U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown won 106,000 more votes in Ohio this month than his Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. 

That shouldn’t be a surprise. In 2018, Brown significantly outran Rich Cordray, the Democrat at the top of that ballot that year, although he did so by a margin that was twice as large. 

The three-term Brown’s popularity with voters has long been tied to his reputation for looking out for working-class people. Perhaps no Democrat from Ohio has been more successful than Brown with blue collar voters across the state. 

So, how did Brown lose to Republican Bernie Moreno, a wealthy first-time candidate who once owned a chain of luxury car dealerships? Several people inside and outside the race for the U.S. Senate and Ohio politics shared their views on why Brown’s record with workers wasn’t enough. 

Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee in the 2022 U.S. Senate race, said the national Democratic Party has lost credibility with working-class voters.

“I think he got swallowed up in the national brand,” Ryan said.

Ryan said Brown ran on a strong independent resumé that included sponsoring legislation that reversed cuts to more than 2 million union worker pensions and backing legislation that subsidized and attracted a planned Intel plant to the Columbus area.

That helped Brown distinguish himself as an “Ohio Democrat” distinct from the national party, Ryan said. 

But it wasn’t enough to resist Republican efforts to tie Brown to President Joe Biden’s unpopular administration.

“People wanted a change,” Ryan said. “The only indicator was Moreno is going to be up Trump’s rear end and Sherrod Brown is going to be more independent. And evidently that was enough.”

The Donald Trump effect 

Republicans also rode a wave of support for former President Donald Trump, who won Ohio by 11 percentage points, which helped give Moreno a 4 percentage point victory over Brown. 

That sounds like a relatively strong performance by Brown. And it is. But he got just 46% of the vote — a dispiriting sign for future state Democrats – and just two percentage points more than Harris. The relative difference likely is due to Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate Don Kissick, who got 3% of the vote, far more than any third-party presidential candidate.

Bob Paduchik, a former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, has said for years that Democrats have moved too far to the left to resonate in places like Ohio. But he said in a post-election appearance at an event organized by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce that Trump’s margin of victory was simply too large for Brown to overcome.

“I really believe Sherrod Brown ran the best race he could. … I don’t know he could have won that race in the time that Donald Trump was on the ballot,” said Paduchik, who advised the Trump campaign this year and oversaw the Republican campaign to defeat Issue 1, the redistricting reform amendment.

Immigration played a key role in shaping the race

The center of Brown’s strategy was to retain Democratic votes – which today is a mix of liberal voters near core urban centers and swing voters in the suburbs – while also winning over enough ex-Democratic voters who supported Trump in legacy union areas like the Mahoning Valley. 

Moreno’s simply was to prevent that from happening. 

Ahead of the election, Moreno’s campaign identified 580,000 “Trump but not Moreno” voters, a mix of people who actively favored Brown and those who didn’t know much about Moreno, according to a key Moreno campaign adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

The most important issue to that group was immigration – Trump’s signature issue – which explains how the issue came to dominate the race. 

Brown tried to play defense by emphasizing a law he helped pass that toughened enforcement of anti-fentanyl laws and by talking up a bipartisan immigration bill he supported. 

Ads aired by a Democratic Super PAC, meanwhile, appealed to anti-immigrant sentiment by referencing Moreno’s status as a Colombian immigrant and his family’s political connections in his country of birth. 

It wasn’t enough.

“We ran a guerrilla campaign,” said the Moreno campaign official. “And if there were two things you knew about Bernie Moreno, you knew he was endorsed by Trump and he was going to fight like hell against illegal immigration.”

Ryan, the Democratic 2022 Senate candidate, said national Democrats, by defending the Biden Administration’s record, have lost credibility with voters who view border security and inflation as major problems.

“When you’re seen as that far out of touch with people, they tend not to trust you. And I think that’s part of the problem that Democrats have,” he said.

Abortion issue didn’t rally voters as Democrats had hoped

Brown and his allies tried to limit their weakness on immigration while benefitting from another issue: abortion rights. Democrats had hoped to build on their ballot-issue victories of 2023, when voters in separate special elections added abortion rights to the state constitution and defeated a Republican measure meant to block it. 

In September, Brown’s allies sensed the race was shifting in Moreno’s favor, after tens of millions of ads attacking Brown began airing, financed by national Republican groups and the cryptocurrency industry. 

But they saw a glimmer of hope when, in late September, Moreno made a glib comment about women and abortion at a campaign event in Warren County.

