Rust Belt Rebound

Few contemporary Democratic politicians have defied the odds like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown. In his bid to win a fourth term to the Senate, Brown evinces the same earthy determination that catapulted him to prominence in the House during the George W. Bush years. Then as now, Brown positioned himself as a voice for the underdog: unionized steel workers fighting for their pensions, low-wage service workers, those whose lives have been turned upside down by medical debt. But above all Brown has distinguished himself as an unapologetic foe of globalization and its primary catalyst: bilateral and international trade agreements shorn of even the most basic labor or environmental protections.

This stance has been key to his success in conservative-leaning Ohio, which is still the third largest manufacturing state in the country despite being widely seen as one of  the epicenters of industrial decline. A true political survivor, Brown has eluded his party’s dismal fortunes in this former swing state won twice by Barack Obama. Yet Brown’s unwavering opposition to economic orthodoxy makes him an even greater rarity among national Democrats; rather than be a “red state” Democrat à la Joe Manchin, whose moderation seemed calibrated to antagonize everyone left of center, Brown has repeatedly won split-ticket voters as an unabashed “progressive populist” supportive of both abortion rights and clean energy.

Brown’s remarkable consistency lends him a critical edge over Bernie Moreno, his right-wing opponent. Protectionist sentiment in Ohio runs deep, and while it traces back to the GOP’s support for infant industries during—and even before—the Civil War, its locus shifted to union-aligned Democrats in the late 1960s and 1970s, during the first great wave of deindustrialization. Brown, as many profiles have recounted, first earned his stripes as a state representative by attending union hall meetings in those lean years. Although that period proved merely a foretaste of the trade shocks to come, his persistent outreach forged an image of uncommon authenticity. Recalling the Rooseveltian tradition, he would be undeterred in his fight for “people who are getting screwed by the system.”

Brown’s hope this November is that the battle lines could not be starker for Ohio’s wage-earners. The juxtaposition with Moreno, a smarmy luxury car salesman and political novice, would seem to favor Brown. After winning the Republican primary in March, Moreno boasted, “We have an opportunity now to retire the old commie.” It was not exactly a battle cry to rally workers immiserated by decades of multinational offshoring and underpriced import competition.

In an election season full of choice reminders, Moreno’s candidacy is certainly one of the more transparent examples of MAGA’s phony populism. Yet Moreno’s cheap red-baiting is not quite the badge of honor for Brown that it might normally be. However staggered, the U.S. party system has witnessed some important policy realignments since 2016 that, while validating Brown’s critique of globalization, have paradoxically eroded his standing as a distinctive voice for industrial workers and Ohio’s manufacturers.

Most centrally, Donald Trump’s GOP has pivoted back to industrial protectionism as part of its promise to counteract China’s neo-mercantilist development strategy, thereby junking the neoconservative view of American power and global capitalism that defined the party a generation ago. As demonstrated by Tim Ryan’s defeat in the 2022 race for Ohio’s other Senate seat at the hands of J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, that move not only exploited deep-seated discontent with NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, both enacted under Bill Clinton, but cut into terrain that Brown and Ryan had staked their reputations on. Progressives and elite donors, for their part, have been conspicuously divided over the Biden administration’s “concession” to the Trumpian view of trade policy, despite the fact that over half of the Democrats’ House Caucus is still comprised of fair-trade advocates. This dispute has muddled the media narrative about the resurgence of protectionist sentiment, depriving Brown of a clear-cut symbolic victory. Under Biden, the liberal establishment has been forced to reckon with its sanguine assumptions about globalization, much as Brown has urged, yet he has not been heavily credited with influencing Washington’s grand “paradigm shift.”

In this altered political landscape—wherein Bidenism has broadened the scope of state intervention in the economy but struggled to galvanize blue-collar voters—Brown cannot merely lean on his iconoclasm to prevail. Indeed, while the old Washington Consensus appears moribund, Brown has little incentive to crow about where he has stood on the issues facing working-class Ohioans. Instead, he must make the case for how Ohio could be the cornerstone of a national manufacturing revival without minimizing the long road ahead. Like GOP-dominated states in the Southeast, Ohio stands to benefit greatly from the Biden administration’s signature industrial and infrastructure policies, should they reach their full potential. Brown, accordingly, has touted various investments and grants furnished through recent legislation, particularly the CHIPS and Science Act, while lobbying the administration to make buy-American provisions and project-labor agreements central to its broader industrial strategy.

