Post Trump America Decision 2026, Part 5: Why Its Always Been Difficult For Democrats To Win In Ohio – And Why Sherrod Brown Has A Chance

In the leadup to the 2024 election I read an article in Newsweek from a young man in his thirties who couldn't comprehend how Ohio, which had gone for Obama in 2008 and 2012, was now so 'hopelessly Republican'. In truth in the history of American politics it has only been slightly easier for a Democrat to win Ohio than a camel to pass through the eye of the needle. And this was true even before the Republican party was founded.

Ohio was one of the biggest states that was part of the abolitionist movement which meant it was always going to be hard for a Democratic Party that was increasingly in the hands of the antebellum South to make progress there. Many of the most prominent anti-slavery politicians such as Salmon P. Chase and Ben Wade were elected to Ohio from the Free Soil party and members of his cabinet such as Edwin Stanton began their political lives there.

More Presidents were born in Ohio then any other state then Virginia and all of them were Republicans. Some of them, such as Grant and Harding, are the worst in our history; most of the rest, such as Hayes and Taft, were at best mediocrities but because it always had a sizable amount of electoral votes it was always considered a good one to have. And from the founding of the Republican Party in 1856 until 1928 it only went Democratic once – and that was because of the split between TR and Taft in the 1912 election that gave it to Wilson. Only in 1932 did FDR finally carry the state for the Democrats

Democrats could not easily win Ohio during the 20^th century. FDR lost in 1944 even as he carried 36 other states. Kennedy would lose it in 1960 even as he carried the rest of the Midwest. And Carter was only barely able to carry it in 1976 and that state was necessary to win the Presidency that year. Despite the fact that historical fact as well that Republicans almost always carry Ohio by a far greater margin then Democrats usually do (Carter carried Ohio by 11,000 votes out of 4 million cast over Ford but lose by more than half a million votes to Reagan four years later, for example) there are those in the party who still believe that, because Ohio is a big state, it's fundamentally Democratic at its core. This is not the only state with a sizable electoral vote count where that logic fails but in Ohio's case it is a particularly grievous one because the state historically has an equally poor track record electing Democrats at the Senate level as well.

Some of the most prominent conservatives  in the party came from Ohio. One of the most important  was Robert Taft. The son of the former President, he would have the nickname "Mr. Republican."  During the New Deal Era well into World War II when the Republicans being at their lowest membership in Congress in their history most of the party in the Senate was in the Midwest, in states such as Illinois, Michigan and Ohio. These Republicans were the early models of the kind we have today: virulent opponents of the New Deal, incredibly racist and so anti-Communist that they admired fascists in Europe as a viable alternative to the Soviet Union. The main difference was men like Taft and his fellow Republican John Bricker was that they were also isolationists.  Taft was by far the biggest opponent of organizations like the United Nations and the formation of NATO in the Senate and was adamantly opposed to the Marshal Plan. He would run for the Republican nomination for President three times, the last time losing to Eisenhower in1952.

It took a lot of work for a Democrat to win statewide office in Ohio and a lot of the time you had to be pretty moderate and independent to do so. Frank Lausche, who was elected to the Senate in 1956 as a Democrat, was considered by Eisenhower as his running mate in 1952 and 1956. During the 1960 campaign he endorsed Nixon for President and was known in the Senate for his independence which bothered men like LBJ when he said he might vote for Republican William Knowland for Senate Majority Leader. Stephen Young won election to the Senate over John Bricker in 1958 which gave Ohio two Democratic Senators for the first time in its history. Young was far from it, actually 69 at the time, and his win came as a shock. Lausche would lose the Democratic primary in 1968 to John Gilligan by ten points and refused to endorse him. Young would not run for reelection in 1970 and Robert Taft Jr ended up being elected to the Senate in 1970

John Glenn ended up getting elected in a landslide in 1974 but it says something that a Democrat had to leave Earth to be seriously considered to win election in Ohio. That said Glenn did hold the seat with distinction for four terms winning with 60 percent of the vote or more in three of his four runs for the Senate and managing to defeat Mike DeWine in what would be his first ever campaign loss.

