The Buckeye State’s most prominent (and well-funded) Dem attempts a comeback
Yesterday, former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown (D) announced that he will return for a comeback attempt next year after losing his seat last November to Republican Bernie Moreno.
Though Mr. Brown is a prodigious fundraiser and has had a successful decades-long political career, the numbers suggest reversing his 2024 loss will be a formidable task.
Last November, now-Sen. Moreno defeated Mr. Brown by 206,434 votes, or a victory percentage margin of 50.1 – 46.5. What makes Brown’s task more difficult in 2026 is that he actually received more votes in his defeat than he did upon winning his previous election, a 2018 re-election victory over then-US Rep. Jim Renacci (R). The cumulative results suggest the state is undergoing a major electoral shift.
In 2018, then-Sen. Brown was re-elected to a third term with a 53.4 – 46.6% win over Mr. Renacci. In that election, he garnered 2,355,923 votes. In his losing 2024 campaign, Sen. Brown’s vote total was 2,650,949, or 295,026 votes more than he received in his 2018 winning campaign.
In reality, even though Brown increased his vote total from six years previous, the 2024 end result proved a major underperformance. Because the Ohio turnout in the 2024 presidential election year was 29.2% higher than in the 2018 mid-term election, Sen. Brown would have needed to increase his vote total by 690,914 votes just to keep pace with his winning vote ratio from seven years ago.
Therefore, even with growing his vote total in 2024, Mr. Brown’s vote performance as it relates to his previous victory was substantially deficient.
In terms of the Ohio political landscape, Sen. Brown carried only 16 of the state’s 88 counties in 2018, yet his margins were large enough in the big counties to record a comfortable victory. In 2024, the counties he carried were cut in half, dropping to just eight of the 88 local entities.
Comparing Sen. Brown’s county win totals to that of President Biden in the same election year of 2024, the latter man carried one less. Only Lorain County, which Mr. Brown represented when he was in the US House and state legislature, voted for him in 2024, but chose President Trump in the national election. The other seven Biden counties also voted for Brown. The same seven counties supported Mr. Biden in 2020.
