Sherrod Brown
Based on Wikipedia: Sherrod Brown
In American politics, losing an election usually means the end. Politicians fade into lobbying, corporate boards, or comfortable obscurity. But Sherrod Brown—the gravelly-voiced senator from Ohio who lost his seat in 2024—announced he's coming back for more. At seventy-two, he's running again in 2026, defying the conventional wisdom that says you should quit while you're behind.
What makes a politician keep fighting after defeat? And why does Brown's particular brand of politics keep resonating with working-class voters in a state that has swung dramatically toward Republicans?
The Making of a Populist
Brown was born in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1952. His father was a doctor. One brother became Attorney General of West Virginia. Another graduated from Harvard Law School. This was solidly professional-class upbringing in the heartland.
But Brown didn't follow the expected path into law or medicine. He studied Russian at Yale—an unusual choice during the Cold War that suggests either intellectual curiosity or contrarian instincts, possibly both. He campaigned for George McGovern in 1972, the anti-war candidate who lost forty-nine states to Richard Nixon. If you wanted to pick the losing side, McGovern was your man. Brown picked him anyway.
Then something remarkable happened. During his senior year at Yale, a local Democratic leader in Ohio recruited him to run for the state legislature. Brown was twenty-one years old. He won. He became the youngest person ever elected to the Ohio House of Representatives.
Think about that for a moment. Most twenty-one-year-olds are figuring out what to do with their lives. Brown had already started his political career—one that would span five decades.
The Long Climb
Brown's political trajectory followed the traditional ladder: state representative, then Secretary of State, then Congress, then the Senate. But the path wasn't smooth.
He served as Ohio's Secretary of State from 1983 to 1991, focusing on voter registration outreach—a priority that would become increasingly contentious in American politics over the following decades. Then he lost. His 1990 reelection campaign against Bob Taft—great-grandson of President William Howard Taft—was, by all accounts, brutal. The Taft name still carried weight in Ohio.
Defeat didn't end Brown's career. He moved from Mansfield to Lorain, near Cleveland, and won a Congressional seat in 1992. He would hold that seat for fourteen years, getting reelected six times.
Those were frustrating years for any Democrat. The Republicans took control of the House in the famous 1994 election—the Newt Gingrich revolution—and didn't give it back until 2006. Brown spent over a decade in the minority, unable to pass major legislation but still able to make noise.
The Trade Warrior
If there's one issue that defines Brown's career, it's trade. He's been fighting against free trade agreements since before it was fashionable.
In 2005, he led the Democratic effort to block the Central American Free Trade Agreement, known as CAFTA. For months, he worked as a legislative "whip"—that's the term for someone who rounds up votes, derived from the British fox hunting tradition of the "whipper-in" who keeps the hounds from straying. Brown secured Democratic opposition and searched for Republican allies.
He failed. The House passed CAFTA after midnight on July 28, 2005, by a single vote. But the fight established Brown's reputation as a trade skeptic in an era when both parties largely embraced free trade orthodoxy.
This wasn't a popular position among the economic establishment. The consensus view among economists was that free trade creates net benefits—cheaper goods for consumers, more efficient allocation of resources, rising living standards overall. The economists weren't wrong in the aggregate. But "aggregate" doesn't mean much if you're a manufacturing worker in Ohio watching your factory close and move to Mexico.
Brown was ahead of his time, or perhaps just paying closer attention to his constituents. A decade later, Donald Trump would win the presidency partly by promising to tear up trade deals and bring back manufacturing jobs. Brown had been saying the same things, just from the left instead of the right.
Early on Gay Rights
Brown's voting record reveals something interesting about political courage. In 1996, he was one of the few members of Congress to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act—the law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman for federal purposes. This was not a popular position. DOMA passed the House 342 to 67. President Clinton, a Democrat, signed it.
Brown also opposed an amendment to Ohio's constitution banning same-sex marriage. In deeply conservative Ohio, this was politically risky. But Brown kept winning elections anyway.
