DAYTON, Ohio – On Sunday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the Democrat who has held a U.S. Senate seat for Ohio since 2007, was at a door-to-door campaign kickoff event on North Ludlow Street, telling Democratic supporters at a campaign office that his re-election campaign is primarily about his support for workers and “reproductive rights.”
Never mind that reproductive rights are not in danger in Ohio, as the state’s voters overwhelmingly voted in a referendum last November to amend the state constitution to guarantee the right to abortion and other reproductive “rights.”
Brown’s absence the next day, and every other day this week, was conspicuous, but for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which included a farewell to President Joe Biden and a nostalgic lovefest with former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama and will end Thursday when Vice President Kamala Harris formally accepts the party’s nomination for president.
Brown told CNN he doesn’t go and he “skips conventions a lot” or only goes “maybe for a day.” But a detailed search of newspaper archives shows he has attended every convention since his election. He also told a reporter in Philadelphia in 2016 that he endured an “arduous” 32-day screening process when Hillary Clinton’s campaign considered nominating him as running mate, and admitted he wanted the job more than he thought.
He was also in Charlotte, North Carolina, at Obama’s convention in 2012. That same year, he ran for re-election to the Senate against his Republican opponent Josh Mandel.
This week, however, Brown is arguing that he is staying in Ohio because he is seeking re-election, and that is what matters most. Brown is running against Republican Bernie Moreno, a Cleveland businessman in a state that has become decidedly Republican since Brown first ran for Senate in 2006. And more importantly, it is a state where former President Donald Trump, who is at the top of the ticket in this year’s election, is extremely popular.
Just 250 miles east of here, another senator and Democrat was also absent from the convention – for entirely different reasons. He wants to be home with his children.
Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), the young Democrat who earned his seat in 2022 while recovering from a severe stroke and who has openly rebelled against factions of his party on Israel, the border and the treatment of Biden after the debate, told reporter Peter Savodnik in Free Press“I have three small children and they have a day off school. That’s four days that I can spend with my children.”
For someone who has covered Fetterman for over 20 years, that answer makes sense. That’s just the way he is.
Political scientist Paul Sracic of Youngstown State University said of their decisions that both Brown and Fetterman have one thing in common: They know their voters.
“Brown has been winning elections in Ohio longer than many of the state’s voters have been alive,” he said of his streak of electoral victories dating back to 1974.
“He has always relied on rock-solid support in working-class neighborhoods like Youngstown, but those voters have abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of a Trump-led Republican Party,” he said of Trump’s stunning victories in Trumbull, Columbiana and Stark counties, beginning in 2016 and the final victory in Mahoning in 2020.
It’s important to note that Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) won in those same districts in his Senate race against former Congressman Tim Ryan, the Democrat whose congressional seat was in three of those four districts for decades. Sracic said Brown managed to hold his old coalition of voters together in 2018, but to win this year, Brown will have to repeat that feat against a more talented and better-funded opponent in Moreno.
“You often hear voters in the Youngstown area say they didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the party left them. Brown needs to convince voters that he is not part of the party that left them. This new, bright and progressive party will likely be on full display in Chicago, and Brown seems to understand that he needs to stay as far away from it as possible,” Sracic said.
Fetterman’s decision is actually the more interesting of the two, since he won’t be on the ballot for another four years, Sracic noted.
“Despite entering the political scene relatively recently, Fetterman won his Senate seat by appealing to the same renegade Democrats that Brown needs in Ohio. Fetterman’s odd support for Joe Biden when others abandoned him makes sense in that Biden, regardless of his politics, was something of a pedigree Democrat, like Sherrod Brown,” he said.
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In short, Fetterman could theoretically win votes that are not available to the current party.
Sracic said that although polls showed a very close presidential race in Pennsylvania, “Fetterman’s decision to stay away from the convention could be an important indication of what insiders really expect from the campaign in the Keystone State.”
