In 2019, I wrote a piece about Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s decision to not seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In the piece, I argue that Brown was uniquely well-suited to run the kind of campaign Democrats would have to run to defeat then-President Donald Trump – as an unapologetic social progressive who was also a union-friendly protectionist before it was fashionable, Brown seemed like he could perfectly thread the liberal/populist needle, maintaining Democrats’ commitment to social progress while cutting a Rust Belt friendly image that wouldn’t scare away swing voters. 

All of those qualities are the same qualities that could hypothetically help Brown win reelection to the Senate in 2024, even though he’ll be running as a Democrat in a state that’s almost certainly going to be won by Trump at the presidential level. Along with Montana’s Jon Tester, Brown has proven to be perhaps the most resilient of the class of red state Democratic senators who benefited from blue-heavy environments in both George W. Bush’s second midterm in 2006 and Barack Obama’s reelection year of 2012. Even though the likes of Claire McCaskill, Bill Nelson, Joe Donnelly, and Heidi Heitkamp ran out of luck in 2018, Brown and Tester soldiered on, setting themselves up to be the crucial pieces in a slim Democratic Senate majority that’s hanging by a thread in 2024. In other words, Sherrod Brown has never been as important as he is now. Unfortunately for him, he’s also never faced a reelection battle as difficult.

Much of that is because the way that the overall electoral environment of Ohio has shifted to the right in the Trump era. As we wrote in our analysis of the presidential race in the Buckeye State, Ohio is no longer the bellwether it once was. Instead, as white working class voters began to flock to the Republican party, Ohio became a much more reliably red state, and once reliably Democratic counties like Mahoning and Trumbull swinging hard towards Trump in 2020. If you’re one of those people who believe a key component of this swing among is “economic anxiety” and reactions to deindustrialization, then Brown, who literally wrote the book on anti-free trade politics, would seem to be well-poised to weather a coming red storm and win a fourth term. But considering the social and cultural issues that have also played a significant role in this shift, Brown may have some difficulty breaking away from the national Democratic brand and getting through to those voters, even if their stances on unions and healthcare may be more aligned with him than that of his opponent. 

Speaking of his opponent, Republican nominee Bernie Moreno represents something of a middle ground between subpar Republican swing state Senate nominees like Wisconsin’s Eric Hovde and Arizona’s Kari Lake and less controversial figures like Michigan’s Mike Rogers. A Colombian immigrant who made his money through car dealerships, Moreno isn’t free from controversy – in 2023, he settled a series of wage theft lawsuits from former employees, and faced gender and age-based discrimination lawsuits while preparing to sell his business. He’s also something of a serial flip-flopper – while a businessman, he sponsored the 2014 Gay Games and was a supporter of gay marriage. Ten years later, he would accuse the LGBTQ+ community of engaging in a campaign of “indoctrination.” In 2019, he supported mandatory background checks for gun purchasers; in 2024, he reversed his position. And in 2016 and 2020, Moreno was a vocal critic of Trump, describing the former president as a “lunatic” and a “maniac” and blamed him for the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But, seeking a future in Republican politics, he’s since changed his tune, questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election and actively sought and then touted Trump’s endorsement in both the 2022 and 2024 Senate primaries, respectively. But despite (or perhaps because of) the volume of these reversals, they don’t seem to be catching on in the news cycle, and outside of some disputes about the current status of his businesses and his academic record, he’s managed to avoid making any serious, attention grabbing missteps thus far. 

In fact, the biggest Ohio-related mistakes are probably coming from the top of the ticket. Even though it’s not really a swing state anymore, both Trump and his running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance have managed to make the Buckeye State the center of attention by frequently repeating debunked claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio have been kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ pets. While Springfield was the site of a fatal car accident involving an unlicensed Haitian driver and some have argued that the migrant community has strained the area’s social services, Ohio’s Republican governor, Springfield’s Republican mayor, Springfield’s city manager, and Springfield’s police department have all said that there is no evidence that Haitian migrants (or anyone else, from that matter) are eating the dogs and cats of the town, and nearly every investigation into the claims shows that they were first stoked by a neo-Nazi group.

Trump and Vance’s lies about Springfield have created a massive amount of stress for the city’s residents, making it the target of bomb and shooting threats that have disrupted the city’s schools and civic events, and may actually be backfiring on the campaign as a result – according to Politico, at least two Republican Clark County Commissioners (where Springfield is located) refused to say if they would vote for Trump in November. While Moreno doesn’t appear to have made any comments regarding the pet eating claims, he has advocated for members of Springfield’s Haitian community to be deported, which could attach him to the chaos stoked by Trump and Vance in the city and hurt him in the eyes of some voters.

There’s also, as in every important Senate race this year, the issue of abortion. For a Republican, Moreno is a relative moderate on abortion – he supports a ban after 15 weeks, although his campaign has said that he “supports comprehensive access to birth control.” But if two 2023 referendums in Ohio are any indication, this position is still to the right of that of most of the state’s voters. Last year, 56.7% of Ohians voted to codify abortion rights in the state constitution, a decisive victory that came after another referendum in which the same voters voted against a measure that would have required the abortion-related referendum to receive 60% support to become law. If Brown can make this a race about abortion, he’ll be fighting on more favorable ground for him and other Democrats, and could manage to parlay Republican weakness on the issue with his incumbency to create a winning coalition. 

It’ll be a real uphill climb, though. Republicans are poised to spend an astronomical sum of money in the coming months on Moreno’s behalf, a pace that Brown and the Democrats seem to be having difficulty keeping up with. It doesn’t help that Brown has had to tread carefully when it comes to the presidential campaign; he hasn’t declined to endorse Kamala Harris like Tester, but he’s still kept her at arm’s length, choosing not to attend the Democratic National Convention and making a point to say things like “presidents of both parties have failed at the border.” Brown has led almost all of polls thus far, but as the GOP money machine gets to work in Ohio and the presidential election reaches a higher level of salience, partisan gravity may take effect, and Brown’s long political career could come to a premature end.

This is the last long form analysis piece we’ll be publishing about the Senate, and it feels appropriate that it’s about Sherrod Brown and Ohio. If Brown loses, it’ll mark the end of an era – not just for Democrats’ statewide competitiveness in Ohio, but for the era of a certain kind of ticket-splitting, where voters would reelect popular incumbent senators no matter who was running for president – it could very well be that when we rate the Senate races four years from now, the most important factor will be which presidential candidate will win the state, eclipsing all other considerations. But if Brown wins, it’ll be a sign that the old dynamics are still lingering on, and that state-level politics still matter beyond the presidential race. In other words, the results from this year’s Senate election will reverberate not only in the short term policy making sense, but in the long term historical analysis of American elections as well.

Hopefully our ratings will play a meaningful part in that analysis. Thank you for following along as we march towards Election Day. In the meantime, we’ll see you over on the model!