PERRYSBURG, Ohio — When Sherrod Brown and Marcy Kaptur first shared a political ticket, in 1982, they were well ahead of their time in the Democratic Party.
Brown, who won Ohio’s secretary of state office that year, and Kaptur, who won her first term in Congress, preached an aggressive economic populist message meant to appeal to the working class people who worked in steel mills and auto plants, the type of agenda that fell out of favor during the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Now, after they lost every bit of power in 2024, many Democrats are embracing the Brown-Kaptur message as the future of the party — and yet the other big political force of the moment, an anti-Washington fervor, could doom two Democrats with more than 75 years of combined service in Congress.
Brown and Kaptur used a packed carpenters hall last weekend to say that their experience walking the walk with Ohio’s working men and women is more important than their age.
Trending
“No one in Washington, with the exception of Marcy and a few of us, are standing up to the corporations that game the system. But politicians who are supposed to work for you too often work for themselves,” the soon-to-be-74-year-old Brown told a few hundred union members.
In a midterm election where the economy and cost of living is far and away the most important issue, no pair of Democrats seems better positioned to tap into an electorate that is angry at billionaires and the political class. Their mission may have found its moment.
Brown is trying to reclaim a Senate seat after his loss to Bernie Moreno two years ago. Kaptur, 80, is trying to secure her 23rd term in the House, the longest-serving woman in the history of Congress, despite repeated gerrymanders that made her Northwest Ohio district more friendly to President Donald Trump.
Yet their very calling card of legitimacy is the thing Republicans are using against them — their decades in politics, especially in Congress. Republicans are using that throughline of longevity on Capitol Hill in just about every attack ad run against the duo.
One super PAC ad starts off with the theme of “it’s time to retire Marcy Kaptur” and goes on to accuse her of voting over the years to raise taxes and allow federal benefits to go to undocumented immigrants. On Thursday the Senate Leadership Fund unveiled its latest ad against Brown that cites votes cast all the way back to the 1970s in the state legislature.
“Sherrod Brown, 50 years in politics, 50 votes to raise your taxes,” the narrator says in the ad, run by the super PAC affiliated with Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
Kaptur’s opponent, former state legislator Derek Merrin, likes to point out how he wasn’t born yet when she first took office and highlights the region’s economic decline over those decades.
“Since 1983 when Marcy Kaptur took office, America’s population across the country has increased by approximately 46% — 46%. In Lucas County, the population has decreased by 9% — failure, she’s a failure,” Merrin said earlier this month while campaigning alongside House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), at a logistics company that helps the booming data center business.
Both races, which could determine the majority in each chamber of Congress, are considered pure tossups by The Cook Political Report.
Kaptur offers no apologies for her tenure and suggests that her constituents would be worse off without her fighting for them. She is poised to chair a subcommittee that spends almost $60 billion annually on energy and water projects if Democrats claim the majority, a beneficial post for constituents whose local economy is based in the Great Lakes region.
“Now I have some authority, and they try to use it against me in the ads. They try to say, you know, she served there too long. Oh no, it took me four decades to get where I am now, and I’m not giving it up because it’s their seniority, not mine,” she said during an interview in Toledo.
Their most fervent supporters agree, as Ohio state Sen. Paula Hicks-Hudson, who represents Toledo, dismissed talk of needing “new blood” at the carpenters hall rally.
“We need fighting blood,” Hicks-Hudson told the hard-hat crowd.
Out in the audience Brayden McClure, 26, a carpenter from Lima, nodded along as he attended his second rally for Brown in recent weeks. “I need better wages and a better pension, and he has promises and he has ideas for our future,” McClure told The Washington Sun.
Two years ago he voted for Trump, after supporting Joe Biden in 2020, a prototypical voter almost always landing on the change candidate. He thinks the Iran war was a huge mistake that drains an extra $100 a week on gas costs driving to his jobs, leading him to support Brown and Kaptur this fall.
“I don’t think age matters at all,” he said, preferring experience over youthful energy. “You get someone up there that’s going to fight for your rights.”
Public polls give Brown a small but durable lead over Sen. Jon Husted, the former lieutenant governor who was appointed early last year by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.
The winner in November will take over the remaining two years of a Senate term that Vice President JD Vance won in 2022 — setting up the possibility that Brown would have to immediately gear up for a third straight grueling Senate campaign.
Husted is an imperfect vessel to run as the anti-politician, as he has worked his way up the power ladder in Columbus: 10 years in the legislature, eight as secretary of state and six as DeWine’s lieutenant governor.
Both Brown and Kaptur are running against the Republican machine in the state capital as much as they are running against the Trump administration.
Brown’s ads dubbed Husted as the “face of data centers” after the Republican-dominated legislature approved tax incentives to attract the now controversial projects to rural patches of Ohio. The line of attack proved so effective national Republicans leaked a memo calling the issue “an anchor” around Husted, pleading for the industry to mount its own PR campaign.
Yet over almost 90 minutes of speeches at the carpenters rally, no one blasted Husted on the issue. The reason was hanging on a “We Build Industry” banner along the side of the venue, rattling off the things the union builds.
Fourth on the list: data centers.
“We know it’s controversial, but we are in favor of them because it puts a lot of our members to work,” Lee Daher, 46, senior representative of the regional union, told The Sun.
Kaptur explained later that she doesn’t support a full moratorium on the controversial projects but wants these tech companies to better negotiate with county and state officials to ensure water and power usage by the behemoths doesn’t surge costs for local residents.
Their closing message is focused on blaming the richest people in the world for the decades-long decline in the region. “No human being in America should be a trillionaire. Nobody, and I say that to Elon Musk because he’s helping to put money against me,” Kaptur said.
Later, when Brown spoke, he added that no one should be a billionaire. He uses a Husted line about how the “work ethic is broken” in America to riff on how the senator should look “in the eye” of a crowd of different trade workers he mentioned and “say your work ethic is broken.”
It’s a message that’s found new relevance in a party that spent the 1990s and first 20 years of this century courting suburban professionals, only to see folks like McClure abandon the party.
Ohio swung from being the quintessential battleground in presidential campaigns, to an afterthought where Trump won by 11% in 2024. Part of this drift came from culture war issues that broke religious, gun-owning rural voters away from Democrats, something Kaptur is distancing herself from in this campaign, which is all about economics.
Everywhere Kaptur goes, an aide must have a sheet of paper showing the median household income by congressional district.
Of the 50 wealthiest, 35 are marked blue for a Democratic representative. The back piece of paper, for the poorest districts, is overwhelmingly red, for Republicans.
“The Democratic Party as a whole couldn’t understand this. They couldn’t,” she said of the past ethos.
Now, other Democrats are trying to catch up to this message. Brown and Kaptur hope that they will be there in Congress in January to explain to others how they rode it to victory — and they’re warning their supporters to hold these new converts to doing more than just talking the talk.
“That’s kind of all they do. They don’t fight. They don’t come to rallies like this. They don’t show up at picket lines. They don’t talk to management sometimes and get them to accept that there’s an organizing drive,” Brown said. “I know Marcy’s done this. I’ve done this.”
Author
