Sherrod Brown

Call Democrat Sherrod Brown the once and future senator. After winning three terms in the U.S. Senate, Brown was defeated by Republican Bernie Moreno in 2024. In 2026 he again ran for the Senate, defeating Republican Sen. Jon Husted, who was appointed by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to replace Vice Pres. JD Vance in 2025.

Brown is a proud product of Ohio; he is also a stalwart progressive who has been called a “politician ahead of his time” for his positions on workers’ rights, same-sex marriage, and financial industry reform. Brown’s ability to champion those liberal positions in what was long considered the quintessential purple state—before it swung toward Republicans in the 2010s—is a testament to his considerable political skill.

Early life and education

Brown grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, the youngest of Charles and Emily Brown’s three sons. Charles Brown was a doctor and a Republican. Emily Campbell Brown, who had grown up in Georgia, worked in the community with groups including the YWCA and Habitat for Humanity, instilling in her sons a commitment to service and social activism. That did not always go well. Emily Brown recalled in a 2005 interview that Sherrod, who was named for her father, often found himself in trouble as president of his high-school student council: “He caused people a lot of headaches because he was such an activist.…The principal didn’t really care for him at all.”

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As a boy he was active in Scouting, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout and receiving his badge in 1969 from then-astronaut and future Ohio senator John Glenn. He attended Yale University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in Russian studies in 1974. While at Yale he became active in the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, who went on to lose to Pres. Richard Nixon. But politics was now in Brown’s blood. When the head of the county Democratic Party asked whether he was interested in running for the state legislature after graduation, Brown’s career was launched.

Political career

Brown was 21 on election day in 1974, when he upset the Republican incumbent for the Ohio House of Representatives. He did it without his father’s vote. “You’re too young,” Brown recalled his father telling him. And in fact he became the youngest person elected to the Ohio body at the time. He was reelected three times, serving from 1975 to 1982, when he was elected Ohio secretary of state. One of his key initiatives in that role was increasing voter registration. To that end he implemented a program whereby McDonald’s restaurants lined their trays with registration forms. “We had voter registration forms that had ketchup stains, but they were legitimate,” Brown said in an interview with Politico in 2014. He won a second term in 1986 but was defeated in 1990 by Republican Bob Taft, who later was the state’s governor.

In 1992 Brown ran for and won a seat representing Ohio’s 13th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. He won reelection six times. During his tenure in the House, he championed a number of policies—including some that directly affected his Ohio constituents and others that appealed to his progressive tendencies. One example of the latter was his push for federal funding to eradicate tuberculosis. He also voted against the war in Iraq in 2002 and gained some notoriety the next year when he took to reading the letters he received from Ohioans opposed to the war on the floor of the House. One constituent wrote:

“Bring back the troops.…Spend the $87 billion and more at home for schools, health care, basic infrastructure.…Take care of the people at home.”

He has long been a staunch supporter of same-sex marriage, casting a 1996 vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as involving opposite-gender unions. More than 25 years later, in 2022, he voted for the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex marriage.

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One of Brown’s centerpiece positions has been his support of labor unions and American manufacturing. It was that policy position that led him, during his first term in Congress, to rally opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In 2006 Brown declared his candidacy for the Senate, setting up a showdown with the incumbent Republican, Sen. Mike DeWine. Brown won the race easily, giving Democrats their first win in an Ohio Senate race since 1992. In three terms in the Senate, Brown continued to take progressive stances that put the rights of workers front and center. He eschewed his official Senate pin, instead wearing one that featured a canary. The pin had been given to him at a workers’ rally to commemorate the canaries that miners brought down into the mines to ensure their safety. Brown has said he wears it as a reminder of the role of government to “create and build a middle class.”

Brown provided strong support for the initiatives of Pres. Barack Obama’s administration, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010) and other health care reform measures. A leading advocate of education, he repeatedly convened the annual Ohio College Presidents Conference in Washington, D.C., to explore ways in which federal resources could be used to promote higher education and job training in Ohio. He also emerged as a critic of the financial and banking system, pressing the party’s case for reform on Wall Street.

He later was a vocal critic of Republican Pres. Donald Trump. In 2018 Brown was reelected to the Senate, and there was speculation that he might run for president in 2020. However, in 2019 Brown announced that he would not enter the race. He was defeated in his reelection bid in 2024 by Republican challenger Bernie Moreno in a race that seemed to cement Ohio’s status as a Republican stronghold. It was one of four states (along with West Virginia, Montana, and Pennsylvania) that Republicans flipped in 2024 to take control of the Senate.

Post-Senate career and comeback bid

Upon leaving the Senate in 2025, Brown founded the Dignity of Work Institute with the mission of returning the Democratic Party’s focus to working-class Americans. He told Politico immediately after his 2024 Senate loss that his future role was to “focus on helping the Democratic Party and my colleagues understand how important it is that we talk to workers and we make decisions with workers at the table.”

But other Democrats, most notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, had other ideas about Brown’s future in the party, making multiple trips to Ohio to woo Brown. It worked. By August 2025, just seven months after he left the Senate, Brown was running again.

The 2026 campaign saw Brown defeating Republican Jon Husted, who was both the incumbent and a newcomer, having been appointed by DeWine to fill the seat vacated by Vance. Brown will serve out the remainder of Vance’s term and be up for election again in 2028.

Key issues for Ohio voters in the November 3 election included the economy and higher gas prices fueled in part by the Iran War. In the last weeks of the campaign, artificial intelligence data centers also became a divisive issue in the race.