Cleveland Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who had just won a landslide reelection in 2018, contemplated a presidential run on a populist platform that targeted the large number of working-class Midwest voters who had defected from the Democratic Party to Donald Trump.
Brown did not participate in the White House campaign. Six years later, he is about to lose his job after losing his campaign for a fourth term in the Senate. He will not be holding an elected seat for the first time since 1992 and for the second time since 1974.
Meanwhile, Brown and the Democrats are already facing existential issues as Trump prepares to return to the White House next month. While just retaining two Senate seats in Michigan and Wisconsin, the GOP also lost one in Pennsylvania. Trump won Ohio by a landslide in November and flipped all three of those blue wall states.
Brown, 72, has been warning about the difficulties for years, ever since he was a House member and vehemently opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Furthermore, despite his loss, Brown has the chance to play a prominent role in the party if he so desires because of his position in a region of the nation where Democrats are a damaged brand.
Brown recently spoke like someone who does in an interview with NBC News. He mentioned a purpose to reposition Democrats as the Middle American workers’ party after leaving the Senate. He also disclosed that, although he stated that he is not interested in the role, he has gotten calls urging him to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee.
“You have a platform as the national chair,” Brown stated. Managing an organization with fifty state chairmen is another requirement. Raising money on an airplane is not something I want to do.
However, Brown may return to the Senate as a result of his post-Senate mission. In 2026, when Ohio will conduct a special election to fill the remaining seats in the chamber left by Vice President-elect JD Vance, he left open the possibility of running for office once more. Brown also makes a point of describing his last address, which he intends to give there on Tuesday afternoon, not as a farewell as is customary for senators who are leaving office.
When asked if he was already thinking about making a comeback in 2026, when Ohio will also elect a new governor, Brown said, “I’m not making decisions yet on that.” I have time.
Brown is currently making harsh criticisms of his party.
He added, “I’m not going to complain about my loss.” However, a major reason I lost was the Democratic Party’s widespread perception as a more laid-back version of a corporate party. We are regarded as an elite, bicoastal party. And it’s difficult to dispute that.
Brown continued by saying that Republicans were overwhelmingly opposed to raising the minimum wage, which prevented us from passing it. There aren’t enough Democrats on the right side to win, and Republicans are always on the losing side. It’s an excellent illustration of how employees are mistreated.
No Democrat in the state has quite as much name recognition or electoral success as Brown, even with his defeat this November to Republican Bernie Moreno. In Ohio, he did 7.5 percentage points better than Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris. Brown’s supporters think that his coattails helped put Democratic Representatives in jeopardy. In challenging districts, Marcy Kaptur and Emilia Sykes maintain their congressional seats.
For his part, Brown has been reciting the 7.5-point figure with a respect that borders on cosmic. For instance, he claimed that Ohio people trust him more than other Democrats on trade policy problems and contended that both parties have banded together against workers.
“That’s why I won the state elections,” he remarked. I finished seven and a half points ahead of Harris because of this. In Ohio, Harris won the union vote by around one point. I won by about twenty.
In addition to the fight over transgender rights and transition-related medical treatment, Moreno and his supporters focused on other topics in the Senate election, such as immigration and border security. Brown was ridiculed for advocating for the usage of pronouns such as they and them.
Jai Chabria, a senior Republican strategist in Ohio and a Vance adviser, said of Brown, “He’s not wrong that Democrats have forgotten how to talk about workers.” However, he also refuses to take responsibility for their cultural war shortcomings because he is involved. Working-class people have been inclined to turn away from the Democratic Party for this reason, among others. It’s not just NAFTA, and it’s not just union concerns. There are several issues that ordinary people are concerned about.
Brown’s 1993 vote against NAFTA, a trade agreement between Canada and Mexico that expedited job outsourcing and the demise of American industrial communities, is one of the votes that most significantly shaped his political reputation. When Democrats started losing the working class, Brown spoke about NAFTA as if it were a sin for his party.
He remembered how a staffer at a Washington-area airport told him they had never seen so many business planes parked there as lobbying for the law grew more intense. He also recalled that after members returned to their districts for recess and heard unfavorable comments from their people, then-Rep. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., who was spearheading support for NAFTA, had complained to him about losing votes.
Brown remembered, “I told Bill that perhaps we should pay attention to what the voters want on this.”
In working-class areas of Ohio, such as Dayton and the Mahoning Valley, which includes Youngstown and has shifted from being a Democratic bastion to a Trump stomping ground since 2016, Democrats’ assistance in ratifying the deal has not been forgotten, despite the fact that more Democrats voted against it than in favor of it.
Brown, who lost Mahoning and Trumbull, the region’s anchoring counties, by considerably smaller margins than Harris, said that the situation was more severe in the Mahoning Valley.
Considered a resolute liberalBrown’s attempts to run for president in 2020 were more subtle than those made earlier in his Senate career. At a time when other potential nominees were calling for Medicare for All, he preached incrementalism and pragmatism. As he traveled through early voting areas like Iowa, his main point was the value of hard labor.
Brown emphasized his ties to Republicans and his populist views on trade during his most recent reelection campaign. His super PAC supporters highlighted how he and Trump agree on anti-opioid laws and other policy matters. Brown ran alongside former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat who signed NAFTA into law, in the closing hours of the campaign.
Using the campaign soundbite that politics shouldn’t be about the left or the right, Brown claimed he had no recommendations for Democrats attempting to decide whether to oppose Trump and when to cooperate with him: Whose side are you actually on?
He also expressed his hope that senators would examine Trump’s choice of Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer as labor secretary with greater skepticism. The Republican from Oregon is well-known for her support of labor, which includes co-sponsoring a bill that would safeguard the ability of unions to organize. However, Brown emphasized that the Biden administration’s proposal to increase overtime pay, which was recently blocked by a Texas judge selected by Trump, would serve as a more accurate indicator of her stance on important worker problems.
They say she s better than others, or other Republicans, on labor, Brown said. I suppose she’s received a few good votes. The question they must ask her is, “Are you going to fix the overtime?”
At other moments in the conversation, Brown expressed reflection, describing his most significant congressional experience as the day the Senate approved the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan on March 6, 2021. The Brown-championed Butch Lewis Act, named for an Ohio teamster, was one of the comprehensive laws that safeguarded pension payments for both employees and retirees.
According to Brown, Democrats should celebrate their wins and their hard work in this manner. And that’s what we ought to do; it’s how we win elections.
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