For twenty years Ohio did have two Democratic senators with Howard Metzenbaum winning in 1970.He'd tried to run and beat Taft in 1970 but this time with Jimmy Carter's coattails Metzenbaum prevailed. He would be Senator in for four terms himself. Both men were the early version of red state Senators as Glenn would win reelection in 1980 even as Carter lost Ohio in a landslide and so many of his fellow liberals went down to defeat. He ran ahead of Clinton in Ohio when the two were on the same ballot in 1992. In 1988 Metzenbaum would easily win reelection for his third term even as George H.W. Bush easily carried Ohio.

By 1998 both Metzenbaum and Glenn were gone from the Senate and Ohio was very much a Republican state across the board. Republicans had been holding the governorship in the state for a long time. It wasn't until 2006 that a chance for the Democrats came – in large part because  of Howard Dean.

In the aftermath of the 2004 election Howard Dean took over the DNC and launched a 50 state campaign. Part of that meant campaigning in areas the Democrats had not exactly been strong in before and that included the Midwest. Most of it involved the Senate but they did so with quite a few governors races and Ohio was central to both.

Mike DeWine had won reelection in 2000 but by that point his approval ratings were at 38, second only to Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum. Several Republicans challenged DeWine but he won the primary by and overwhelming margin. The Democrats settled on Sherrod Brown the former Secretary of State of Ohio and representative of the 13^th district.

The GOP knew how vital it was to keep the seat and DeWine felt hard and dirty. But by October 16^th Republicans were sure DeWine was a lame duck and withdrew financial support. Brown was declared the winner in a blowout, trouncing DeWine by more than twelve points and nearly half a million votes.

Even more shocking was the gubernatorial race. Robert Taft III was viewed as the most unpopular governor in the country with approval ratings between 10 and 25 percent. The eventual winner of the Republican primary Secretary of State Ken Blackwell was carrying the baggage of Taft and as  a result the Democratic candidate Ted Strickland would win with over 60 percent of the vote and become the first Democrat to win election in that state since Vincent Celeste in 1986.

A scurrilous conspiracy theory among Democrats was that Taft as governor had used his authority to steal Ohio from Kerry in 2004 to give George W. Bush reelection. (There has never been any real proof to back that up. The fact that the margin was over 100,000 votes has compared to the miniscule margin in Florida did nothing to dim it.) The Democrats had targeted Ohio in particularly in preparation of the 2008 election. When Obama's historic victory took place in 2008 he would carry Ohio by nearly five percent of the vote it seemed like Ohio would be in the Democratic column for the foreseeable future.

That began to fall apart almost immediately after Howard Dean left the DNC and the party completely rejected the strategy that had brought them such success over four years. Most of that was felt in Congress but it was felt just as harshly in the governor's races as six of the states Obama had carried ended up going under Republican control. While Strickland had been an effective governor he faced a strong opponent in John Kasich. It would be one of the closest races of that cycle but Strickland would lose by two percent of the vote. No Democrat has been able to win the governor's race in that state since. That same year George Voinovich retired from the Senate and Lee Fisher; the former Lieutenant governor tried to run for Senate as a Democrat. He would absolutely be trounced by Rob Portman, a moderate Republican.

In 2012 Obama won reelection and once again managed to carry Ohio. It was by a smaller margin over Mitt Romney then John McCain, a little more than three percent this time. Sherrod Brown was running for reelection for the first time.

By this point in Brown's career he had established himself as one of the most liberal Senators in the state. The Washington Post argued that 'Brown is way to the left of Ohio in general but probably the only person who could outwork Brown is Portman. He would run against Josh Mandel, who'd been elected State Treasurer just two years earlier and was compared to Florida's Marco Rubio as a rising star in the Republican Party. But Brown beat him by nearly six percent, doing better than Obama did against Romney that year.

The Democrats managed to hold their own in the Midwest that year with Amy Klobuchar and Claire McCaskill winning reelection and even gaining a seat when Joe Donnelly managed to win election in Indiana after a series of controversial response by the Republican Richard Murdock cost them a seat.

