The Party That Must Not Be Named
· The Atlantic
For most of the past two decades, Ohio Democrats have hobbled home in defeat on Election Day, beaten and battered in a state that used to be a national bellwether. In 2024, Donald Trump ran up an 11-point margin, while Sherrod Brown lost his seat in the Senate. But earlier this month, I found Brown campaigning at Ohio State University, his red L.L.Bean fleece blending in with the students’ scarlet-and-gray apparel. It was the last day for Ohioans to register to vote.
“O-H!” Brown said. The students’ response came automatically: “I-O!” they screamed. Maybe they could try “O-H … I-vote,” Brown suggested with a smile. It didn’t quite catch on. After blowing a 20-point lead against Texas early in the college-football season, the Buckeyes have turned things around—and Democrats are clearly looking to borrow more than a chant from their playbook.
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Beating a Republican Party that has dominated the state for the past two decades, they believe, requires speaking directly to voters’ frustrations. Brown, in particular, has focused his campaign on reminding everyone how terrible things are, and is betting that tapping into Ohioans’ anger—spurred by a combination of high prices, an unpopular war, and a flailing president—might just be enough to return to the Senate. Less than two weeks from Election Day, there are signs that the strategy may be working. Most polls show Brown and Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor—a first-time politician and physician who served as director of the Ohio Department of Health during the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic—leading or tied with their GOP rivals.
At Ohio State, Brown’s cheery greeting was prelude to a bleak speech about the future that awaits young Ohioans. The 73-year-old warned that life would be much harder for these students than it was for him when he graduated (Yale, but he went on to earn two master’s degrees from Ohio State) five decades ago. “The system’s rigged,” he began, then listed all of the ways that young people are screwed: Corporations make more money than ever. Their CEOs earn hundreds of times more than the average worker. The dream of homeownership might be entirely out of reach for young Americans. Normal people, Brown kept repeating, just cannot get ahead anymore.
Brown was telling a group of ambitious students at the state’s top-ranked public university that they don’t have a future—or at least not the future they want. And they were captivated. Afterward, when Brown chatted with them individually, some looked like they were talking to a therapist.
Freshman Trent Carson told me he’s already afraid that he won’t be able to find a good job when he graduates. He also worries that his cousins, who are truck drivers, will be out of work if the price of diesel remains near record highs. Josie Speakman, the pink-haired College Democrats president who introduced Brown, voiced a similar pessimism. “It feels like we can't get ahead, despite working harder than ever,” she said. The system is broken, she told me, but Brown is going to fix it.
Brown’s speech lacked rhetorical flourishes; he spoke to the students in his signature rasp, offering no major ideas beyond pledging to end the Iran war and get rid of tariffs. Barack Obama he is not, except that Brown is the only Democrat besides Obama to win statewide political office in Ohio since 2006. Brown’s project this year is not to fix Democrats’ tattered image in the state; in fact, Brown seems determined not to remind anyone that he’s a Democrat unless he absolutely has to. His campaign ads target the incumbent, Jon Husted, for taking money from Jeffrey Epstein’s benefactors and supporting AI data centers that raise Ohioans’ electric bills. They do not mention Brown’s party affiliation. Nor does his campaign website. “In large swaths of Ohio, and the country, the Democratic Party’s reputation has become toxic,” Brown wrote in The New Republic last year.
Not that Brown’s political identity is a secret. Husted, who was appointed to the Senate last year by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine after J. D. Vance became vice president, was in elementary school when Brown was first elected to the Ohio legislature. It was the same year Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.
Brown is following the same approach that gave Trump three consecutive victories in Ohio: lean into voters’ grievances and convince them that voting for him is a way to fight back against the rotten status quo. It doesn’t matter if Ohioans think that Democrats are lousy too, so long as they vote for this one candidate who just so happens to be a member of the party.
One Republican strategist told me that in Brown, a candidate who is well known and well liked, Republicans face a formidable opponent amid a terrible political environment for the party. “People obviously do not feel better economically,” the strategist, whose organization did not authorize him to speak publicly about campaign dynamics, said, “so they’re taking it out on us.”
In 2024, Brown was also leading in the polls just weeks before the election, and then lost the Senate seat he had held for nearly two decades to now-Senator Bernie Moreno. So what’s different this year? Brown’s answer is simple: Everything has gotten worse. Life got more expensive. Washington got more corrupt. And because he’s no longer an incumbent, he can somewhat more convincingly claim to be an outsider. “The system’s more rigged than it was,” Brown told me during an interview with a group of reporters after the Ohio State event. “My message hasn’t changed.”
