Bernie Moreno claims to have learned English from Ronald Reagan speeches. The timeline doesn’t make sense.

EDITOR’S NOTE (7/10): This article has been edited to include a response from a Bernie Moreno campaign spokesperson.

Ohio Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno says he learned English from watching Ronald Reagan’s speeches as a child, even though Reagan was not yet a national political figure and Moreno was five years old at the time.

During an appearance on the “MVRed Podcast” in January 2022, Moreno claimed to have learned English from listening to Reagan’s speeches. When asked about who helped shape his political beliefs, Moreno cited conversations with his father, and speeches by Reagan which he claims to have learned English from.

“I’d say my dad first. Reagan certainly, you know I learned English listening to Reagan’s speeches as a kid,” Moreno said. “He was very influential in my life politically.”

During another podcast interview with Ohio Christian Alliance in October 2021, Moreno claimed he listened to Reagan when he started learning English.

“One of the presidents I got to really know a lot was Reagan because that was my formative years,” Moreno said. “I was just learning English. I’ve been fluent in Spanish as my first language. Learning the Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, the Constitution. This was a time that for me was so fortunate to have Ronald Reagan during those years for me.”

Moreno moved to the United States with his family from Colombia in 1971, when he was about five years old. During an appearance at the Turning Point Action Conference in July 2023, Moreno himself said that he learned English “pretty quickly” after moving to the United States. In a separate radio interview from May 2021, Moreno said he learned English when he was five. Moreno’s parents and older siblings were also fluent or proficient in English at this time, making it extremely unlikely that Moreno substantially “learned English” from Reagan speeches when he was five.

Reagan was also the governor of California at the time, but he had not yet become a national voice for the Republican Party. It wasn’t until his 1976 campaign that Reagan began to make regular radio and television appearances. The Presidential Library and Museum lists just six “major” speeches given by Reagan before he became president in 1980. Only one of them occurred in the period of 1970-1974, which was Reagan’s second gubernatorial inaugural address in 1971.

And while Reagan had prominence as an actor and a Democrat-turned-Republican activist (he gave his popular “A Time for Choosing” speech in 1964 to promote Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign), he wasn’t a popular conservative figure until after he exchanged his governorship for a radio program in 1975. Russell Riley, co-chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program, told History in 2020 that after Reagan left office as governor in 1975, he developed “a radio presence in a way that really puts him in the public consciousness as a conservative voice in America.” Moreno was eight years old when Reagan started his radio show.

A Moreno campaign spokesperson contended that Reagan was a prominent national figure by 1971, saying Moreno was “likely” referring to the “A Time for Choosing” speech when talking about learning English from Reagan.

“Ronald Reagan was a prolific governor and politician at the time, and then ran for president,” the spokesperson said.

A Marist College poll from June 3 had Moreno trailing incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) by five percentage points in a race that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate in the next cycle.