By 2010, he was voting for the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"—the military policy that allowed gay and lesbian service members to serve only if they kept their sexuality secret. The Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ advocacy group in the country, gave him a perfect score.
This trajectory—from unpopular early support to mainstream acceptance—is now common on LGBTQ issues. But Brown was there before it was safe.
The Senate Years
Brown won his Senate seat in 2006, defeating the incumbent Republican Mike DeWine by over twelve points. It was a wave election for Democrats, with anger over the Iraq War driving voters away from President Bush's party.
His 2012 reelection was harder. No candidate running for reelection that year—except Barack Obama himself—faced more opposition spending. By April, outside groups had spent over five million dollars on television ads attacking Brown. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce alone spent 2.7 million. Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS piled on. Conservative groups spent heavily.
Brown won anyway. He brought in Martin Sheen, the actor who played a Democratic president on "The West Wing," to campaign with him. He outperformed Obama in Ohio, winning with nearly 51 percent of the vote.
In 2018, he won a third term, defeating Republican Jim Renacci by almost seven points—a solid margin in an era of razor-thin elections.
Then came 2024.
The Fall
Ohio had been trending Republican for years. Trump won the state by eight points in 2016 and again in 2020. Brown had managed to swim against this tide, presenting himself as an independent-minded champion of workers regardless of party.
But 2024 was different. Brown faced Bernie Moreno, a businessman who tied himself closely to Trump. Despite Brown's name recognition and experience, he lost by over 200,000 votes—46.5 percent to Moreno's 50.1 percent.
For the first time since his 1990 loss in the Secretary of State race, Brown was out of office.
The Dignity of Work
What does Brown actually believe? His political philosophy centers on what he calls "the dignity of work"—the idea that all work, whether performed by a teacher, nurse, steelworker, or service employee, deserves respect and fair compensation.
This might sound like standard Democratic rhetoric, but Brown gives it a sharper edge. He's repeatedly called for his party to adopt a more "populist" approach—that's the political term for policies that claim to represent ordinary people against elites. Populism can come from the left or the right; Brown's version emphasizes economic fairness rather than cultural grievances.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he pushed for immediate paid sick leave, arguing that workers shouldn't have to choose between staying home when sick and paying their bills. The logic was both humanitarian and practical: sick workers spreading disease don't help anyone.
He's advocated for stricter regulation of chemicals called perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—you might have heard them called "forever chemicals" because they don't break down in the environment. These substances have been linked to various health problems, and they've contaminated water supplies across the country.
On pensions, Brown became co-chair of a committee focused on keeping multiemployer pension plans solvent. These are retirement plans shared by multiple companies, common in industries with unionized workers. When companies in these plans go bankrupt, the remaining companies and the workers themselves are left holding the bag. Brown's efforts helped shore up plans that had been teetering on the edge of collapse.
The Progressive-Populist Alliance
Here's the puzzle that makes Brown interesting to political observers: he's close allies with Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont, yet he endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary and was vetted as her potential running mate.
In the end, Clinton chose Tim Kaine of Virginia instead. The calculation was partly practical: if Clinton won and Brown became vice president, Ohio's Republican governor would have appointed his replacement in the Senate. Kaine's replacement would be chosen by Virginia's Democratic governor. One less Republican senator might matter more than any particular vice president.
But the fact that Brown was seriously considered reveals something about his political positioning. He managed to maintain credibility with both the progressive wing (the Sanders supporters) and the establishment wing (the Clinton supporters) of the Democratic Party. That's rare.
The Washington Monthly suggested in 2017 that Brown could unite these factions as a presidential candidate in 2020. He considered running, began exploring a campaign in early 2019, then decided against it. He stayed in the Senate instead—until the voters of Ohio decided otherwise.
The Second Act
After losing in 2024, Brown did what many defeated politicians do: he gave a farewell speech promising to stay active, then headed to Harvard as a visiting fellow. He started something called the "Dignity of Work Institute." He wrote opinion pieces for The New Republic and The New York Times.
