MANSFIELD, Ohio — Last week Sherrod Brown, a native of Richland County, Ohio, and a Democrat who has been the state’s U.S. senator since 2007, voted to support the student loan forgiveness program that President Joe Biden announced last year.
It was a vote that basically said he was OK with redistributing debt from a Case Western Reserve graduate degree — or University of Dayton or Ohio State — to union workers with plenty of valuable real-world skills but no college degree. To demand that blue-collar workers subsidize college graduates was a peculiar move for the self-described lunch pail populist to make, particularly in an election cycle where he will face perhaps the toughest race ever in his storied political career.
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Even Tim Ryan, the former congressman who lost the 2022 Senate race to Republican J.D. Vance, realized in Ohio — where 70% of the population does not have a college degree — that the college loan bailout would be radioactive politically. In the middle of last year's race, he flipped and said he didn’t support the debt amnesty.
Since Brown upended incumbent Republican state Rep. Joan Douglass in a conservative district in his very first run for office as a George McGovern-supporting 22-year-old Yale University graduate, who organized the town of Mansfield’s first Earth Day and boasted about knocking on 20,000 doors, he has gingerly navigated a state constantly in political flux but open to his lunch pail populism with great success.
“I got tired of seeing people without money and influence being pushed around,” Brown told the Mansfield News Journal when the final results arrived in November of 1974.
Either Brown has stopped being tired of seeing people without power being pushed around by the elite, lost touch with the people of his state, or just hopes that the people in Youngstown — of which only 14% have a college education — aren’t paying attention to his vote.
According to estimates from the National Taxpayers Union based on the specifics of President Joe Biden’s plan, the average burden of debt forgiveness per U.S. taxpayer will be $2,503.22. At a time of high inflation and a looming recession, that redistribution of wealth in which the recipients of higher education would be paid, at least in part, by those who weren't blessed enough to go to college is the definition of people without power and influence being pushed around by the people in power.
In 2006, Brown challenged and defeated then-two-term incumbent Republican Sen. Mike DeWine in a decidedly hostile year for Republicans everywhere, and he has enjoyed successive weak Republican challengers and sailed through three election cycles handily.
However, it is not 2006 anymore, or 2008 or 2012 when Barack Obama won successive electoral wins in the Buckeye State. Today the political coalition that Brown once relied on, supported by New Deal Democrats who lived in counties such as Mahoning, Stark, Trumbull, and Ashtabula, has shed those white working-class voters that gave him his victories.
And that is his challenge: He has not run in a competitive race since the party lobbed off workers in favor of the party’s new ascendant coalition made up of socially liberal upscale whites, minorities, and young people, centered on their elitist conceptions of "social justice" causes.
Brown needs “just enough of them” to win next November — just like Hillary Clinton needed “just enough of them” to win in 2016. But she made the calculated decision to instead refer to them as deplorable and narrowly lost to Trump electorally.
Last November, just after Ryan lost by a whopping 7 percentage points to Vance, Brown announced he was seeking a fourth term, saying “there’s no question” a Democrat can still win statewide in Ohio and that he’ll win because “people recognize I get up every day and fight for the dignity of work. Whether you swipe a badge or punch a clock or work for tips or work for a salary.”
Is it worth repeating that he voted to support a bill that would force people who punch a clock or work for tips to now help foot the bill so coddled college grads can run away from the bills they owe?
Despite no Democrats winning any statewide race in Ohio in 2022, a lot of very smart people in Washington dismiss the idea that Brown could lose because Brown "always wins." Never mind that he is the only Democrat to win this state in the last ten years.
The reality is that if he continues to make these significant votes that harm people who he says he champions, he will be in trouble.
To date, Republicans announcing candidacies for the seat include state Sen. Matt Dolan, whose family owns Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians franchise, and Bernie Moreno, a Cleveland-area businessman who has already received an endorsement from Vance.
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Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose is also considering a run.
Democrats have a lot of defending to do in 2024, both here and in neighboring West Virginia and Pennsylvania, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics rankings. The center's analysts currently rank Ohio a “Toss-up,” saying while Brown should be able to get at least some crossover support, they are not sure that crossover support would be enough to overcome a GOP margin of perhaps 8 percentage points for president, which was Donald Trump’s margin in both 2016 and 2020.