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CLEVELAND — Fresh off a comfortable re-election victory in 2018, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, considered running for president on a populist message aimed at the many working-class Midwest voters who had fled the Democratic Party in favor of Donald Trump.
Brown passed on the White House campaign. Now, six years later, he is soon to be unemployed, having recently lost his bid for a fourth Senate term. It will be the first time since 1992 — and only the second time since 1974 — that he will not hold an elected office.
Trump, meanwhile, will return to the presidency next month, and the existential challenges are already roaring back for Brown and the Democrats. The party also lost a Senate seat in Pennsylvania while barely holding onto two others, in Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump flipped all three of those “blue wall” states in November and won Ohio by a commanding margin.
The challenges ring true to Brown, 72, who has been warning about them for years, dating to his staunch opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, as a House member. And, despite his defeat, Brown’s perch in a part of the country where Democrats are a tarnished brand presents him with the opportunity to have a vocal role in the party if he wants one.
In a recent interview with NBC News, Brown talked like someone who does. He spoke of a “post-Senate mission” to reorient Democrats as the “party of workers” in Middle America. He also revealed that he has received calls from people encouraging him to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee, though he added that the position does not interest him.
“Being the national chair, you have a platform,” Brown said. “You also have to run an organization with 50 state chairs. … I don’t want to spend my time on an airplane raising money.”
But Brown’s post-Senate mission could lead him back to the Senate. He left the door open to running for office again in 2026, when Ohio will hold a special election to fill the remainder of Vice President-elect JD Vance’s term. Brown also is noticeably describing the final remarks he plans to deliver in the Senate Tuesday afternoon as his “last” speech — not as a “farewell,” as such speeches from outgoing senators are commonly known.
“I’m not making decisions yet on that,” Brown replied when asked if he was already considering a comeback in 2026, when Ohio also will elect a new governor. “I’ve got time.”
For now, Brown is unleashing stinging critiques about his party.
“I’m not going to whine about my loss,” he said. “But I lost in large part because the national reputation of the Democratic Party is that we are sort of a lighter version of a corporation — a corporate party. We’re seen as a bicoastal, elite party. And it’s hard to argue that.”
Brown then added: “We couldn’t pass the minimum wage because Republicans almost uniformly were against it. It’s always Republicans who are on the wrong side, and there aren’t enough Democrats on the right side to win. … It’s a good example of how workers get screwed.”
Even after his loss to Republican Bernie Moreno this fall, no Democrat in the state has anywhere close to Brown’s track record of name-recognition or electoral success. He outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, by 7.5 percentage points in Ohio. Brown’s allies believe that he had coattails that helped endangered Democratic Reps. Marcy Kaptur and Emilia Sykes hold onto their congressional seats in tough districts.
Brown, for his part, has been reciting the 7.5-point figure with an almost cosmic reverence. While dissecting trade policy, for example, he argued that both parties had “ganged up on workers” while asserting that Ohio voters trust him more than other Democrats on those issues.
“That’s why I’ve won elections in the state,” he said. “It’s why I finished 7-and-a-half points ahead of Harris. Harris won the union vote [in Ohio] by like 1 point. I won it by like 20.”
Moreno and his allies emphasized other issues in the Senate race, including immigration and border security, as well as the debate over transgender rights and transition-related medical care. One ad mocked Brown for supporting the use of pronouns like they and them.
“He’s not wrong that Democrats have forgotten how to talk about workers,” Jai Chabria, a Vance adviser and veteran Republican strategist in Ohio, said of Brown. “But he also doesn’t accept blame for their cultural war failings, because he’s part of that. And that’s one of the reasons that working-class voters have been willing to look away from the Democratic Party. It’s not just union issues, and it’s not just NAFTA. It’s a lot of things that regular people care about.”
Few votes factor more into Brown’s political legacy than his 1993 vote against NAFTA, a trade pact involving Canada and Mexico that accelerated the outsourcing of jobs and the decline of U.S. manufacturing towns. Brown talks of NAFTA like it’s an original sin for his party — the moment Democrats began losing the working class.
He recalled how, as lobbying for the bill intensified, an employee at a Washington-area airport marveled to him how they had never seen so many corporate jets parked there. He also remembered how then-Rep. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., who at the time was whipping support for NAFTA, had grumbled to him about losing votes after members returned home to their districts for recess and heard negative feedback from their constituents.
“I said, ‘Bill, well, maybe we ought to listen to what the voters want on this,’” Brown recalled.
Even though more Democrats voted against it than for it, their help in ratifying the deal has not been forgotten in working-class parts of Ohio like Dayton and the Mahoning Valley, which includes Youngstown and since 2016 has swung from Democratic stronghold to Trump stomping ground.
“It’s more acute in the Mahoning Valley,” said Brown, who lost the region’s anchoring counties, Mahoning and Trumbull — but by much smaller margins than Harris did.
Regarded as an unflappable liberal earlier in his Senate career, Brown’s flirtations with a 2020 presidential campaign came with a more nuanced tone. He preached pragmatism and incrementalism at a time other would-be nominees were demanding Medicare for All. His core message as he toured early voting states like Iowa centered on “the dignity of work.”
During his recent re-election race, Brown played up his relationships with Republicans and his populist stance on trade. His super PAC allies emphasized his agreement with Trump on anti-opioid legislation and other policy issues. In the final hours of the campaign, Brown campaigned with former President Bill Clinton, the Democrat who signed NAFTA into law.
Brown said he had no advice for Democrats trying to gauge when to push back on Trump and when to work with him, reaching instead for a campaign soundbite — that politics should not be about the left or the right: “It’s really whose side are you on?”
He added that he hoped senators would cast a more skeptical look at Trump’s choice for labor secretary, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The Oregon Republican is known for her labor-friendly views, including co-sponsorship of a bill that would protect union organizing rights. But Brown stressed that expanded overtime pay — a Biden administration initiative recently thwarted by a Trump-nominated judge in Texas — might be a better barometer on where she stands on key workers issues.
“They say she’s better than others, or other Republicans, on labor,” Brown said. “She’s had a couple of good votes, I guess. But they’ve got to pin her down: Are you going to fix the overtime?”
Brown was reflective at other points during the interview, calling March 6, 2021 — the day the Senate passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan — as his most meaningful moment in Congress. The far-reaching legislation included the Brown-championed Butch Lewis Act, which was named for an Ohio Teamster and protected pension benefits for workers and retirees.
“Democrats need to celebrate those victories and celebrate work that way,” Brown said. “And if you do that — it’s what we should do — it’s how we win elections.”
Henry J. Gomez is a senior national political reporter for NBC News
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