But unlike most defeated politicians, he announced in August 2025 that he's running again—this time for the special election to fill the seat vacated by J.D. Vance, who became vice president. The Republican currently holding that seat, Jon Husted, was appointed to replace Vance. If Brown wins in 2026, he'll return to the Senate he left less than two years earlier.
It's a remarkable gamble for a seventy-three-year-old who just lost a statewide race. Ohio has continued its rightward drift. Trump remains popular there. The fundamentals that led to Brown's 2024 defeat haven't changed.
So why is he running? The optimistic interpretation is that Brown genuinely believes his message about the dignity of work can still resonate with Ohio voters—that if he can just make the case clearly enough, the workers who've been voting Republican will come back. The cynical interpretation is that he can't imagine life outside politics, that after fifty years in public office, he simply doesn't know how to stop.
The truth is probably somewhere in between. Brown has spent his entire adult life fighting for a particular vision of how the economy should work—one where workers have power, where trade deals don't sacrifice American jobs, where the government protects people from corporate excess. He's watched that vision lose ground, both in Ohio and nationally. Maybe he thinks one more race will vindicate it. Maybe he just can't accept defeat.
In his farewell speech, Brown promised that his departure was "not the last time you will hear from me." He wasn't kidding.
The Political Scoreboard
How liberal is Sherrod Brown? That depends on how you measure.
The National Journal, in its 2011 rankings, tied him with eight other members as the most liberal person in Congress. That's pretty far left. But he also voted with President Trump's positions about a quarter of the time—more than many Democrats. On the other hand, he voted with President Biden 98 percent of the time.
These numbers reveal the limits of simple liberal-conservative scales. Brown is economically progressive—favoring unions, opposing free trade, supporting strong regulation—while also being willing to work across the aisle on specific issues. He's an ideological purist on worker issues and a pragmatist on everything else.
His critics on the left have noted that he didn't co-sponsor Bernie Sanders's single-payer healthcare bill, despite claiming to support "Medicare for All" in principle. Brown said he preferred his own plan, which would let people fifty-five and older buy into Medicare. This is a classic Brown move: agreeing with the progressive goal while preferring an incremental approach.
The Voice
One thing you can't capture in a summary of votes and positions: Sherrod Brown has a distinctive voice. It's gravelly, rough, almost hoarse. He sounds like a man who's spent decades shouting over factory machinery or arguing in union halls—even though he actually spent most of his career in legislative chambers.
That voice has become part of his brand. It sounds authentic in a way that polished politicians often don't. When Brown talks about workers being treated unfairly, he sounds genuinely angry about it. Whether that's performance or personality is hard to say. It might be both.
In an era when politicians are increasingly packaged and focus-grouped, Brown's roughness stands out. He looks rumpled. He sounds tired. He comes across as someone who's been fighting for a long time and isn't sure he's winning.
Maybe that's why he keeps running. The fight itself has become the point.
What It Means for 2026
The 2026 Ohio Senate race will test several theories about American politics.
Can a Democrat still win statewide in Ohio? The state has been trending Republican for two decades. Brown was the last Democrat holding statewide office there. His defeat seemed to confirm that Ohio had completed its transformation from swing state to red state.
But special elections are different from regular elections. Turnout patterns change. The national environment matters more. And Brown has won statewide three times before—he knows something about appealing to Ohio voters.
Can economic populism overcome cultural conservatism? This is the fundamental question for Brown's brand of politics. He believes that if Democrats focus relentlessly on worker issues—wages, benefits, job security—they can win back voters who've drifted to Republicans over cultural issues like abortion, guns, and immigration.
Trump's success suggests the opposite: that cultural identity, not economic interests, drives working-class voting. But Brown has outperformed Democrats in Ohio before. Maybe he can do it again.
Finally, the race will test whether a politician can successfully come back after defeat. The graveyard of American politics is full of candidates who lost, ran again, and lost worse. Richard Nixon's 1968 comeback remains the exception, not the rule.
Brown is betting his legacy on one more try. Win or lose, it will be a fitting end to a fifty-year political career—going down swinging, fighting for the workers he's always claimed to represent.