Ohio’s Democratic coalition confronts urban turnout and progressive skepticism
Former three-term Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio is mounting a comeback bid for the Senate seat he lost in 2024, entering a race against Republican Sen. Jon Husted that highlights the Democratic Party’s struggle to win in a state that has become reliably Republican in statewide contests.
Brown, 73, announced in August that he would run to fill the final two years of the term JD Vance vacated when he became vice president. The race places him at the center of the Democratic Party’s competing structural challenges: blue-collar voters have drifted toward Republicans over the past decade, while younger progressives demand a sharper break from the party establishment.
Brown began calling old friends and confidantes within weeks of his 2024 loss, asking whether he should run again and for which office, according to the Wall Street Journal. He relocated from Cleveland to Columbus, started a nonprofit advocating for the working class, and began working on a book about the labor movement. Reading news coverage of Republicans’ efforts to pass President Trump’s tax bill pushed him toward a decision.
“My wife and I thought that, in five years, I didn’t want to look back and say, ‘I could’ve beaten that guy,’” Brown told a supporter at a Cincinnati brewery, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer urged Brown to run during a dinner in Columbus a year ago, according to a person familiar with their conversations. A group aligned with Schumer has pledged to spend $60 million to support Brown’s candidacy, underscoring his status as a top Democratic recruit nationally.
Even those advantages come with complications. Attention-grabbing leftists such as New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic Socialist who unseated a congressional caucus chair in a primary, have drawn attention by signaling a break from the party. In a recent Associated Press poll, two in 10 Democrats gave a positive response about their party, while others described it as “weak” or “ineffective.”
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, who defeated Brown in 2024, has sought to frame the race as a referendum on Brown’s decades in Washington. “Nothing says ‘outsider’ more than a guy who’s only been in elected office his whole life and spent three decades in Washington, D.C.,” Moreno said. “The voters of Ohio just realized, ‘Oh, this guy’s a total phony.’”
Husted has made a similar argument. “More people think he’s a senator than me,” Husted said.
Brown’s supporters counter that he is the only Democrat to win statewide in Ohio in more than a decade. He won his 2018 Senate race by nearly 7 percentage points before losing in 2024 by 4. Recent polling shows the contest to be close.
“I’m so glad that Sherrod Brown is running again—and what a damning indictment of the situation Democrats are in that he’s the only option in Ohio,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits young candidates.
At campaign events, Brown promises to tackle affordability by targeting health-insurance companies and requiring data centers to pay for their own electricity. He invokes his antiwar roots to argue against the war in Iran and the high gas prices that followed it. He cites his record of standing up for working people while casting opponents as part of a system that has failed them.
Brown’s campaign trail takes him from brewery events in Cincinnati to barn meetings in the state’s rural heartland. In Lima, the center of Ohio’s soybean-and-alfalfa country, he sat with seven farmers and avoided politics, asking instead about crop prices. The county surrounding Lima voted by nearly 3-to-1 for Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024.
Yet deeper challenges persist. In some urban areas, voter turnout in 2024 hovered just above 60 percent, far lower than the 80 percent or more in Trump-supporting regions. Ohio politicians said the party neglected urban organizing and took those voters for granted. From the left, some Democrats said Brown has not taken strong enough positions on issues that energize the base, including the war in the Middle East.
“Things have shifted,” said Tanmay Shah, a 30-year-old Cleveland City Council member and one of few Democratic Socialists elected in Ohio. “I would like to see him take a stronger stance on things like the war in the Middle East. I think that would energize the base.” Brown has historically been a staunch ally of Israel while criticizing the war in Iran.
Born in Mansfield, Ohio, the son of a physician, Brown organized student anti-Vietnam War protests in high school and was recruited to run for the Ohio statehouse during his senior year at Yale. He went on to win elections for secretary of state, the U.S. House — where he served seven terms beginning in 1992 — and the Senate, where he served three terms and rose to chair the Banking Committee.
In Washington, Brown was known for working across party lines — hitting the Senate gym with both Democrats and Republicans and hosting a Wednesday morning interfaith prayer group. After his 2024 loss, the prayer group moved from his Senate office to Zoom, where it continues to meet.
Brown broke from his party on trade early, opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement and writing a book in 2004 about how globalism harmed workers — a message Donald Trump would seize on a decade later to reshape the Republican Party. Brown was unable to enact several of his signature priorities, including single-payer healthcare during the Obamacare debates, targeted tariffs on Chinese imports, and a ban on institutional investors owning homes.