Sherrod Brown starts the race of his life

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, has always had the luxury of running for election for his party in remarkably good years. He won his seat in 2006, amid opposition to the Iraq War, won reelection in 2012, the last time a Democrat took over the state, and did so again in 2018, amid a national reckoning over Donald’s presidency J Trump.

His 2024 campaign will be different, and most 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 signature rumpled suits. In an election year when control of the Senate hinges on the Democratic Party’s ability to win every competitive race, there is an enormous weight on the slumped shoulders of the famously confused 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 gravelly voice have appealed to working-class voters since he was elected Ohio secretary of state in 1982. His arms may be clutched tightly around his chest, but he exudes a casual confidence that he can win again in a tough fight. red Ohio, where he is the last Democrat to hold statewide office.

But beneath that image there are problems. On Monday, he had just received a message of support from the 100,000-strong Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council when a retired mason, Jeff King, pulled him aside in a weathered union hall in Dayton.

Mr. Brown has had numerous successes, Mr. King, who made the trip from his hometown of Cincinnati, told the senator. But, he wondered, would workers in a blue-collar state that twice delivered Trump victories of eight percentage points understand who should get the credit?

“That’s the mission,” Mr. Brown said, leaning forward. “They don’t know enough.”

The party and its union allies have made the re-election of Ohio’s senior senator their top priority — “the absolute top,” said Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the chairman of the AFL. The CIO Political Committee.

The election could get in Mr. Brown’s way. With Trump’s support — and a push from a Democratic super PAC — Democrats’ Republican opponent Bernie Moreno easily prevailed in the Republican Senate primaries on Tuesday, handing the incumbent president a setback with dizzying wealth, little political experience and the imprimatur. from a former president who could prompt some voters to split their tickets.

The next day, the Biden administration announced an $8.5 billion deal to finance Intel Corporation’s semiconductor production, much of it destined for Ohio, thanks to legislation that Mr. Brown helped secure. Thanks to Mr. Brown, that law, the Chips and Science Act, requires so-called project labor agreements to be entered into between management and union workers before construction of the plants can begin. So 7,000 union workers will be employed in the huge Intel complex outside Columbus.

On Wednesday, the government finalized stringent new emissions standards for cars and trucks that would increase electric vehicle production at the Stellantis Jeep complex in Toledo and car battery factories around Youngstown.

Finally, construction should begin around election time on a long-sought replacement for the Brent Spence Bridge, connecting Cincinnati to the Kentucky suburbs. That too was partly supplied by Mr Brown.

Yet Republicans are most confident for a much simpler reason: political seriousness. In March polls, Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden in Ohio by as few as nine percentage points and as many as 18 percentage points. Mr. Brown will most likely lead Mr. Biden in the state, Republicans say, but not by enough to win.

“We now have the opportunity to retire the old commission,” Mr. Moreno proclaimed at his victory party on Tuesday, referring to Mr. Brown.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Brown emphasized that his toughest Senate race was his first, when he unseated Mike DeWine, who went on to win two terms as Ohio’s governor.

And Mr. DeWine reaffirmed that confidence Monday night, imploring Columbus voters to cast their votes for the candidate he thought could defeat Mr. Brown, State Senator Matt Dolan.

“This isn’t going to be an easy race, folks,” Mr. DeWine advised at the Hey Hey Bar & Grill in Columbus’s German Village. “I bumped into this guy.”

This year it could be different.

“Nothing can save Sherrod Brown from voting with Joe Biden 99 percent of the time,” Moreno said.

Compared to Mr. Moreno, a political newcomer, Mr. Brown is a fixture in Ohio. “People just know I’m standing up for them,” he said.

Two years ago, Tim Ryan, then a U.S. representative, ran for Senate as a Mahoning Valley Democrat cut from Mr. Brown’s mold. Although he ran a campaign that is almost universally praised as a textbook one, he lost to J.D. Vance by six percentage points.

But Mr. Ryan said he lacked something Mr. Brown has: a steady identity across the state. To win as a Democrat in Ohio, he said, “all you have to do is have the name Sherrod Brown.”

This fight will be about Mr. Moreno’s attempt to define Mr. Brown’s policy agenda — and the Democrat removing Mr. Biden’s name from it. Mr. Brown talks about his action to save more than 1,460 union officials’ pensions in Ohio through the Butch Lewis Act, a retirement provision named in memory of an Ohio teamster and included in the massive Covid relief bill, the American Rescue Plan.

He tells the audience about his role in the massive bill signed by Mr. Biden that expanded veterans health care to former service members exposed to toxic “burn pits” in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also named after an Ohioan, Sgt. First Class Heath Robinson, who died of lung cancer at age 39.

He speaks glowingly about the CHIPS Act, which would ensure that the two new semiconductor factories 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, Green New Deal radicalism.”

“They know the performance,” Mr Brown said. “They just don’t really know who did it.”

The sitting president will almost certainly be able to match the Republicans dollar for dollar and then some. Between the loyalty he built in the labor movement and corporate interests with cases 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 dollar cash on hand at the end of last month.

Mr. Moreno emerged from a brutal three-way primary with $2.4 million in cash, according to federal campaign finance records from late February.

And Mr. Brown said that beneath Ohio’s pro-Trump tilt was a state that was less conservative than Republicans believe. Last August, Ohioans crushed a ballot measure designed by Republicans to make it more difficult for future ballot measures, a transparent attempt to defeat an upcoming vote on abortion rights. 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.”

Exactly how much Mr. Brown can continue to perform against national Democrats is a subject of debate in Ohio. David Pepper, a former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, said the senator outperformed the rest of the Democratic ticket by more than 10 percentage points in 2018, beating Republican James B. Renacci by 7 percentage points when Mr. DeWine defeated his Democratic opponent defeated. ahead of Governor Richard Cordray by 3.7 points.

“The question is: To what extent is Biden competing here?” said David Pepper, a former chairman of the Democratic Party of Ohio. “If he competes hard, he keeps it within reach of Brown.”

In the union hall of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 82 in Dayton, it was impossible to find anyone who was not firmly in Mr. Brown’s camp.

“As many pensions as he has saved, absolutely” he will win, said David Bruce, the chairman of the Dayton Building Trades Council.

But beneath the bravado was a recognition of the work ahead.

“That’s our fight,” said retired bricklayer Mr. King, citing the flood of right-wing information consumed by many of his union brethren. “As union leaders, we are called to better communicate our message. The problem is that we are masons. We do not understand the messages.”