In 2024, Sherrod Brown won more votes in Ohio than his own party’s nominee for president.
He still lost his Senate seat.
Two years later, Brown’s quest to win his way back to Washington could be a tipping point in starting to reverse a shift that has turned Ohio from a presidential battleground into reliably red electoral turf.
With voters heading to the polls on Tuesday for the state’s primary to lock in expected matchups for the Senate and governor, Ohio is a red state where Democrats realistically have a shot at starting to reclaim lost ground this fall.
“There’s no doubt that having Sherrod Brown at the top of the ticket makes a huge difference for Democrats’ ability to compete this cycle,” said state House Democratic Leader Dani Isaacsohn. .
It’s also a test of whether conservatives who benefited from President Donald Trump’s appeal to Rust Belt voters can hold power even as traditional midterm election headwinds turn against them — and as the reality sets in that Trump himself will never again be on the ballot to juice GOP turnout.
“Look, Sherrod Brown is a known commodity to Ohioans, and this is a state where Donald Trump won by 11 [points],” said Alex Triantafilou, the chair of the Ohio GOP. “We don’t see a going back to Sherrod is the bottom line.”
Brown, 73, isn’t the only thing animating Democrats’ ambitions. With Republican Gov. Mike DeWine term-limited, the party sees an opening for Dr. Amy Acton, who served as DeWine’s director of the Ohio Department of Health during the Covid-19 pandemic, to win the governorship.
History is not kind to that hope. A Democrat has not won an Ohio governor’s race in almost 20 years, and Acton’s likely November opponent is deeply linked with Trump’s MAGA movement. After running as a potential alternative to Trump in the 2024 Republican primary, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy now has the president’s endorsement to succeed DeWine — and has the kind of campaign style and base support that could pay off despite his dearth of experience as an elected official or in government leadership.
After the 2024 election delivered Republicans full control of Washington, Democrats began a painful reckoning with what voters had been telling them. Not so long ago, Democratic candidates in places like Ohio had managed to distance themselves from the national party’s brand. That ability largely collapsed in 2024, and Democrats are still searching for a long-term path back to electoral success.
In the short term, though, political gravity and a midterm cycle shaped by Trump’s second term and frustrations about the cost of living may help them overcome the kind of messaging woes that last lost them control in Washington.
This fall will mark the third time in six years that Ohio voters decide who to send to the Senate. After defeating former Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan in 2022, then-author JD Vance served for less than two years before being picked by Trump to be his running mate. Vance’s shift to the vice presidency created an opening that the state’s governor filled by appointing his own lieutenant governor, Jon Husted, to the vacancy.
Once Democrats lost control of the Senate in 2024, there was a realistic prospect that it could take years before the party had a path back to power in the chamber given a rough map of races playing out this fall. That dynamic has shifted considerably in recent months, with the recruitment of Brown into the special election race against Husted part of a larger plan that rests on Democrats focusing on trying to win in places such as Ohio, Alaska, North Carolina, Maine, Texas and Iowa to potentially flip the Senate.
While Brown being on the ballot has created at least a level of anxiety among Republicans, there’s still confidence within GOP circles that the state’s red hue will remain. In 2018, when Brown won a third Senate term while Trump was early in his White House days, Republicans kept hold of the governor’s office in what amounted to a roughly four-point victory.
And the Democrats deficit in the state may also be even worse than it first appears. In the last presidential race, then-Democratic nominee Kamala Harris lost Ohio to Trump by a little over 11 points. That result was the worst loss in Ohio for a presidential nominee of either major party since the 1980s.
But the reality that Ohio is even seen as competitive this year in any of its top-of-the-line races may be another signal that bodes poorly for what kind of message many voters around the country will send to Trump and his allies when they head to the polls this fall.
A Republican operative close to Husted who was granted anonymity to speak candidly said, “Brown is a tough out,” and he is preparing for a close race this fall.
“Trump’s not on the ballot. Governor DeWine’s not on the ballot. Both of those guys pushed turnout for different reasons, but favorable for Republicans,” the Husted ally said. “We’ve got our work cut out for us. But I don’t know what Sherrod Brown has to run on either.”
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