No, a Fox News Poll Did Not Show Sherrod Brown Leading in Ohio by 8 Points

A claim spread online that a Fox News poll showed Sherrod Brown leading in Ohio by 8 points during the 2024 Senate race. That claim is false. No verified Fox News poll showing Brown with an 8-point lead has ever been documented, and the actual race went in the opposite direction entirely.

The real polling picture looked nothing like this. According to RealClearPolitics poll averages for the Ohio Senate race, Brown and Republican challenger Bernie Moreno were locked in a tight, competitive contest throughout 2024, with Moreno holding a modest lead in most late polls. An 8-point Brown advantage would have been a dramatic outlier — the kind of number that every major newsroom would have covered immediately. It went unreported because it does not appear to exist.

The election results make the claim even harder to defend. The Associated Press confirmed that Brown lost to Moreno by approximately 6 percentage points. That means the claimed poll would have been off by 14 points from the final result — not a rounding error, but a complete reversal of reality.

PolitiFact found no credible record of this poll either. When a number this large and this significant leaves no trace in news archives, polling databases, or fact-check records, the most straightforward explanation is that it was fabricated, badly misremembered, or a distortion of a real but very different data point.

This kind of misinformation spreads fast because it is almost impossible to disprove in the moment. Most people do not have Fox News poll archives bookmarked. A confident, specific claim — a named outlet, a named candidate, a precise number — feels credible even when it is invented. If you see a poll cited without a direct link to the original release, treat it with real skepticism before sharing.