After more than three decades in Congress, Sherrod Brown is asking Ohio's labor movement to help him do something he has never done before: win back a Senate seat he lost just two years ago.
The 73-year-old Democrat appeared at the biennial gathering of the Ohio AFL-CIO in Columbus, where a ballroom full of steelworkers, utility workers and construction workers welcomed him with loud cheers, endless handshakes and a soundtrack of AC/DC's "Thunderstruck." For Brown, the reception was a homecoming of sorts. Union members have sat at the center of his political identity across 50 years in public office, including 32 years in the U.S. Congress.
Now he is counting on those same workers to send him back to Washington. Brown lost his Senate seat in 2024 as working class voters across Ohio shifted heavily toward Donald Trump. In the current cycle, he is seeking to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted, and his path back runs directly through the state's organized labor ranks.
Speaking to the union crowd, Brown did not ask for money or endorsements so much as for conversations. He urged members to talk to their neighbors, their friends at church, their children's schools — anyone who might listen to a familiar voice rather than a television ad.
The pitch was personal and specific. If you are a pipefitter, Brown told the room, other pipefitters will trust what you say. The same goes for friends and neighbors who share a trade, a pew or a school pickup line. He asked them to spread the word about how he has spent his career fighting for workers.
That message is central to Brown's strategy. His 2024 defeat exposed a deepening weakness for Democrats among Ohio's working class, a bloc that once formed the backbone of the party's statewide coalition. Trump carried Ohio comfortably, and Brown was swept out alongside other Democrats as voters without college degrees moved further toward Republicans.
Brown's calculation is that union membership can still cut through that partisan drift. Union households have historically leaned Democratic, and Brown has cultivated those relationships for decades. His appearances at labor events are not new; they are the foundation of a brand built on lunch buckets, picket lines and manufacturing policy.
Whether that brand still carries weight in a state that has twice backed Trump is the central question of the race. Ohio's Senate contest is one of several that will determine control of the chamber, giving the state outsize influence on the national balance of power. Democrats need to defend seats and flip others, and Ohio represents one of their most high-profile opportunities — or one of their most painful missed chances.
Husted, the Republican incumbent, holds the advantages of an established statewide profile and a state that has trended red. Brown holds the advantages of name recognition, a long record and deep ties to labor. The collision between those forces will test whether union outreach can still overcome broader political currents.
The race also carries symbolic weight beyond Ohio. Brown has framed his career around worker protections, trade policy and pensions, and his comeback bid is effectively a referendum on whether that style of Democrat can still win in the industrial Midwest.
For union leaders, the stakes are equally clear. A Brown victory would validate their role as a decisive political force at a moment when union membership nationally remains far below its mid-century peak. A loss would raise fresh questions about labor's ability to move voters in the states where it once mattered most.
Brown's appeal to the AFL-CIO gathering reflected that urgency. He did not present himself as a candidate asking for a favor. He presented himself as a known quantity asking workers to vouch for him the way they would for a coworker or a neighbor.
That approach depends on trust that cannot be manufactured late in a campaign. It relies on relationships built over five decades, on members who remember Brown showing up before he needed their votes, and on a belief that his record matches his rhetoric.
The next several months will show whether that reservoir of goodwill is deep enough to overcome the partisan realignment that cost him his seat. Ohio's working class voters will decide, and Brown is betting that the most persuasive messenger is not him — it is them.
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