Why did the Democrats
get creamed? Sherrod Brown can tell you.
“I don’t look at
politics left and right. It’s who’s on your side.”
December
22, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. ESTToday at 6:30 a.m. EST
It is hard to think of a state that
has seen a faster and more dramatic political transformation than Ohio.
For more than half a century, the
Buckeye State was the quintessential, closely fought bellwether. Until its
streak was broken in 2020, it had voted for the presidential election winner a remarkable
14 times straight.
Had John F. Kerry taken roughly 60,000 more Ohio votes from George W. Bush
in 2004, he would have been president. Four years later, Barack Obama won the state by
nearly five percentage points; he did it again in 2012, but by less than half
that margin.
Then, Ohio swung hard to Donald Trump and the
Republicans — and it has remained there since.
Now, the man who was possibly the last
Democrat capable of being elected statewide, Sen. Sherrod Brown, has been
defeated and is heading home. Costing half a billion dollars, Brown’s losing
battle against Republican Bernie Moreno became the most expensive Senate race in the country. Brown
came up about three points short in his quest for a fourth term.
Why? Brown says the political shift in
his state began with a signal event: the passage of the North American Free
Trade Agreement in 1993, the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
“Workers have slowly migrated out of
the Democratic Party,” he told me. “It accelerated as more and more jobs were
lost. And I still heard [about NAFTA] in this campaign, especially in the Miami
Valley, Dayton, where we still won, [and] up there in Mahoning Valley, where we
didn’t win.”
Workers came to view Democrats “as a
bicoastal elite party,” he explained. “We were too pro-corporate. They know
Republicans are going to shill for corporate interests. They expected Democrats
would stand up for them, and they don’t see that nationally.”
Then Trump came along and switched the
script, breaking with the GOP’s long-standing free-trade stance to denounce
NAFTA and other agreements, promote more protectionist policies and make
promises such as ending taxes on overtime. “Republicans are now,
for the first time, actually trying to talk to workers,” Brown said.
Still, in November, Brown ran more than seven percentage
points ahead of the top of the Democratic ticket in Ohio; where Vice
President Kamala Harris lost the
state’s union households by nine points, the
senator carried them by 13.
On Tuesday, he gave his final speech on the Senate floor. Occasionally
choking up, Brown had stood at a desk that had once belonged to Sen. Robert F.
Kennedy of New York — something he discovered on his first day in the
chamber, when he saw Kennedy’s signature in a drawer.
As Brown invariably does, he wore a
bright white lapel pin given to him decades ago by a steelworker in Lorain. It
depicts a caged canary. “At the turn of the last century, coal miners took the
canary down into the mines with them to warn them of poisonous gasses,” he
said. “The mine worker in those days knew he didn’t have a union strong enough
or a government that cared enough to look out for him. He was on his own. Over
the last century and a half, we have done so much to change that. And all of
those fights required going up against powerful special interests.”
That day, 40 or so of his Senate
colleagues who had gathered to hear Brown’s remarks wore identical pins in his
honor.
I caught up with Brown the morning
after that Senate speech. His suite on the fifth floor of the Hart Office
Building, where we spoke, was all but empty, the walls and desks already bare.
But although he himself will no longer
be there come January, Brown insists that Democrats can — and must — win back
the votes of working-class Americans. Those voters may disagree with some of
the party’s stances on social issues, such as guns, abortion, crime and
immigration, but will return to the fold “if we stay on economic issues and do
it right.”
“We have to sharpen our message. I
don’t look at politics left and right. It’s who’s on your side,” he said. “Work
really binds. I mean, what do we have in common? The term ‘dignity of work’
really cuts across all lines.”
Brown, 72, refused to call that speech
a farewell. “It is not — I promise you — the last time you will hear from me,”
he said. Indeed, in the waning hours of the congressional session, Brown
notched one last major achievement: passage of a bill that will give millions of
public sector retirees full Social Security benefits, instead of the reduced
payments they currently receive.
His future options include running
again for the Senate in 2026, when there will be a special election to fill the
unexpired term of the seat now held by Vice President-elect JD Vance (R).
I hope he does, because few have so
ardently championed the value of work. And his, it is clear, is not finished.
