Sherrod Brown’s Phony Populism

Polling shows that former Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown is in a dead heat with incumbent Republican Jon Husted in Ohio’s marquee Senate race. Like his previous campaigns, Brown is betting the house on a message of economic populism while avoiding the radical positions on social issues that have made the Democrat brand toxic in the state.

But Ohio voters should understand that Brown is hardly the pragmatic moderate he presents himself as – and he is responsible for the very economic anxieties that he is now looking to capitalize on.

Brown’s campaign website calls him a “champion for workers and the middle class” who “has advocated for Ohio and for ordinary people.” During rallies throughout the state, he has bragged about his work with President Trump on trade policy and a 2018 bill, the Interdict Act, to crack down on fentanyl trafficking. He has claimed that he supports “closing the border” and tapped into simmering voter anger over the rapid growth of the data center industry.

To hear Brown tell it, he’s working day and night to deliver for the same working-class constituency that turned Ohio from a perennial swing state into safe Trump territory.

If this strategy sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a rinse-and-repeat of the same playbook he rolled out in 2024. Two years ago, Brown blanketed the Buckeye State with ads boasting that he “worked with Trump on trade” overlaid with footage of him in a hard hat and blue jeans.

It worked to some extent – Brown ran about eight points ahead of Kamala Harris. But he ultimately lost to Republican Bernie Moreno 50.1 percent to 46.5 percent. Now, he’s hoping that a more favorable national environment for Democrats will send him back to the Senate.

Republicans’ playbook for beating Brown a second time is straightforward: use the record from his three decades in Congress to expose him as a hypocrite and a fraud.

For instance, Brown wants working-class Ohioans to believe that he will be a better defender of their interests in the Senate than Jon Husted. But in 2017, Brown voted against President Trump’s signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a landmark bill which primarily benefitted lower- and middle-income earners.

If Brown were in the Senate last year, it’s a safe bet that he also would have voted against the follow-up to that bill, the Working Families Tax Cuts, which locked in and expanded the 2017 tax cuts. Husted voted in favor of that bill, helping deliver the biggest tax refund season in American history and overwhelmingly popular policies like “No Tax on Tips,” “No Tax on Overtime,” and a new senior deduction that effectively eliminates taxes on Social Security income for about 90 percent of beneficiaries.

Brown also cosplays as a moderate on securing the border, claiming that he supports “closing the border to people so they just can’t cross the border at will, but I also say we, of course, should be deporting people that have committed a crime.”

As Fox News reports, however, Brown “voted at least 10 times to protect federal funding for sanctuary cities”; “co-sponsored the 2019 End Mass Deportation Act, which sought to rescind Trump's executive order to prioritize deporting criminal illegals”; called Trump’s border wall “stupid” and voted against funding for it; and voted “against $300 million for U.S. Customs and Border Protection for opioid and narcotic detection at the southern border.”

On trade, Brown’s record is even more damning. Yes, it’s true that he was a leading voice against the North American Free Trade Agreement and helped replace it with Trump’s U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. But that doesn’t erase the fact that the bulk of Brown’s career in Congress overlapped with the most severe period of offshoring that decimated Ohio’s manufacturing sector.

When Brown first won election to the U.S. House in 1993, Ohio had about 984,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. By the time he won election to the U.S. Senate in 2007, that number had dropped to 765,000. By the time he left office in January 2025, it stood at 673,000, a decrease of nearly 32 percent.

True, plenty of other leaders – including establishment Republicans – deserve blame for the collapse in Ohio’s manufacturing sector. But the reality is that despite talking about it for more than 30 years, Brown was unable to stop the exodus of good-paying manufacturing jobs from his home state.

Trump’s success in Ohio in 2016, 2020, and 2024 was a reaction to the failure of career politicians like Sherrod Brown to deliver anything more than empty words and rhetoric for Ohio workers. Brown was able to survive re-election in 2012 and 2018 thanks to national headwinds working against Republicans, but 2024 showed that working-class voters simply aren’t buying the false bill of goods that Democrats have been selling for decades.

Ohio voters saw through Sherrod Brown’s dishonest pro-worker charade in 2024. They shouldn’t fall for the same act again just two years later.