Republican Bernie Moreno wins the Ohio Senate race over Democrat Sherrod Brown

Republican Bernie Moreno, a Colombian immigrant who became a prominent car dealer in Cleveland, has unseated Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, NBC News projects.

Moreno, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump this year amid a heated primary, will be the first person of color to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate.

His victory gives Republicans a major boost in their bid to regain control of the chamber, where Democrats had a seat advantage heading into Election Day. Republicans on Tuesday gambled away another Democratic seat in West Virginia, a state Trump easily won, and sought to capture another seat in Montana.

Moreno's victory also ends the 50-year political career of Brown, who was first elected as a state representative in the post-Watergate era.

Brown was the last of a dying breed in Ohio: a Democrat who could win more than one statewide election. The state was once a hotly contested battleground, twice supporting Barack Obama as a presidential candidate. Today it is a playground for Republicans, who have a decisive grip on all three branches of government and dominate the state's congressional delegation.

Moreno, 57, a prominent businessman and civic leader in the Cleveland area, spent millions of his own dollars campaigning but relied heavily on outside Republican groups that spent tens of millions more on advertising against Brown.

The race depended on Brown's familiarity, which the freshman Moreno described as a liability.

For decades, Brown had distinguished himself as a hardline liberal and progressive with close ties to working-class voters, particularly organized labor. His strong opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has been accused of accelerating the decline of U.S. manufacturing, long ago established a populist credibility that came in handy during the Trump era.

And although Brown's ads disparaged his political party and highlighted areas where he and Trump found common cause, the GOP's ads dismissed Brown as a career politician who was too beholden to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Moreno also closely aligned himself with Trump and emphasized the former president's support.

The messaging strategy, built on Trump's popularity in the Buckeye State, strengthened Moreno even as Brown and Democrats tried to exploit his weaknesses.

Moreno struggled to keep up with Brown in fundraising, leaving Republican super PACs to shoulder much of the television advertising at higher rates than were offered to the candidates themselves. And Moreno faced relentless scrutiny over how he characterized his family's emigration from Colombia to the United States — which was not the rags-to-riches story Moreno sometimes portrayed it as. Democrats also described him as an unprincipled businessman who mistreated his employees, pointing to previous lawsuits against his companies alleging workplace discrimination and overtime pay violations.

Moreno's strong anti-abortion stance was also an issue in a state where voters overwhelmingly enshrined abortion rights in their constitution last year. Moreno was one of the prominent Republicans leading the charge against the ballot measure. Even after its passage, Moreno expressed support for federal restrictions on the procedure as a Senate candidate.

Perhaps most problematic for Moreno was a video of him at a campaign rally in September in which he mocked single-issue voters on abortion and questioned why it was a problem, “particularly for women over the age of 50 or so.” are”. Even Republicans cringed after the NBC News affiliate in Columbus aired the story.

“Are you trying to lose the election?” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, asked herself in a social media post.

In the end it hardly seemed to matter.