave program for new mothers. Only about a quarter of U.S. workers have access to paid family leave from their employers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate have been separately working on federal paid leave legislation.

Participating companies will provide paid leave for employees today. They include stroller maker Bugaboo, maternity clothing firm Hatch and others.  

What we're watching

On the Hill

We’re waiting to see whether negotiators can agree on the final six funding bills before money runs out at midnight on Friday. Five of the funding bills are done, but appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security is still a mess. 

Here’s the latest from our colleague Jacob Bogage: 

Lawmakers and the White House went back to the drawing board to fund DHS on Sunday afternoon. The White House rejected an offer from House Speaker Mike Johnson for a continuing resolution for the remainder of the year at current funding levels plus some extra resources — or “anomalies” — for other priorities. 

But immigration and border security agencies are headed into a budget shortfall without additional funding, a prospect that could force ICE to slash its detention capacity and release tens of thousands of undocumented migrants. The administration saw the offer from Republicans as a nonstarter and told negotiators to draft a full funding bill. That could edge the federal government closer to a partial shutdown, though. 

At the White House

President Biden will do a West Coast campaign swing this week, starting his trip in Reno, Nev., on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he’ll speak in Phoenix and then head to Houston and Dallas for fundraisers on Wednesday and Thursday. 

From the courts

This morning, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for the high-stakes social media case Murthy v. Missouri. At issue is whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment when it urged social media companies to remove posts deemed to contain misinformation about the pandemic and elections. 

• Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri say the action amounted to an illegal censorship. The Justice Department, on behalf of the administration, says “that the Constitution permits the use of the bully pulpit to protect the public,” our colleagues Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Ann E. Marimow report.

The court will also hear oral arguments for National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, a First Amendment case that has brought two unlikely groups together: the NRA and the American Civil Liberties Union. At issue is whether former New York regulator Maria T. Vullo violated the NRA’s First Amendment rights when she pressured banks and insurers to cut ties with the gun group. 

• “If government officials can pressure the businesses they regulate to blacklist the NRA in New York, then officials in other states can punish other advocacy organizations in the same way — including the ACLU itself,” the ACLU said in a statement. 

The campaign

Some voters are in denial about a dreaded Biden-Trump rematch

Our colleagues Isaac Arnsdorf and Sabrina Rodriguez take a look at why, despite Biden and Trump clinching their parties’ presidential nominations last week, some Americans are “expressing doubts that the presumptive nominees will in fact be the nominees.”

“In a Monmouth University national poll conducted last month, almost half of voters said it was ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ likely that Biden would be replaced as the Democratic nominee by November, and about a third said the same of Trump. An Economist/YouGov survey taken as both candidates clinched their nominations found 33 percent of Americans thought a Biden-Trump rematch would ‘definitely’ happen, 44 percent said it would probably happen, and the rest were even less certain.”

• “Those doubts are another unusual feature of this year’s presidential campaign: a rematch between two presidents, both effectively running as incumbents within their parties, and both historically unpopular. In the Economist/YouGov poll, 54 percent said they viewed Biden unfavorably and the same share did not want him to run again, compared to 50 percent for each for Trump. For some, that dissatisfaction crosses over into disbelief.”
• Bryan Bennett, senior director of the Democratic group Navigator Research, said “voters who support Biden are more convinced he’ll be the nominee, while those who disapprove are less sure,” our colleagues report. “Bennett attributed this ‘believability gap’ to denial among left-leaning and moderate young Americans and another way for conservatives to express disapproval of the president.”
• “But some voters’ doubts stem from genuine uncertainties in an unprecedented and unpredictable election year. In follow-up questions for the Monmouth survey, voters who thought the nominees would be replaced before November provided reasons such as Biden’s age (81), physical or mental health, and for Trump, his criminal charges or health (he is 77).”

In the states

In Wisconsin, a vote for Biden or Trump could come down to grocery prices

Our colleague Abha Bhattarai spoke to voters at a Piggly Wiggly in Sheboygan, Wis. — Ground Zero for economic discontent. Here’s an excerpt: 

“In poll after poll, voters say inflation — and grocery prices in particular — is a leading concern,” Abha writes. “That’s true in this Midwestern manufacturing town overflowing with well-paying jobs, rock-bottom unemployment and some of the lowest gas, food and housing prices in the nation. Kitchen and bath product maker Kohler Co. and food manufacturers Johnsonville and Sargento Foods are all headquartered nearby, providing a steady stream of stable careers. The unemployment rate, at 2.1 percent, is one of the lowest in Wisconsin.”

• “Still, Sheboygan residents have one persistent gripe: As with elsewhere in the country, grocery prices have risen 25 percent in four years, driving much of their economic discontent.”
• “In interviews with more than three dozen shoppers at three stores, almost all cited high food prices as a major financial hurdle. Many said they were sticking with the candidate they voted for last time — either because Trump was better for the economy, or because they valued Biden’s position on other issues like abortion rights. But nearly a third said inflation had led them to revise their opinions, and some were even considering voting for the first time because of food prices.”

The Media

Must reads

From The Post: 

• Pro-Trump disruptions in Arizona county elevate fears for the 2024 vote. By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Adriana Usero. 
• On Fox News, Steve Doocy has become the unexpected voice of dissent. By Jeremy Barr.
• Trump is eyeing Paul Manafort for 2024 campaign role. By Josh Dawsey. 
• Biden and other Democrats forced to adapt to pro-Palestinian protests. By Ashley Parker and Tyler Pager.
• Russian voters, answering Navalny’s call, protest as Putin extends his rule. By Francesca Ebel and Robyn Dixon.

From across the web: 

• Nicole Shanahan emerges as a top candidate to be RFK Jr.’s running mate. By the New York Times’s Rebecca Davis O’Brien.
• New Jersey AG says controversial ballot design in Senate race to replace Menendez is unconstitutional. By Politico’s Daniel Han.

Viral

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