On these counts, Brown’s policy leverage in Washington is just beginning to be felt. Yet from the vantage of at least some working-class households, Ohio’s fragmented economy may overshadow Brown’s growing policy influence. Headline-grabbing investments by companies like Intel—some of which are in doubt due to project delays and two years of elevated interest rates—could be of vanishing import relative to other trends. From auto parts to cereal, plant closures continue to afflict the state’s battered manufacturing base, while poverty and food insecurity rose during the pandemic. Faced with a mixed picture on regional manufacturing, progressive think tanks and advocacy groups naturally want to foreground what many analysts have called an unusually tight labor market, which typically boosts workers’ bargaining power, even at nonunion businesses. But Brown has reason to reject Democratic talking points about a strong national recovery from the pandemic recession. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Ohio’s economic growth was middling during the inflationary period of mid-2021 to mid-2023, ranking forty-fifth in the nation.

Ohio, moreover, is a microcosm of rising regional inequality and its partisan dynamics in the United States. Brown quite understandably loathes the term “Rust Belt,” but the pattern of divergent regional outcomes it evokes eerily matches what has unfolded in Ohio since the 1990s. In a state that lost over 3,500 manufacturers in the 2000s alone and over 350,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990, growth and opportunity increasingly depends on the greater Columbus metro area, a Democratic stronghold noted for its universities and medical centers; as with Ohio’s rural counties, all “legacy cities” have seen their populations aged fifty-four and younger decline since the turn of the century. That does not mean Ohio is ripe for migration from high-rent zip codes along the coastal Northeast or other regions. Although Ohio overall ranks as the second most affordable state for homeownership, the national housing crisis has snuck up on Columbus as well as flagging hubs such as Cincinnati and Cleveland, weakening affordability where decent jobs are most available.

Still, perhaps the most worrying indicator of economic distress is Ohio’s underwhelming labor-market participation. At the peak of its employment rebound last summer, when approximately 5.6 million residents were employed out of a population just shy of 11.8 million, Ohio had nearly 1.6 million non-retired adults missing from its workforce. Even when factoring the role of unpaid caregiving, this shortage underscores just how checkered economic opportunity has become in the state. Should the economic forecast darken—Ohio’s official unemployment rate has ticked up to 4.5 percent in the last year—Brown’s incumbency could prove to be more of a drag than an asset in swing districts and micropolitan locales where inflation, not job growth, has dominated voters’ minds.

Of course, the state’s GOP establishment has had a direct hand in perpetuating Ohio’s structural economic woes. Since the 2010 midterms, Republicans have controlled the governor’s office and enjoyed majorities in the state legislature, while flagrant gerrymandering has helped them clinch supermajorities in the last two election cycles, which has allowed them to enact generous tax abatements and, more recently, pursue “flat tax” proposals to entice business investment. These strategies have neither turned the tide for rural communities and smaller cities, nor have they arrested the state’s population decline. In Appalachian Ohio, the state’s most underwater region, an estimated 17 percent of the population was in poverty last decade. Statewide, the bright spots have been few and far between: after the Great Recession, Ohio encapsulated the phenomenon of a “jobless” recovery, as evidenced by chronic underemployment, long-term unemployment, and plummeting labor force participation among prime-age men.

One might reasonably conclude on the basis of these trends that a majority of Ohioans regret the level of power they have granted Republicans. Or, as some liberal pundits have been itching to affirm, that reactionary cultural resentments simply outweigh questions of political economy. But as with other states where Democrats were once viable up and down the ballot, the political climate is far more complex than most media narratives would suggest. Notably, Ohio has not become a right-to-work state despite its rightward drift; around 640,000 of its residents are still union members, no small feat given the state’s steep manufacturing losses. There are signs dogmatic social conservatism has met its limits too. In a state referendum last fall, the right to an abortion before twenty-two weeks of pregnancy was passed by 57 percent of voters; most recently, parts of the GOP establishment and business leaders have defended Haitian migrants against vicious calumnies spread by Trump and Vance. A descent into fringe MAGA-style politics is not inevitable—something Brown’s own cross-partisan appeal should testify to.