By the next time Brown was running for reelection in 2018 the blue wave that gave Democrats their best results in the House ran the opposite way for them in the Senate. By this point the progressive mindset of Bernie and the Justice Democrats was at its height in the party and the Democrats were about to get their first lesson as to just how well it didn't play in middle America. The Republicans gained four seats to Democrats only taking two and the reason that happened was entirely because of the Midwest. Claire McCaskill would lose to Josh Hawley in Missouri by nearly six percent, Heidi Heitkamp would be trounced in North Dakota by Kevin Cramer losing a seat Democrats had held for nearly eighteen years and Mike Braun would take back Indiana's seat for the GOP. Only Sherrod Brown managed to win reelection.

In 2016 Trump had flipped Ohio back to the Republican column by more than 8 percent over Hilary Clinton, an eleven point gain from how Romney had done just four years earlier. He had carried 80 counties as opposed to Hilary's 8. Trump would carry it in each of his three elections, the third time by the largest margin since Reagan did in 1984. While part of this was no doubt due to JD Vance being on the ticket, he had carried it by eight points four years earlier.

The reason that Sherrod Brown was such a successful Red State Democrat is the same reason that Susan Collins is, at least for now, a successful Blue State Republican. Like her he had the ability to run ahead of both parties in his state regardless of when he was on the ballot. He ran ahead of both Obama and Romney in 2012,ran ahead of Clinton's total in 2016 and Biden's in 2020 and considerably ahead of Harris in 2024. Only in the latter case was that not high enough to beat Bernie Moreno.  In 2018 he managed to win despite Republicans winning all statewide executive offices on the same ballot, which included Mike DeWine being elected governor.

Now in 2026 Brown will be running to be the replacement of JD Vance when he became Vice President Jon Husted. He's already favored to win the seat over him even six months out in what is already looking to be one of the key races for both parties in 2026.

That same article I mentioned at the start of the piece admitted that for Democrats to regain control in the Senate they have to do better in the Midwest, including states such as Iowa and Indiana. At this point Iowa has also been moving in the direction of the Democrats down the road. But if that happens the Democrats will need to learn the correct lessons.

The first is that at no point in America's history has the Midwest embraced any real kind of liberalism, whether it is the Bull Moose progressives of TR and LaFollette, the New Deal or that of the 1960s and 1970s. This has been the area of blue-collar workers who respond far more to messages of economic prosperity then anything else and have far more often embraced the deep roots of conservative politics more deeply then any other region of the country.  The original America First movement had its roots in the Taft's and Bricker's during the lead-up to World War II; there's a reason Trump found a sympathetic ear for it nearly 70 years later there in particular.

Considering that Ohio has been become associated so much with the Rust Belt in the 21^st century also explains why it is loathe to embracing the beliefs of the Sanders-AOC wing of the Democratic Party. Ohio voted for the 'law and order' argument of Nixon both in 1968 and 1972 and the only reason it has voted for most Democrats is because of the economy. It's not a coincidence that Obama carried it just as the crash of 2008 hit. The voters in these states care about their economic well-being first and foremost; historically they have never embraced the issues of social justice that the left believes in and they made it very clear in the last two elections they don't intend to start now.  If they do vote for Brown in six months' time, it will be because of the issue of affordability that has carried Democrats to gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey last year.

For all of the arguments about residents of Ohio being more open to ideas of social justice – particularly in the passage of their amendment to the constitution upholding abortion in 2023 – that argument comes crashing down when you consider just how big a margin Trump won the state by exactly one year later.  Brown was considerably to the left of the population of Ohio during his tenure as Senator but it was also done by working the state as hard as elected official did. When Harris ran on a fairly progressive ticket in 2024, it may have been too much of an onus for him to overcome.

Next Tuesday Sherrod Brown will begin his race to reclaim his place in the Senate from the state of Ohio. It will be a tough fight, but he has had his share of them. If he wins, it will because he knows what the voters in Ohio actually want from their elected officials, not what the author of that article two years ago believes they should. There are fewer places in America that the left's message play then they believe and Ohio has never been one of them. Brown knows that and for the sake of Democratic Party, they'd better learn it too.