Sherrod Brown Hasn’t Modified – The Atlantic

Sherrod Brown will be exhausting to comply with at instances. He apologizes for his frequent rambles, parentheticals, and asides.

“I don’t think that’s what you came to talk about,” the previous and possibly future senator from Ohio instructed me after a short soliloquy about how a lot he enjoys Diet Coke. And additionally about his efforts to chop again on his consumption of Diet Coke.

“It’s just, you know,” he puzzled, “what’s in it, man?”

“I’m trying not to drink that shit,” he affirmed.

Brown was sitting in a Toledo espresso store, having simply completed a roundtable dialogue about rising health-care prices. A small group of Ohioans had expressed all method of issues about how they’d afford their medical payments, co-pays, and prescriptions. This was the type of occasion that Brown used to do a whole lot of earlier than he departed the Senate after dropping reelection in 2024.

Now that he’s operating once more, Brown, 73, appears to be satisfying some pent-up urge for food for these interactions. He is similar aggressively rumpled determine who was a fixture across the Capitol for greater than three many years (seven phrases within the House, three within the Senate), and round Ohio politics for 5 many years. He conveys the frenetic bearing of an over-caffeinated faculty professor fortunately returned from a compelled sabbatical.

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Republicans at the moment management the Senate 53–47, and Democrats are a protracted shot to select up the 4 seats they should take the chamber this fall. Brown is difficult Jon Husted, the incumbent who was appointed by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to fill the seat vacated by J. D. Vance when he turned vp; Husted is taken into account a slight favourite to win on this now reliably pink state.

Brown, nonetheless, represents a wild card on the nationwide map: He might be the Democrats’ finest hope of flipping a seat that in any other case would probably keep Republican. Few, if any, candidates operating this yr have as constant a report of interesting to what’s develop into a type of holy-grail constituency for Democrats: the coveted “working-class voter.” Once the cornerstone of the celebration base, they’ve deserted Democrats in droves over the previous decade. Despite Ohio changing into extra Republican through the Trump period, Brown has had extra success getting elected within the state than anybody else in his celebration over the previous 20 years.

While nationwide Democrats are obsessive about discovering leaders—ideally new ones—conversant within the language of affordability and financial insecurity, their garrulous man in Ohio has been round endlessly, speaking about simply this stuff. From what I can inform, the key themes of Brown’s marketing campaign in 2026 are just about indistinguishable from these of the Nineties and 2000s.

Brown instructed me he didn’t anticipate to run once more this yr, however discovered himself shocked at how shortly President Trump’s second time period had devolved. He listed a number of elements: the parade of tech billionaires who have been seated prominently at Trump’s inauguration, the “No Kings” protests towards the administration, the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. What he didn’t point out might be probably the most simple rationalization for his marketing campaign: wanting his job again.

“He’s definitely a grinder,” Tim Burga, the president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, instructed me. “Sherrod’s had the same haircut, the same voice, the same persistence on getting policy done,” Burga stated. “He’s a policy guy. And where do you learn your policy bona fides? You learn them in a union hall, a community center, a senior center.”

Or a espresso store in Toledo, which is the place I met Brown on a grey day in December. Our dialogue was a part of a long-term venture I’d been engaged on in regards to the state of the Democratic Party. But Brown additionally appeared worthy of stand-alone remedy. After the roundtable, he pulled up a chair, and we talked for 32 minutes. I had many questions: how he seen the citizens, how the temper of it had shifted, how Democrats would possibly reclaim some semblance of their working-class coalition. Brown saved getting sidetracked with tangents and non sequiturs, on matters each momentous and random.

How did he take pleasure in his “gap year” out of the Senate? I requested.

“It’s not really been a gap year,” he protested. Gap yr suggests day without work, whereas these previous months have the truth is been extraordinarily busy, he stated. He went into minute element about his week-to-week routine. Early final yr, Brown’s spouse—the previous Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz—tripped over a garments basket and broke her shoulder.

