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Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has always had the luxury of running for office in particularly good years for his party. He won his seat in 2006, amidst the backlash against the Iraq War, and was reelected in 2012, the last time Democrats were in charge of national politics, and President Donald J. Trump’s term in office gained national recognition. He was also re-elected in 2018.
His 2024 campaign will be different and perhaps the toughest of his career. While Republicans are determined to take his seat, the Democratic president is hounding him like his trademark rumpled suit. In an election year where the Senate majority depends on Democrats’ ability to win all races, a huge weight rests on the shoulders of the famously disheveled 71-year-old.
“I will fight for the people of Ohio,” Brown said in an interview Wednesday. “There’s a reason I win in Republican-leaning states.”
Mr. Brown’s tousled hair and gravelly voice have spoken to working-class voters since he was elected Ohio’s secretary of state in 1982. His arms may be clasped tightly across his chest, but he projects a casual confidence that he can win solidly once again. He is the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Red Ohio.
But beneath that image lies a problem. On Monday, he had just received approval from the Ohio Building and Construction Industry Council, a city of 100,000 people, when Jeff King, a retired bricklayer, pulled him aside in a weathered union hall in Dayton.
King, who flew in from his hometown of Cincinnati, told senators that Brown had a lot of accomplishments. But he asked whether workers in the blue-collar states who delivered two 8-percentage-point victories to Trump understood who should take the credit.
“That’s the mission,” Brown said, leaning forward. “They don’t have enough knowledge.”
The party and its allies have made re-election of Ohio’s senior senator a top priority, which American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees president and AFL president Lee Sanders said is “right at the top.” CIO Political Committee.
This election could break Brown’s path. With Trump’s support and lobbying from Democratic super PACs, Democrats’ favorite Republican challenger, Bernie Moreno, won easily in Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary, with staggering wealth, little political experience, and the courtroom. This gave an advantage to the incumbent who has experience in the field. The former president’s comments could prompt some voters to split their tickets.
The next day, the Biden administration announced an $8.5 billion deal to fund Intel’s chip manufacturing, much of it destined for Ohio, courtesy of a bill Brown helped secure. Thanks to Mr. Brown, the Chip Science Act requires so-called project labor agreements to be signed between management and unions before factory construction begins. That means he will employ 7,000 union workers at the massive Intel complex outside Columbus.
Also Wednesday, the administration finalized tougher emissions standards for new cars and trucks to expand electric vehicle manufacturing at the Stellantis Jeep complex in Toledo and auto battery factories around Youngstown.
Finally, construction on a replacement Brent Spence Bridge between Cincinnati and suburban Kentucky should begin around the time of the election. That too was conveyed in part by Mr. Brown.
But Republicans have so much confidence for a much simpler reason: political weight. March polls showed Trump leading Biden in Ohio by just 9 points, up to 18 points. Republicans say Mr. Brown is likely to lead Mr. Biden in the state, but the margin is not large enough. To win.
“We now have an opportunity to retire the old communists,” Moreno declared at Tuesday’s victory party, referring to Brown.
In an interview Wednesday, Brown argued that his first election, in which he defeated two-term Ohio governor Mike DeWine, was his toughest Senate race.
And Mr. DeWine gave credence to that confidence Monday night, pleading with Columbus voters to vote for the candidate he thinks can beat Mr. Brown: State Sen. Matt Dolan.
“Guys, this is not an easy race,” DeWine advised at Hey Hey Bar & Grill in Columbus’ German Village. “I’ve fought this guy before.”
This year might be different.
“There’s no getting away from the fact that Sherrod Brown will vote for Joe Biden 99 percent of the time,” Moreno said.
Compared to Moreno, who is a political newcomer, Brown is an established Ohioan. “People just know I support them,” he said.
Two years ago, then-U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan ran for the Senate as a blue-collar Democrat from the Mahoning Valley, breaking out of Brown’s mold. He ran a campaign that was almost universally praised as a textbook campaign, but lost to J.D. Vance by 6 percentage points.
But Ryan said he lacks what Brown has: a fixed, statewide identity. To win Ohio as a Democrat, “you have to have the name Sherrod Brown,” he said.
The battle will likely be about Moreno trying to define Brown’s policy agenda and Democrats removing Biden’s name from it. Mr. Brown spoke of his own actions to save the pensions of more than 1,460 union drivers in Ohio through the Butch Lewis Act. The Butch Lewis Act, named in memory of the Ohio Teamster, is a pension provision included in the American Rescue Plan, the massive coronavirus relief law.
He told the audience about his role in the massive legislation Biden signed to extend health care coverage to veterans exposed to toxic “scorch marks” in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was also named after Ohio State Sgt. Private First Class Heath Robinson died of lung cancer at the age of 39.
He speaks passionately about the CHIPS Act, which guarantees that two new semiconductor factories being built in Ohio with federal funds will employ union-trained workers.
But even Moreno said he understands the road ahead, especially when Moreno called his record “job-killing Green New Deal radicalism.”
“They know the accomplishments,” Brown said. “They have no idea who did it.”
Incumbent members will almost certainly go toe-to-toe with Republicans, and even some of them. Mr. Brown has built up a formidable war chest between the loyalty he has built in the labor movement and the business interests of the Senate Banking Committee, which he chairs. He has raised $33.5 million since 2019 and has $13.5 million in cash on hand in Congress. The end of last month.
Moreno emerged with $2.4 million in cash after a competitive three-way primary, according to federal campaign finance records from late February.
And Brown said that underlying Ohio’s pro-Trump tendencies is that the state is not as conservative as Republicans think. Last August, Ohioans crushed a Republican-engineered voting bill to make it harder to pass future voting bills. This is a transparent effort to override the pending abortion rights vote. Three months later, the state enshrined the right to abortion by 13 percentage points in the state constitution. On the same day, they voted to legalize marijuana by a 14-point margin.
“That should scare them,” Brown said of his Republican opponents. “They need to figure out a way to reach these voters.”
The extent to which Mr. Brown can continue to outperform Democrats nationally is a subject of debate in Ohio. Former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper said that when Mr. DeWine was defeating Democratic candidates in 2018, the senator beat the remaining Democratic candidates by more than 10 points and beat Republican James B. Renacci. He said he was up 7 points. Gov. Richard Cordray had a 3.7 point lead.
“The question is, how competitive can Biden be here?” said David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. “If he competes hard, he’ll keep it within Brown’s reach.”
In the Dayton union hall of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 82, it was impossible to find anyone who was not firmly in Mr. Brown’s camp.
David Bruce, president of the Dayton Building Trades Council, declared he would win “absolutely, as much as my pension savings.”
However, behind his bravado was a recognition of his future work.
“That’s our fight,” said King, a retired bricklayer, referring to the right-wing information stream consumed by many of his union brethren. “As union leaders, we are being asked to get the message across better. The problem is, we are bricklayers. We don’t get the message.”
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