TOLEDO, Ohio — Sen. Sherrod Brown might get another dog someday — and if he does, he already knows what he’d name it.
“We may get a third dog and call him Shawn,” after United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, Brown said during a rally last month at a union hall for plumbers and pipefitters just outside of Toledo in northwest Ohio.
Brown is probably not kidding: His other two dogs, two medium-sized rescues, are named after former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and former UAW president Walter Reuther, both lions of the U.S. labor movement.
“I stand up for the dignity of work every day. That’s who I am, that’s how I was raised,” Brown, 71, told the crowd.
For nearly 50 years in elected office, Brown has championed the interests of organized labor, from opposing Democratic President Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement as a young congressman in the 1990s to standing in solidarity with UAW members striking against the Big Three domestic automakers last year.
“We never have to ask Sherrod Brown for help because he lives to help the working class,” said Fain (the actual person) introducing Brown at the plumbers and pipefitters hall, the kind of place where visitors are encouraged to park only domestic vehicles on-site. “[Brown will] call me from time to time and he’ll ask, you know, what he can do,” Fain continued. “And even better, he’ll go a step further and say, ‘What can we do together for the workers?’”
Now it’s labor’s turn to return the favor: Brown, who represents the last vestige of the kind of gritty Democratic populism that was formidable in Ohio before Donald Trump, is relying on the clout of organized labor and its hundreds of thousands of members to help him win his fourth and likely toughest race for the Senate.
Brown is one of two Senate Democrats up for reelection this year in states that Trump carried in the last two elections. But unlike Montana Democrat Jon Tester, Brown comes from a state that epitomizes the flight of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party since Trump. For decades, Ohio was a presidential bellwether that closely mirrored the national popular vote until Trump knocked it off the map in 2016. Ohio has voted mostly red ever since — with Brown, several judicial candidates and a reproductive rights measure, the lone bright spots for Democrats.
The only Democrat now in statewide office, Democrats attribute Brown’s appeal to his economic populism: Brown extols the “dignity of work,” runs his campaigns through union halls and has been skeptical of trade deals from both parties (although Brown, like the vast majority of Democrats, voted in favor of Trump’s renegotiated North American trade pact in 2019). Brown also has the type of authentic personal brand that’s hard to cultivate and even harder to replicate: rumpled clothes, unruly hair, and a distinctive rasp that makes it sounds like he’s swallowed rocks when he’s speaking.
In 2018, Brown won reelection after performing strongly in many of the industrial counties that Trump had carried two years prior, suggesting there are working-class voters who will split their tickets for Brown and Trump — or at least that’s what Democrats hope for in November. A Republican from the Cleveland area, Brown’s part of the state, scoffed at the idea: “Not only do I not know any Republican voting for Brown, I’ve never even heard of one contemplating it. Except those actors in Sherrod’s commercials,” said Ralph King, a local activist citing Brown’s ad featuring Republicans crossing the aisle for him.
Republicans point out that Brown has never had to run on the same ballot with Trump and go up against his remarkably consistent Ohio base. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other national Republicans also all but ignored Brown’s weak opponent of six years ago, former car dealer and ex-Rep. Jim Renacci, who bankrolled a significant portion of his campaign.
This time, Republicans are throwing everything they’ve got at Brown, including what they insist is a better candidate, Bernie Moreno, another former car dealer and a very on-the-nose foil for Brown. With nice-looking suits and closely cropped hair, Moreno has a slick way about him on the stump that sticks out against Brown’s “rumpled authenticity.” Moreno is portraying Brown as a radical liberal who’s content to let migrants pour over the southern border. “[Kamala] Harris and Brown used [Joe] Biden’s declining mental state to enact the most liberal agenda to date,” Moreno wrote in an August op-ed in the Toledo Blade.
Up until a few years ago, Moreno, 57, owned an empire of two dozen luxury dealerships across several states that sold BMWs, Porches and other foreign brands. Brown has cited aspects of Moreno’s business record to paint him as a slippery car salesman who, according to a 2017 wage theft suit, stiffed one of his workers on overtime and lied about never selling cars made in China.
“The guy that’s running against me, he advertised in his last campaign, he said, ‘You know what? If Buick, if General Motors, makes me sell those cars made in China, I’m just going to quit with GM. They can fire me as a dealer.’ … Except somebody found out two years ago [that] he was on television saying, ‘Buy an Envision. It’s a great car,’” said Brown, who drives a U.S.-made Jeep Cherokee, referring to a Buick model made in China.
Both sides have been spending astronomically to get out their messaging, easily making it one of the costliest Senate contests this election cycle, if not ever. Future ad reservations across the state’s numerous media markets for both the primary and general elections have reached $463 million, which includes a deluge of cash from cryptocurrency firms with a stake in securing a Republican-controlled Congress. Republicans, however, appear to be outspending Democrats in Ohio to little avail — polls of the race either have Brown ahead of Moreno or in a dead heat.
Beyond poking holes in Moreno’s backstory, a key aspect of Brown’s electoral strategy has been shoring up support from national and state labor unions normally aligned with Democrats at a time when two politically influential unions, responding to the preferences of its membership for Trump, declined to endorse either candidate for president this year. Although one of those groups, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, has endorsed Brown, who has the support of over two dozen labor unions, including the United Mine Workers of America, United Steelworkers and the Ohio Building Trades Council, according to his campaign.
