Sherrod Brown is returning to the Senate.
The Ohio Democrat is projected to defeat incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted in a special election for the seat once held by Vice President JD Vance. Brown, who previously served three terms in the Senate before losing reelection in 2024 to Bernie Moreno, will serve out the remaining two years of Vance’s term.
Brown’s victory is an important one for Democrats in the state, who have steadily lost power in every election since 2012. President Donald Trump won Ohio by 11 percentage points in 2024.
This year, however, Democrats found success with an electorate angry about high prices and a booming data center industry in the state. Brown, who benefitted from having strong name recognition, tapped into those frustrations on the campaign trail.
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“The first thing we do is end the war, period,” Brown said during an Oct. 21 campaign rally. “Second thing we do is get rid of the tariffs. Third thing that we do is we begin to clean up the corruption in Columbus and in Washington.”
Brown referred to his opponent as “the face of data centers,” and accused Husted of giving tax breaks to the developments during his tenure as lieutenant governor. In the month leading up to the election, Brown’s campaign sponsored billboards near data centers that read “Jon Husted did that.”
Brown also took a different approach toward the president. In 2020 and 2021, Brown voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges. In the campaign’s final stretch, he said he would not support a third impeachment attempt “no matter what happens in the midterms.”
“He gets a lot of crossover appeal from moderates, from centrists, from progressives that support him,” David Brock, the chair of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, told The Washington Sun.
Democrats threw high-profile surrogates onto the campaign trail to help pull Brown over the line. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Brown campaigned in Cleveland alongside former President Barack Obama.
Still, Republicans outspent Democrats by millions after Labor Day, and doubled down on investing into the state until the end. A cryptocurrency-adjacent PAC had dropped $55 million against Brown as of Oct. 21, and Husted was one of several Republican candidates boosted during the last-minute MAGA Inc. blitz that began in late October.
Trump and Vance made several trips to the state and campaigned alongside Husted, who they praised as a consummate conservative. Trump’s backing of Husted dominated the headlines after he repeatedly praised Husted’s “ass” at campaign stops across the country.
That commentary did not prove powerful enough to drive Republicans to the polls.
Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, told The Sun that he believed any Republican losses could be chalked up to low voter turnout.
“The 1980s rock band Rush had a song called ‘Free Will,’ and in that song there’s a line: If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice,” LaRose said. “Voter turnout matters. Elections have consequences.”
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