Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, has always had the luxury of running for office in exceptionally good years for his party. He won the seat in 2006 during the backlash to the Iraq war, won re-election in 2012, the last time a Democrat carried the state, and did so again in 2018 amid a national reckoning with the presidency of Donald J. Trump.
His 2024 campaign will be different and likely the toughest of his career, with a Republican Party determined to win his seat and a Democratic president hanging on him like one of his rumpled suits. In an election year where control of the Senate rests on the Democratic Party’s ability to win every competitive race, a huge weight rests on the slumped shoulders of the famously disheveled 71-year-old.
“I’m fighting for the people of Ohio,” Mr. Brown said in an interview Wednesday. “There’s a reason I’m winning in a state that’s a little more Republican.”
Mr. Brown’s tousled hair and thin voice have spoken to working-class voters since he was elected Ohio secretary of state in 1982. His arms may be clasped tightly around his chest, but he projects a casual confidence that he can to win back solidly red Ohio, where he is the last Democrat to hold statewide office.
But beneath this image lies a problem. On Monday, he had just received approval from the 100,000-strong Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council when a retired mason, Jeff King, pulled him aside at a run-down union hall in Dayton.
Mr. Brown had a lot of accomplishments to go on, Mr. King, who made the trip from his hometown of Cincinnati, told the senator. But, he asked, would workers in a blue-collar state that has twice given Mr. Trump eight-percentage-point victories understand?
“That’s the mission,” said Mr. Brown, leaning in. “They don’t know enough.”
The party and its union allies have made re-electing Ohio’s senior senator their top priority — “the top,” said Lee Sanders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and chairman of the AFL-CIO’s policy committee. .
The election could break Mr Brown’s path. With Mr. Trump’s support — and a boost from a Democratic super PAC — the Democrats’ preferred Republican challenger, Bernie Moreno, easily won the Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, giving the incumbent a foil of astonishing wealth, little politics experience and spontaneity of a former president that could prompt some voters to split their tickets.
The next day, the Biden administration announced an $8.5 billion deal to fund Intel Corporation’s semiconductor manufacturing, much of it earmarked for Ohio, thanks to legislation Mr. Brown helped secure. Because of Mr. Brown, that law, the Chip and Science Act, requires so-called labor agreements between management and unionized workers before construction on the plant begins. So 7,000 union workers will be employed at the massive Intel complex outside Columbus.
That same Wednesday, the administration finalized tough new car and truck emissions standards that are expected to increase production of electric vehicles at the Stellantis Jeep complex in Toledo and auto battery plants around Youngstown.
Finally, construction should begin around election time on a long-awaited replacement for the Brent Spence Bridge, which connects Cincinnati to its Kentucky suburbs. This, too, was partly delivered by Mr. Brown.
But Republicans are confident for a much simpler reason: political clout. In the March poll, Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden in Ohio by just nine percentage points and as many as 18. Mr. Brown will likely be ahead of Mr. Biden in the state, Republicans say, but not by enough to win.
“We now have an opportunity to retire the old committee,” Mr. Moreno said at his victory party on Tuesday, referring to Mr. Brown.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Brown insisted that his toughest Senate race was his first, when he unseated Mike DeWine, who won two terms as governor of Ohio.
And Mr. DeWine gave credence to that confidence Monday night, imploring voters in Columbus to vote for the candidate he believed could beat Mr. Brown, State Sen. Matt Dolan.
“This is not going to be an easy race, guys,” Mr. DeWine advised at Hey Hey Bar & Grill in Columbus’ German Village. “I have run against this man.”
This year may be different.
“Nothing can save Sherrod Brown from the fact that he votes with Joe Biden 99 percent of the time,” Mr. Moreno said.
Compared to Mr. Moreno, a political newcomer, Mr. Brown is in Ohio. “People just know I’m standing up for them,” he said.
Two years ago, Tim Ryan, then a US representative, ran for the Senate as a blue-collar Democrat from the Mahoning Valley, cut from Mr. Brown’s mold. Although he ran a campaign that has been almost universally hailed as a campaign for the books, he lost to JD Vance by six percentage points.
But Mr. Ryan said he lacked something that Mr. Brown has: a consistent statewide identity. To win in Ohio as a Democrat, he said, “the only thing you have to do is have the name Sherrod Brown.”
That fight will be about Mr. Moreno trying to define Mr. Brown’s policy agenda — and the Democrat trying to remove Mr. Biden’s name from it. Mr. Brown talks about his action to save the pensions of more than 1,460 union drivers in Ohio through the Butch Lewis Act, a pension provision named in memory of an Ohio Teamster and incorporated into the massive Covid relief law, the American Rescue Plan.
He tells the public about his role in the massive law signed by Mr. Biden that extended veterans’ health care to ex-servicemen exposed to toxic “burn pits” in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was also named after an Ohioan, Sgt. 1st Class Heath Robinson, who died of lung cancer at age 39.
He speaks passionately about the CHIPS Act, which ensures that the two new semiconductor plants being built in Ohio with federal money will employ union-trained workers.
But even he said he understood the road ahead, especially when Mr. Moreno called his record “job-killing radicalism, the Green New Deal.”
“They know the accomplishments,” Mr. Brown said. “They just don’t know who did it.”
The incumbent will almost certainly be able to match Republicans dollar for dollar and then some. Between the ties he has built in the labor movement and corporate interests with businesses before the Senate Banking Committee, which he chairs, Mr. Brown has built a formidable war chest: $33.5 million raised since 2019 and 13; $5 million cash on hand. end of last month.
Mr. Moreno, after a brutal three-way primary, emerged with $2.4 million in cash, according to late February federal campaign finance records.
And Mr. Brown said that beneath Ohio’s pro-Trump tilt was a state less conservative than Republicans believe. Last August, Ohioans defeated a ballot measure designed by Republicans to make it harder to pass future ballot measures, an apparent attempt to defeat a pending abortion rights vote. Three months later, they enshrined the right to abortion in the state Constitution, by 13 percentage points. On the same day, they voted to legalize marijuana – by 14 points.
“That should scare them,” Mr. Brown said of his Republican opponents. “They have to figure out how to win over those voters.”
How far Mr. Brown can continue to outperform national Democrats is a matter of debate in Ohio. David Pepper, a former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, said the senator outperformed the rest of the Democratic ticket in 2018 by more than 10 percentage points, beating Republican James B. Renacci by 7 percentage points when Mr. DeWine was winning the Democratic his rival for governor, Richard Cordray, by 3.7 points.
“The question is, how competitive is Biden here?” said David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. “If he plays hard, it will keep him close to Brown.”
In the Dayton union hall of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 82, it was impossible to find anyone who was not firmly in Mr. Brown’s camp.
“Whatever pensions he’s saved, absolutely” he will win, said David Bruce, president of the Dayton Commercial Construction Council.
But beneath the thumbs up was an acknowledgment of the work to come.
“This is our battle,” said retired bricklayer Mr. King, citing the stream of right-wing information consumed by many of his union members. “We are called upon as union leaders to do a better job with our message. The problem is that we are builders. We don’t understand the messages.”