Brown also counts the UAW and Fain, one of the country’s top labor leaders, among his supporters, a boon for him in a state where UAW members produce Jeep Gladiators, Wranglers and a host of vehicle components.
Crucially for Brown’s reelection, Fain downplayed his membership’s growing affinity for Trump and Republicans since 2016. “When Trump ran the first time, it was unknown, and I think people just wanted to vote against the establishment. But UAW workers have always been consistent,” Fain insisted to reporters at Brown’s rally. “We’ve run numbers back decades, it’s typically 65% vote Democrat, and roughly 30% to 32% vote the other way. And that’s for a plethora of reasons, you know. There’s been no change recently, and I don’t expect that to change.”
Moreno’s campaign continued to yoke Brown to the Biden-Harris administration in a statement to HuffPost, and cited Moreno’s backing from the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union for border patrol agents. “Biden, Harris and Brown push job-killing electric vehicle mandates and wage depressing open border policies that harm hardworking Ohioans. Sherrod can pretend to be pro-worker, but his decades-long voting record contradicts his campaign pitch,” Moreno spokeswoman Reagan McCarthy said.
Brown is also distancing himself from the national Democratic brand, to a degree he didn’t six years ago. Brown was known for ripping Trump as a “phony populist,” especially in 2017 after Trump told factory workers in Youngstown, Ohio, that he’d restore jobs and not to sell their homes. (Two years later, GM closed a key plant in the area.) Now Brown, who skipped this summer’s Democratic National Convention, is paying zero mention of either presidential candidate on the stump.
Brown’s appeal to the center was on full display last month in Toledo.
“It’s not left or right. It’s really not Democrat or Republican. It’s who’s on your side, and that’s what this fight’s all about,” Brown said, speaking broadly about the labor movement.
But if you ask people who know Brown and have followed his career for decades, they’ll tell you that Brown hasn’t changed even from his earliest days in elected office, as the Mansfield, Ohio-born secretary of state who asked McDonald’s to put voter registration forms on tray liners.
“Folks have a history with Sherrod,” said former Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, who launched a group to draft Brown to run for president in 2020. “He has been a protector of workers even when Democrats weren’t giving labor a fair shake.”
Whaley acknowledged some of the ways Brown has needed to appear less like a partisan Democrat in this race. For instance, Brown released a commercial this week that attempted to debunk the wave of anti-transgender ads against him that also sided with Republican Gov. Mike DeWine on leaving the issue to individual sports leagues to sort out.
“I’m not disappointed at all,” Whaley said. “The most important thing for Sherrod to do right now is to share why he is perfect for Ohio. And really he shouldn’t talk about anything but that.”
The people invited to see Brown at his campaign events (which are carefully curated to deter GOP trackers and other disruptions) offer a window into why Brown keeps winning. The way his supporters talk about him is passionate and specific. There are lawmakers who would love for their constituents to be able to cite literally anything they’ve done in office. And then there’s Brown, who’s known, at least among his most committed supporters, for his opposition to pre-Trump era trade deals and for legislation shoring up faltering multiemployer pension plans.
“Sherrod stood up to presidents of both parties against bad trade deals that shipped jobs overseas,” said Michelle Grim, a Democratic lawmaker from Toledo. A few moments later, Andre Washington, a regional organizer with the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization for Black trade unionists, extolled Brown as “a friend of labor … Sherrod Brown is our family, Sherrod Brown is our cousin,” Washington shouted.
“Sherrod Brown names his bills after people, not after himself,” said Mike Porter, a 69-year-old retiree from the General Motors plant in Defiance, Ohio, citing the Butch Lewis Act, Brown’s pension-saving law named for an Ohio Teamster.
Porter and a former co-worker, John Wiseman, 82, said after the event that even though Brown is well-liked among UAW members, the GOP’s message is beginning to take hold in factory break rooms and union halls. “Our plant is probably over 50% Republican right now. Republicans make it sound really good, you know, so they’ve crawled over there with them,” Wiseman said.
For a while, Brown seemed to be defying the odds, running several points ahead of Moreno in polling in the spring. But the race has tightened in recent weeks, with the National Republican Senatorial Committee claiming that Brown and Moreno are deadlocked. Last week, a leak of data from the Senate Leadership Fund, the Mitch McConnell-aligned super PAC, had Brown 6 percentage points ahead of Moreno, nearly matching Brown’s 2018 margin of victory.
The same leak confirmed public polling that had Tester running behind his own GOP opponent, Tim Sheehy, in Montana, a state with a longer history than Ohio of voting red and that’s confronting an influx of new residents whose political preferences won’t be totally clear until after this election.
“I wouldn’t win Montana, he wouldn’t win Ohio, I’ll leave it at that,” Brown told reporters, in response to a question about why he seems to be having an easier time this year than Tester. “He’s a good candidate. He’s been a very good senator. So I don’t know the politics there, and I don’t see all the polls, just different states.”
For that reason, Democrats may have trouble spinning a Sherrod Brown victory as a roadmap for Democrats to make gains in the industrial Midwest. It may be that the only conclusion to draw from Brown winning another term in November is that people in Ohio, especially union members, know and like Sherrod Brown.
“For someone who has not been as unwavering as [Brown] has been for labor,” said Trina Clayborne-Spence, a 65-year-old Democratic voter from the Toledo area, “I don’t think I would be as confident.”