At the same time, political apathy and disengagement runs worrisomely high. A 2023 report estimates that the state has two million unregistered eligible voters and another seven hundred thousand inactive ones, with black Ohioans comprising nearly one in five of the latter. Given Trump’s hefty margins in 2016 and 2020 and the state GOP’s consolidation of power, effective outreach by the Democratic Party at the local level has clearly withered. That seems to have left Brown’s campaign to carry the burden. But while his team should be seasoned enough to register the stakes—it netted nearly $31 million in campaign donations over the summer and has rallied close allies from organized labor—it is an open question whether a greater share of younger and nonwhite voters can be mobilized via Brown’s signature issues. In the end, a lackluster turnout effort conditioned by Harris’s general election strategy, which generally ignores Ohio, could cost Brown crucial votes, especially if he cannot again muster 40 percent or more of the vote in Eastern Ohio’s red counties.

Brown is also plainly up against his party’s tarnished national brand in the Rust Belt. Along with West Virginia, Missouri, and Indiana, Ohio is a case study of how the “nationalization” of party politics along neo-sectional and identity-based lines has been playing an outsize role in the party’s declining support beyond the coasts. As Marcy Kaptur, one of Ohio’s veteran Democratic representatives, has warned, her party increasingly represents the wealthiest congressional districts in the country, which indubitably shapes how it determines and communicates its priorities, including electoral strategy. While some analysts contend this demographic shift has not reduced the Democratic Party’s support for progressive economic goals—that, on the contrary, the party has moved in a social-democratic direction since the 2018 midterms—neither has it burnished the party’s image with less-educated workers. In a state replete with bitter reminders of NAFTA’s and PNTR’s consequences, Brown must surmount hardened perceptions that Democrats favor elites in “knowledge economy” sectors like tech and finance over workers in traditional industries.

These dynamics capture why Brown might no longer be able to handily outperform his party’s deficit in the state. Still, another part of Brown’s predicament is that even the most ardent advocacy seems to barely grease shovel-ready projects. That this is true even with a president as responsive to Brown’s causes as Biden magnifies the quandary facing pro-labor progressives in the industrial heartland. At this stage, the most hollowed out parts of the interior Northeast and Midwest are in desperate need of massive rural and urban redevelopment programs that dwarf what is being furnished through Biden’s industrial policies, important though they are. But articulating the true scale of the problem, let alone contemplating its resolution, is difficult in light of the Democratic Party’s pronounced—and, in so many ways, self-inflicted—regional weaknesses. In fact, due to the growing fragility of their base, Democrats who hang on in swing states and red states must sometimes temper the inclination to embrace populist themes.

Though evidently proud of his progressive bona fides, Brown is no exception here. Despite his many jabs against corporate greed, Brown can exhibit a pragmatic approach to economic development; like other Democrats from the broader region, he has to strike a conciliatory pose in an environment where disinvestment and outsourcing has been the norm. The potential gush of investment that awaits Ohio if new chips foundries and battery plants ramp up construction is too prized to adopt, say, Bernie Sanders’s more combative line against corporations.

Then again, Brown at his core is an economic nationalist, much as he has tried to parry the “protectionist” label in the past. The imperative to shore up his greatest strength in Ohio nevertheless betrays a certain limit to his political lexicon. In the era of Bidenism, the tricky terrain occupied by Brown exemplifies where economic populism and developmental realism meet. After all, as a Democrat who authored a book entitled Myths of Free Trade at the height of globalization, Brown essentially personified Bidenism in-waiting: pro-tariff, pro-subsidy, pro-economic sovereignty.

That orientation has the potential to cut both ways in the election. An unflinching China skeptic, Brown can sound nearly identical to Robert Lighthizer, a fellow Ohioan and Trump’s former U.S. trade representative, when it comes to protecting domestic industries from “cheating” by what is, or will soon be, the world’s largest economy. While doing so might help Brown outmaneuver Moreno, in other ways it magnifies how economic populism is a secondary aspect of the Biden agenda. To the alarm of many progressives, the geopolitical considerations that have to some degree enabled Bidenism’s more promising features have muted calls in the Democratic Party for restraint and diplomacy in the competition with China. The test for Brown, then, is whether he can keep “Trump Democrats” and blue-collar independents within his reach without repelling left-wing activists and young people frightened by the prospects of conflict in the South China Sea or the expanding war in the Middle East.

If he fails, it will be nothing less than a shock to the party system. For a half-century, Brown’s equipoise between left-populism and economic nationalism has served him well. But his white-knuckle edge in this race—less than 2 percentage points in the latest 538 polling average—is a reminder that not even a politician with his tenacity can evade the cross-pressures of a changing order. The dark irony is that while Brown’s crusade has at last been vindicated, Ohio’s perennial economic trials seem as daunting as ever. Come next week, we will know whether fighting the good fight is still enough to win in the Rust Belt.