Democrats Can Still Win Ohio: What Sherrod Brown Can Teach His Party
“As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” At least, that used to be the saying. However, with Donald Trump winning Ohio by 8 points in back-to-back elections, some are wondering whether the Buckeye State is still a bellwether. Over the past decade, Republicans have consolidated control over the state’s congressional delegation and government offices. Senator Sherrod Brown being one of the few Democrats to survive the rightward shift as the state, at least according to many of the pundits, veers further into GOP territory. Brown’s successful campaign for a third term gives the Democratic Party a blueprint for how to win back states like Ohio, where many voters were attracted to Trump’s protectionist rhetoric, which hearkened to a bygone era of economic security.
For much of the 20th century, these states were home to blue-collar workers in the steel and auto industries; a day of hard work meant a day of good pay. American industry was unchallenged by any other in the world, and union jobs gave life to towns such as Akron, Cleveland, and Youngstown, among others. Little by little, those jobs have disappeared over the last forty years as both parties (the GOP in particular) sided with corporate interests over those of the people. This, combined with the recession of 2008, left the working class struggling, with many people having to take several low-paying jobs simultaneously just to survive. In 2016, it came to a head when Donald Trump won states that Obama had won handily, Ohio among them.
“Why is this? Because Brown does what few others in his party are willing to: talk to the working class.”
While holding office in what many see as increasingly hostile territory for Democrats, Sherrod Brown has managed to win three times, and not by presenting himself as a Blue Dog (or conservative Democrat) who has adopted positions similar to the Republicans. Rather, he is more of a “Midwestern labor liberal”, as Matt Yglesias described him. He has made a name for himself in Ohio politics through a combination of his longevity and a political style that hearkens to an old-fashioned American liberalism that champions the importance of labor unions. His politics offer a blueprint for how the Democratic Party, after years of neglecting large swaths of the country such as the Rustbelt and letting the infrastructures of state parties decay, can win again in states like Ohio. While national Democrats often stress a need to move to the center in an attempt, usually unsuccessful, to win over Republicans, Brown has been solidly liberal throughout his Senate career on issues such as free trade and banking and financial regulation (he’s even been to the left of them in many instances). Rather than fighting an ascendant GOP by watering down his positions, the senator consistently opposed Trump and continued to embrace a protectionist agenda of the left-wing, working class progressive variety, opposing trade deals that many (including Trump) blame for shipping industrial jobs overseas and undercutting American labor. The result: in 2018, Brown won 62% of union voters (a quarter of Ohio voters in the state’s senate race that year). By contrast Biden lost union voters in the state by 12 points in 2020.
In light of the election results, and again in 2020, some began to say that the Midwestern working class was lost, or that Democrats had gone too far left in their agenda, or had become too concerned with social justice issues to be palatable to Middle America. As this debate still rages on within the Democratic Party, I am here to say now is not the time for progressives to stay silent, especially if they want to win back Obama-Trump voters. Reaching these voters does not mean dropping an ambitious agenda. To connect with these voters, Democrats must talk about issues that matter to them. Ironically, they can look to Donald Trump, at least on some issues. If they don’t, they risk throwing away dozens of electoral votes, and with them a chance to win the presidency.