Democrats haven’t always appreciated Sherrod Brown’s political instincts; after all, he lost his Senate seat in 2024. But his election this time confirms that he knows something about winning states Republicans expect to conquer. He doesn’t talk down to the working class, champions their interests and mostly sidesteps the culture wars. Those will be crucial skills if Democrats are going to have a chance at winning back the White House in 2028.
While he is reliably liberal on social issues, Brown’s focus has always been on economic concerns. He kept the faith with private sector labor unions and mostly avoided the woke language that alienated so many working-class Americans.
He’s a Yale graduate but doesn’t come off as elite. Even his forever rumpled presentation, as if he had shopped at Goodwill and worn his clothes overnight, endeared him to those suspicious of anyone too Brooks Brothers. Although he lost in 2024, he did outperform Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, in Ohio — and making Ohio competitive for Democrats is an important feat.
Throughout the industrialized world, the broad disenchantment with politicians and elites has mostly bolstered populists from the far right — from the AfD in Germany to the National Rally in France to MAGA Republicans in the United States. But populism does not inevitably mean the ethnonationalist right.
Brown’s populism has generally been sensible, and he was way ahead of the curve in warning about what is now called the “China shock” — the way trade with China would devastate many manufacturing towns. Many liberals like me were free-traders, and Brown was prescient about the risks of factories closing and the trail of misery that would cause.
This election, many Democratic candidates followed the populist path he’d blazed, veering away from pronouns and identity issues while hammering Republicans on pocketbook issues like the cost of gas and diesel. James Talarico, Jon Ossoff, Roy Cooper and a number of others pursued a very grounded economic populist agenda, railing against President Trump’s economic record and castigating corruption, all while underscoring their local authenticity.
The critique of Brown in the 2026 Ohio election, other than that he was a lefty who would help advance a national Democratic agenda that many Ohio voters are suspicious of, was in part that he wasn’t populist enough. To some voters, he was a forever politician who represented the status quo that they feel has betrayed them.
It’s true that Brown, 73, has been in politics for more than half a century. He was first elected to the Ohio legislature at the age of 21, and then moved to the House of Representatives in 1992 and to the Senate in 2006. But he has managed to tilt against the establishment that he long was part of. A hot issue in Ohio this year was data centers, and Brown made his skepticism about them a central issue in his campaign, criticizing his opponent, Jon Husted, for previously supporting incentives to construct them.
As long as inequality persists and the economy underperforms, populism will be with us, I suspect — here and in Europe. I fear that liberals worldwide have been too quick to surrender the populist ground to charlatans on the right. And here in the United States, becoming the party of the more educated isn’t a promising path considering that less than 40 percent of Americans over the age of 25 have a four-year college degree. Six out of 10 Americans see themselves as working class, and many are suspicious of politicians generally. (I think they have a right to be, considering how poorly politicians have served them over the past half-century.)
Democrats have made progress in this election, and it’s heartening that last month a majority of likely voters said that they once again see Democrats as the party of the working class. In the new Congress, Brown won’t be an isolated liberal populist voice, as he often has been in the past; he will have others who think as he does. May the rest of the Democratic Party offer them newfound respect, for in a populist world the United States and other countries will be better off if that terrain is occupied by a vanguard of social liberals who are also sensible economic populists.
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