Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is in the fight of his life.
The incumbent won back his seat in 2012 and 2018, the latter race during a year that was a bloodbath for his fellow Democratic senators in Republican-leaning states. Brown’s margins grew much tighter, with his 15-point 2012 rout halved six years later. And now, for the first time since 2012, he’s up in a presidential year, with Donald Trump — who easily won Ohio in 2016 and 2020 — at the top of the ballot.
Democrats simply can’t hold their Senate majority without Brown. The brutal map means that Republicans only need to flip West Virginia — a near-certainty, with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) bowing out — and not fumble their incumbencies in Florida and Texas to reach 50 seats. If they flip either Ohio or Montana, both states Trump won twice, they win the majority. Democrats are also defending in the perpetual battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada, as well as fighting for open seats in Arizona and Michigan.
This map puts tremendous pressure on Brown and Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), incumbents with strong personal brands who may be the last survivors of that increasingly endangered species, red-state Democrats.
The last few weeks have seen an unprecedented, eleventh-hour sea change in the race and environment. President Joe Biden, facing bleak polling and a loss of confidence from his own party, bowed out. Vice President Kamala Harris quickly ascended to the nomination, bringing with her a tsunami of enthusiasm and donations.
How does that swap affect Brown, who already had to keep the top of his ticket at arm’s length, the better to bring out the crossover voters he needs to win?
“Take nothing for granted but if the urban electorates in Ohio and the young voters in Ohio are energized because of Harris-Walz, that’s life Sherrod needs,” former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper told TPM.
“The one thing that could kill him in November is a lack of enthusiasm on the Democratic side where the base doesn’t come out,” Dr. Dave Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Akron, told TPM. “Kamala Harris replacing Biden was the best possible news that Sherrod Brown could have gotten.”
As Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, put it: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
Brown can’t win without the votes of at least some Trump supporters. But the stronger the showing from Democratic voters, the fewer of those crossovers he needs.
That’s true even in a state Harris has very little chance of winning. To keep Brown and a couple Ohio House Democrats in competitive races alive, she needs to keep the margin of her likely loss down.
“Biden was on track to lose Ohio by 10 or more, and it’s hard to ask [Brown] to outrun that kind of delta,” Lakshya Jain, who does modeling and data analysis at Split Ticket, told TPM. “That kind of overperformance hasn’t been done in quite a while — that’s Tester level, and Brown hasn’t done that level of overperformance since 2006.”
Trump was running anywhere from seven to 10 points ahead of Biden before he dropped out, as captured in 538’s archives.
“If Trump gets close to a double digit margin of victory, then it gets tougher,” Pepper said.
Bernie Moreno, the Republican car dealership owner who’s challenging Brown, has tried to spin the candidate swap to his advantage.
“Oh, it helps me tremendously,” Moreno told CNN earlier this month. “So maybe Scranton Joe had a little bit of credibility here in Ohio. San Francisco Kamala absolutely does not.”
The idea that Biden’s roots match well with Ohio might feel right, but the data doesn’t back it up. Biden lost Ohio in 2020 by eight points — right around the margin by which Hillary Clinton lost it in 2016, despite the fact that Biden outran her in much of the rest of the country. That suggests Biden doesn’t have an Ohio secret sauce Harris would be unable to replicate — particularly if the energy and enthusiasm she’s brought to the ticket endures.
According to what public polling of Ohio there is — “there’s not that much polling and when there is it kind of sucks,” per Jain — Brown is running around five points ahead of Moreno. But it’s going to be very tight.
“In our model we’re building right now, it’s a dead 50/50 heat between Brown and Moreno,” Jain said.
“Brown is ahead but we still view the race as a toss up,” added Kondik. “It’ll get harder rather than easier across the course of the election.”
This dynamic is echoed elsewhere as well. Democratic senators are running well ahead of Harris (and were running well ahead of Biden) in the swing states. Experts expect those numbers to contract somewhat, as ticket splitting has become increasingly rare in American politics. The key for Brown and Tester is that Harris’ numbers continue to climb into the orbit of those senators’ polls and not the other way around.
Underscoring the viciousness of this cycle’s map for Democrats, Brown actually has a significantly easier path than Tester. He’s competing in a state Democratic presidential candidates have been losing by around eight points; Trump won Montana by over 16 percentage points in 2020, down from his even more dominant 20 percentage points in 2016.
“Montana is a state Trump will probably win by 15 to 20 — Ohio is more like five to 10. He was always gonna need to create more crossover,” Kondik said. “But Montana is a smaller state and sometimes the incumbent has more of an advantage in places like that; a greater percentage of the electorate knows them.”
“If you go by numbers, though, Brown is better positioned than Tester at this point,” he added.
While these men’s endurance — particularly Tester’s — speaks to the effectiveness of their candidate identities, the herculean effort it’ll take to return them to their seats speaks to the ever growing chasm between red states and blue ones. If they lose, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) will be the last true crossover senator, representing a state that very often votes Democrat in state-wide contests. If they win, it’ll be a testament to Harris’ strength and ability to turn her three-month campaign into a national barnstorming.
“This will be a pretty good test to see if red state Democrats can hang on — or if this is the last gasp,” Cohen said.
Is Brown doing anything different from Tim Ryan who lost to Vance? I certainly hope so.
See, the difference is that Ohioans, with the exception of the MAGA crowd, generally like Sherrod Brown. And the negative aspects of Moreno’s background (a fake “rags-to-riches” story and wage theft accusations, to start) haven’t been hammered home yet. I expect they will be after Labor Day. I’ve been seeing Sherrod Brown TV ads for about a month now. I’ve yet to see a Moreno ad.
Having said all that, turnout will be essential.
The bloom is off Trump and MAGA. This could be a good year for Democrats across the country. I am sick to death of journalists and professional Democrats dividing the country into Red States and Blue States. It is time for the Democrats to try to become a national pary again.
There may be “synergy-energy” at work here!
I’m just not sure the Ohio Dems can overcome their propensity for screwing things up. I live here and we’ve been disappointed again and again by their lack of coherent strategy, much less basic skills. Issue 1, the abortion rights constitutional amendment adopted last year, was on the back of local volunteers, with the Dems not really wanting to even push it until popular support overwhelmed them. Their 2014 candidate against John Kasich, who’d tried to shove an anti-union law down peoples’ throats and got spanked for it by voters, was Ed Fitzgerald. His campaign, if you remember, was blown to pieces by the release, 3 months before the election, of a story about a late-night incident in a car with a woman not his wife, when he didn’t even have a valid driver’s license, which had occurred 2 years before the race. Most of JD Vance’s crazy misogynistic rants and other creepy weirdness also happened BEFORE the Ryan race, and none of it came out then. As far as Ryan and the Dems were concerned, there appears to have been no oppo research done on Vance, or if it was done it was completely mis-handled.
The good news is that Brown’s run strong campaigns before, and the Issue 1 vote last year demonstrated that Ohioans aren’t always voting for the Repubs. Brown’s got people working on the ground here and they seem sharp. Some hope is warranted.