“I mean, she could function,” Brown stated. But he needed to chauffeur her every week from Columbus to her educating job at Denison University in Granville. As he spoke, I occurred to be consuming from a can of Diet Coke, which was what triggered Brown’s riveting ruminations on the topic.

“We always stopped at the mile marker 131 on I-71,” he instructed me. “And went to the same McDonald’s. And she got a fried-fish sandwich. And I went across the street and got an Arby’s roast beef.”

“We had large fries and Diet Cokes, and we did that for eight straight weeks,” he recalled fondly. “We always looked forward to it.”

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For the report, “McDonald’s French fries are the best in the world,” Brown instructed me. We have been now down one other fast-food cul-de-sac. “You know, I read somewhere that McDonald’s French fries in England have five ingredients. In America they have 20, because of our food-safety laws,” he stated. “I want to check that out.”

Brown apologized for detouring off-topic once more. He gestured to my can of Diet Coke.

“Do you ever drink regular Coke?” he requested me. Not that always, I stated. He puzzled why. “You don’t want the sugar, or you just don’t like the taste?”

I instructed him that I really like the style of normal Coke, however just like the style of Diet Coke, too. I discussed to Brown that Trump apparently has a particular button within the Oval Office that he can push at any time when he desires a Diet Coke.

“How is that guy still alive?” Brown puzzled. “Think about that.” He noticed that Trump seems to have a horrible weight loss program and can also be “angry a lot.”

And but, Trump just isn’t solely alive however most likely as large an element as any in Brown’s bid to return to Washington. As with many constituencies that propelled Trump’s victory in 2024, working-class voters now seem like dropping religion within the president for quite a lot of causes—one being that he appears manner too targeted on extraneous issues (constructing a ballroom, seizing Greenland) that don’t have anything to do with their financial predicaments. And a few of these voters would possibly simply be primed for a reunion with their previous pal Sherrod Brown.

I requested Brown why he thought Democrats had misplaced a lot credibility with blue-collar, lower- and middle-income residents. In a historic flip of celebration identification, voters at the moment are extra prone to view Republicans as higher attuned to the issues of working-class individuals, whereas Democrats are extra related to prosperous, college-educated elites. “From your perspective, what has that evolution been like over the years?” I requested.

Brown blew off my query. “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” he stated. “This might surprise you.”

It did shock me. Brown began a basis final yr (not a spot yr!) known as the Dignity of Work Institute. He additionally wrote an essay in The New Republic titled “Democrats Must Become the Workers’ Party Again,” by which he declared that it could be “my mission for the rest of my life” to assist Democrats reconnect with their working-class roots.

But it’s maybe one other factor of Brown’s enchantment that he tends to not get slowed down in hifalutin theories or sociology (his Yale diploma however). He prides himself on being an unglamorous advocate, who has earned sufficient belief with sufficient voters to defy Ohio’s Republican pattern traces. At least till he didn’t. Trump’s double-digit victory in Ohio over Kamala Harris in 2024 was an excessive amount of for Brown to surmount, and he wound up dropping to his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, by 3.5 factors.

“Without Trump on the ballot, Sherrod would have won handily,” Ted Strickland, the Democratic former Ohio governor, instructed me. Strickland stated that Brown’s gritty strategy to governance is properly suited to Ohio at this second. “He’s not terribly inspiring in his speaking style,” Strickland stated. “But he is who he is. I’ve known him a long time, and he’s been terribly consistent over the years.”

Brown has a factor for sure phrases. “I love this word penultimate,” he instructed me. And he has a particular fondness for the penultimate vote that he solid earlier than departing the Senate final yr, to assist go the Social Security Fairness Act, which considerably elevated profit funds to a number of public-sector staff. Brown was a co-sponsor of the invoice, and stated it has proved life-changing for 250,000 Ohioans.

“That’s what I live for,” he instructed me. “I worked on it for 10 years.”

An aide tried to nudge issues alongside. “We’re running behind schedule, so we’ve got to get him out of here,” she interjected.

We would have had extra time, Brown stated, “if we didn’t talk about Coca-Cola so much.”