In a video captured by a Democratic ally who filmed the rally, Moreno described some women voters as “unfortunately” only concerned about abortion rights.

“It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you,’” Moreno said at the event.

The Brown campaign quickly used the comment in ads and Brown worked it into his stump speech. Recognizing the potential political damage, Moreno in subsequent media appearances described it as a joke that didn’t land. 

But the Moreno campaign source said Brown and other Democrats overestimated the role abortion would play in the election. 

The source also said the campaign was puzzled by Brown’s cautious media strategy.  Unlike Ryan in 2022, who courted media attention from all corners, including on the conservative Fox News cable network, Brown limited his news media appearances largely to MSNBC and events promoted to local news reporters. 

The candidates also broke tradition by failing to schedule a debate, which was effectively a mutual decision despite Moreno’s public comments blaming Brown.

The Brown campaign’s focus on abortion “didn’t move jack on anybody that Sherrod didn’t already have,” said the Moreno campaign source. “So he spent a lot of time and money talking to people he already had and didn’t spend any time trying to win over Trump voters.”

Democrats nitpick Brown’s strategy as too cautious

A couple Democratic sources thought that Brown and his allies waited too long to respond to endless Republican ads that, starting in September, attacked Brown’s record for supporting transgender rights. In late October, Brown’s campaign cut an ad pointing to media fact checks that called the attacks false, disappointing LGBTQ advocates while also not fully explaining Brown’s stance on the issue. Senate Democrats broadly feel they didn’t do enough to respond to the attacks, Axios reported. 

And Chris Redfern, a former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, via his podcast, publicly criticized Brown after the election for not using his hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign money to support Democratic state legislative candidates, which he said could have helped boost voter turnout in Democratic areas of the state.

In an interview with Signal Statewide, Redfern expanded on his thoughts, saying Brown also hurt himself by campaigning too cautiously. He cited as examples Brown being among the last Democrats to push Biden to drop out of the presidential race, and then failing to fully embrace Harris.

In addition, Redfern said Brown’s efforts to distance himself from local Democrats also caused him to lose opportunities to campaign more effectively with party candidates who overperformed in places where Democrats otherwise lost. 

“I think there were some stumbles along the way,” Redfern said.

A source close to Brown’s campaign said Brown did support down-ballot Democrats, including via Brown affiliated political action committees that campaign-finance records show gave nearly $100,000 to Democrats running for county-level and state offices and $70,000 to state congressional candidates.

Brown also helped raise $6 million into the Ohio Democratic Party, the source said, while attracting additional investment from national Democrats that all helped pay for door-to-door canvassers and other tactics meant to mobilize voters.

“These efforts helped pay for crucial turnout efforts that lifted up Democrats down the ballot,” the source said.

Black turnout continues to sink

Brown ultimately failed to reverse a 2022 trend that’s perhaps most concerning to Ohio Democrats — continued lower turnout among Black voters in and near the state’s largest cities.

Morgan Harper, a Columbus lawyer who lost to Ryan in the 2022 Democratic U.S. Senate primary, said the lower turnout reflects disillusionment among poorer voters with the Biden administration and with government more generally.

“They’re not getting a lot for their vote,” Harper said. “There aren’t a lot of tangible outcomes.”

But she said Democrats also haven’t been aggressive enough at tapping into voter anger or campaigning on policies that might help working-class voters.

“We have to be more focused on economic issues to turn out our base in larger numbers,” Harper said.

The Brown campaign apparently recognized the potential turnout issue in the days leading up to the election. They dispatched former President Bill Clinton to Cleveland on Monday, Nov. 4, booking the Wolstein Center on Cleveland State University’s campus.

A couple hundred die-hard Democrats attended the event in a venue with a 15,000-person capacity.

Brown keeps door open to returning to campaign trail

Although he’s leaving office in January, it’s not clear Brown’s time in politics is over. Brown, who hasn’t yet responded to an interview request, told Politico after the election that he plans to remain active in the party. He also would not rule out running for office in 2026, when Ohio will hold a special election to fill U.S. Senator JD Vance’s seat; Vance will become vice president in January.

Brown also told Politico the national political climate worked against him and that the Democratic Party has lost support of some working-class voters since former President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994.

“That’s my future in this party, is to focus on helping the Democratic Party and my colleagues understand how important it is that we talk to workers and we make decisions with workers at the table,” Brown said.

This story was updated after publication with additional information