Sen. Sherrod Brown’s remarkable run as the most successful Democratic candidate in Ohio over the past 50 years hit the wall Tuesday, ended by a red wave of MAGA politics.
For those of us who have known him since he was first elected to the Ohio House, it is somewhat hard to imagine Ohio politics without him.
The rumpled suits that look like he wore them to bed the night before, the disheveled hair that defied the common comb, the gravelly voice which was the way he spoke in his 20s and in his 70s.
All were trademarks of the most successful Ohio Democrat in our lifetimes.
Brown, whose 72nd birthday is Friday, will continue to be a voice for working people, with an unshakable belief in “the dignity of work.” And he has clearly been the best friend organized labor in Ohio has ever had.
Before Tuesday’s election, Brown was the only Democrat to have won a statewide race since Ted Strickland was elected governor in 2006 — the same year Brown was elected to the Senate.
That streak ended Tuesday, when Brown got swept up in a red wave and lost to a Republican who has never served a day in elected office — luxury car dealer and crypto-currency investor Bernie Moreno.
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Brown’s defeat in the most expensive Senate race in the nation — at least $400 million was spent — was the key to unraveling the Democrats’ tenuous control of the Senate and helped hand it to Republicans.
The Cleveland Democrat, born and raised in Mansfield, has been running for and almost always winning Ohio elections since the 1970s — state representative, Ohio secretary of state, U.S. House, and three terms in the U.S. Senate.
Until Tuesday, the one and only election Brown had lost was a 1990 re-election bid for secretary of state — ironically to then-Hamilton County commissioner Bob Taft. Taft, the fifth generation of Ohio’s most famous Republican family, went on to become Ohio’s governor.
This year, in the waning days of Brown’s re-election campaign, the former Republican governor endorsed his former rival for re-election to the Senate.
Moreno is a candidate with more than his share of baggage to carry around.
Moreno was sued for allegedly stiffing employees out of overtime pay at his car dealerships, of painting a false portrait of his family as immigrants from Colombia, coming to Ft. Lauderdale when he was five, with little more than the clothes on their back (they were a wealthy family in Colombia); of exaggerating his resume, and much more.
In the end, none of it mattered.
What mattered was that in Tuesday night’s unofficial vote count, Moreno ended up with 50% to 46% for Brown.
Brown, of course, was disappointed, but not downtrodden on election night.
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“We may be tempted to say hope was not enough,” Brown told a crowd of supporters in Columbus Tuesday. “We might be tempted to second-guess ourselves and question whether we worked hard enough or long enough.
“That is not our story,” Brown told his supporters. “We believe all work has dignity and we always will.”
Moreno stuck to the Trump script throughout the campaign, including his victory speech in Cleveland on election night.
“We talked about wanting a red wave,” Moreno said. “I think what we have tonight is a red, white and blue wave. Because what we need in the United States of America is leaders in Washington, D.C., that actually put the interests of American citizens above all else.
“We’re tired of being treated like second-class citizens in our own country. We’re tired of leaders that think we’re garbage and we’re tired of being treated like garbage.”
There were at least two factors which made Moreno a winner on election night.
First, turnout of Democratic voters in Ohio’s largest urban areas lagged behind the large swaths of farmland and suburbs that make up the GOP base in Ohio.
Secondly, the ticket-splitting that helped Brown win in the past didn’t materialize to the extent that he needed it to. Not enough Trump voters went along with the Democrat for old-times sake.
If Trump had won Ohio by six percentage points, it’s reasonable to think that Brown would have been re-elected by a slim margin.
But Trump, in winning Ohio for the third time in a row, increased his lead this time around to 11%. That was far too much for the Democratic incumbent to overcome.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by the cryptocurrency industry and other business interests on attack ads accusing Brown, a supporter of LGBTQ rights, of being in favor of transgender surgery for minors and for being responsible for allowing illegal immigrants to roam free murdering citizens.
It was all nonsense.
But, for the cryptocurrency industry in particular, the expense was worth it because Brown is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and has always cast a wary eye toward the blockchain business — which is where Moreno makes his money these days.
ANALYSIS: Why do so many campaign ads state outright lies?
But if there is any bitterness, it didn’t show in what the senator had to say to supporters Tuesday night, with his wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz by his side.
“This is a disappointment, but it is not a failure,” Brown said. “It will never be wrong to fight for organized labor, it will never be wrong to fight for the freedom of women to make their health care decisions, it surely will never be wrong to fight for civil rights and human rights.
“Tonight I am sad, but I am never giving up and neither is Connie.”
