Sherrod Brown Is Grinding It Out

Sherrod Brown can be hard to follow at times. He apologizes for his frequent rambles, parentheticals, and asides.

“I don’t think that’s what you came to talk about,” the former and maybe future senator from Ohio told me after a brief soliloquy about how much he enjoys Diet Coke. And also about his efforts to cut back on his intake of Diet Coke.

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

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

Brown was sitting in a Toledo coffee shop, having just finished a roundtable discussion about rising health-care costs. A small group of Ohioans had expressed all manner of concerns about how they would afford their medical bills, co-pays, and prescriptions. This was the kind of event that Brown used to do a lot of before he departed the Senate after losing reelection in 2024.

Now that he’s running again, Brown, 73, seems to be satisfying some pent-up appetite for these interactions. He is the same aggressively rumpled figure who was a fixture around the Capitol for more than three decades (seven terms in the House, three in the Senate), and around Ohio politics for five decades. He conveys the frenetic bearing of an over-caffeinated college professor happily returned from a forced sabbatical.

[Read: The Democrats’ biggest Senate recruits have one thing in common]

Republicans currently control the Senate 53–47, and Democrats are a long shot to pick up the four seats they need to take the chamber this fall. Brown is challenging Jon Husted, the incumbent who was appointed by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to fill the seat vacated by J. D. Vance when he became vice president; Husted is considered a slight favorite to win in this now reliably red state.

Brown, however, represents a wild card on the national map: He is probably the Democrats’ best hope of flipping a seat that otherwise would likely stay Republican. Few, if any, candidates running this year have as consistent a record of appealing to what’s become a kind of holy-grail constituency for Democrats: the coveted “working-class voter.” Once the cornerstone of the party base, they have abandoned Democrats in droves over the past decade. Despite Ohio becoming more Republican during the Trump era, Brown has had more success getting elected in the state than anyone else in his party over the past 20 years.

While national Democrats are obsessed with finding leaders—ideally new ones—conversant in the language of affordability and economic insecurity, their garrulous guy in Ohio has been around forever, talking about just these things. From what I can tell, the major themes of Brown’s campaign in 2026 are pretty much indistinguishable from those of the 1990s and 2000s.

Brown told me he did not expect to run again this year, but found himself shocked at how quickly President Trump’s second term had devolved. He listed multiple factors: the parade of tech billionaires who were seated prominently at Trump’s inauguration, the “No Kings” protests against the administration, the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. What he didn’t mention is probably the most straightforward explanation for his campaign: wanting his job back.

“He’s definitely a grinder,” Tim Burga, the president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, told me. “Sherrod’s had the same haircut, the same voice, the same persistence on getting policy done,” Burga said. “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 coffee shop in Toledo, which is where I met Brown on a gray day in December. Our discussion was part of a long-term project I’d been working on about the state of the Democratic Party. But Brown also seemed worthy of stand-alone treatment. After the roundtable, he pulled up a chair, and we talked for 32 minutes. I had many questions: how he viewed the electorate, how the mood of it had shifted, how Democrats might reclaim some semblance of their working-class coalition. Brown kept getting sidetracked with tangents and non sequiturs, on topics both momentous and random.

How did he enjoy his “gap year” out of the Senate? I asked.

“It’s not really been a gap year,” he protested. Gap year suggests time off, whereas these past months have in fact been extremely busy, he said. He went into minute detail about his week-to-week routine. Early last year, Brown’s wife—the former Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz—tripped over a clothes basket and broke her shoulder.

“I mean, she could function,” Brown said. But he had to chauffeur her each week from Columbus to her teaching job at Denison University in Granville. As he spoke, I happened to be drinking from a can of Diet Coke, which was what triggered Brown’s riveting ruminations on the subject.

“We always stopped at the mile marker 131 on I-71,” he told 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.”

[From the March 2026 issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]

For the record, “McDonald’s French fries are the best in the world,” Brown told me. We were now down another 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 said. “I want to check that out.”

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

“Do you ever drink regular Coke?” he asked me. Not that often, I said. He wondered why. “You don’t want the sugar, or you just don’t like the taste?”

I told him that I love the taste of regular Coke, but like the taste of Diet Coke, too. I mentioned to Brown that Trump apparently has a special button in the Oval Office that he can push whenever he wants a Diet Coke.

“How is that guy still alive?” Brown wondered. “Think about that.” He observed that Trump appears to have a terrible diet and is also “angry a lot.”

And yet, Trump is not only alive but probably as big a factor 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 appear to be losing faith in the president for a number of reasons—one being that he seems way too focused on extraneous things (building a ballroom, seizing Greenland) that have nothing to do with their economic predicaments. And some of those voters might just be primed for a reunion with their old friend Sherrod Brown.

I asked Brown why he thought Democrats had lost so much credibility with blue-collar, lower- and middle-income citizens. In a historic flip of party identity, voters are now more likely to view Republicans as better attuned to the concerns of working-class people, whereas Democrats are more associated with affluent, college-educated elites. “From your perspective, what has that evolution been like over the years?” I asked.

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

It did surprise me. Brown started a foundation last year (not a gap year!) called the Dignity of Work Institute. He also wrote an essay in The New Republic titled “Democrats Must Become the Workers’ Party Again,” in which he declared that it would be “my mission for the rest of my life” to help Democrats reconnect with their working-class roots.

But it is perhaps another element of Brown’s appeal that he tends not to get bogged down in hifalutin theories or sociology (his Yale degree notwithstanding). He prides himself on being an unglamorous advocate, who has earned enough trust with enough voters to defy Ohio’s Republican trend lines. At least until he didn’t. Trump’s double-digit victory in Ohio over Kamala Harris in 2024 was too much for Brown to surmount, and he wound up losing to his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, by 3.5 points.

“Without Trump on the ballot, Sherrod would have won handily,” Ted Strickland, the Democratic former Ohio governor, told me. Strickland said that Brown’s gritty approach to governance is well suited to Ohio at this moment. “He’s not terribly inspiring in his speaking style,” Strickland said. “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 thing for certain words. “I love this word penultimate,” he told me. And he has a special fondness for the penultimate vote that he cast before departing the Senate last year, to help pass the Social Security Fairness Act, which significantly increased benefit payments to a host of public-sector workers. Brown was a co-sponsor of the bill, and said it has proved life-changing for 250,000 Ohioans.

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

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

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