Republicans have responded by attempting to both validate voters’ concerns and suggest that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Ohio Republican Party Chair Alex Triantafilou, a lawyer from the Cincinnati suburbs, is spending the final weeks of the campaign traveling the state in a rented white minivan. Gas prices now average $4.07 per gallon in Ohio, down from $4.48 a month ago, after the legislature approved a 90-day gas-tax holiday—a policy proposed by Acton that Republicans adopted and repackaged into a victory for her Republican competitor, Vivek Ramaswamy.
[Read: Vivek Ramaswamy’s appalling campaign ad]
“I think if there’s any part of the Iran war that poses an issue for voters, it might be with gas prices, but we’ve solved that here in Ohio,” Triantafilou told me this month at a coffee shop near Columbus. He had driven more than 100 miles from Cincinnati that morning for a couple of meetings and was about to turn around and head back. He said he doesn’t think Ohioans are going to vote on how much it costs to fill up their tanks and considers the issue of affordability to be overstated by the media. The stock market is up, he pointed out.
Husted made a similar argument in a pep talk earlier this month to conservative activists going out to canvass in Delaware County, on the northern fringes of Columbus. “We have the most jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in our history,” Husted told reporters before the canvassing event. “We made progress.” He sought to remind voters that inflation was worse a few years ago, when Joe Biden was president and Brown was in the Senate.
Husted is no MAGA warrior. When he spoke to supporters at a barbecue on a farm near Athens recently, he earnestly asked attendees to call loved ones daily until the election and remind them to vote. A former collegiate Division III defensive back, Husted once turned down an opportunity to coach college football, and he still looks like someone who’d rather be outside tossing a ball around. At a rally in Youngstown last week, Trump was captivated by Husted’s athletic past. “I looked at his ass,” Trump said with admiration, “and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws. And I got it, you are a great athlete.”
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It was Trump’s second time in Ohio in as many weeks. In a midterm election, when turnout tends to be lower, getting Trump’s biggest fans to go to the polls is the way to win, Ohio Republicans told me. They’re banking on that remaining true, despite the president’s broad unpopularity. “I understand the national environment sucks. In the other states, there are gonna be blue waves,” Michael Hartley, a Republican consultant in the state, told me. But he remains convinced that Ohio favors Republicans and that those Republicans listen to Trump: “If we turn our people out, we win.” But Husted’s choice to tether himself to the president does not guarantee success when 60 percent of Ohioans disapprove of Trump, up from 44 percent at the start of his current term.
Trump is not the only one with an image problem in Ohio. It’s not hard to find prominent Democrats willing—eager, actually—to criticize their own party. And though Democratic self-flagellation is nothing new, what’s different in 2026 is that bashing their own party might be a winning strategy for Democrats in the state.
Ohioans are not voting for Democrats “because they’re Democrats. They’re voting for them because we’re not Trump,” Tim Ryan, a former Democratic representative from the Youngstown area who lost a 2022 Senate race to J. D. Vance, told me. Allison Russo, a former minority leader in Ohio’s state house who is now running for secretary of state, says that the party’s organizing efforts in the state have been “terrible” and that the party’s brand is “crap.” But Russo, who still speaks with a southern drawl from her childhood in Mississippi, isn’t particularly beat up about that.
“I would argue the Republican brand is becoming just as toxic,” Russo told me when we met in Upper Arlington, the Columbus suburb where she lives. She thinks she might win, which surprises even her. “What I thought my chances were at the beginning versus where we are now has shifted dramatically,” she said. A Democrat has not been elected Ohio secretary of state in 20 years.
A decade ago, as Trump barreled toward his first term in the White House, then–First Lady Michelle Obama offered Democrats some advice on how to respond to his divisive brand of politics. It was, she said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the Obamas’ family motto, a mantra of sorts that she and her husband would repeat to their young daughters as they grew up in the public eye: “When they go low, we go high.” Democrats grabbed onto the slogan, but the Obamas’ strategy of earnest, upbeat politicking did not help the party defeat Trump. In Ohio a decade later, Brown’s campaign all but repudiates the approach. When he tried to go high in the past, he “was shouted down by the ugly,” Diane Valentino, an elementary-school teacher in Delaware County, told me on the first day of early voting. She had arrived at the Delaware County Board of Elections before doors opened at 8 a.m., and stood with a small group of activists who were passing out Democratic flyers and sample ballots from the back of someone’s car. In this year’s election, Valentino felt, Brown had no choice but to “call out the darkness” of Ohio Republicans. “He didn’t strike first, but he had to step up,” Valentino said.
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After Brown cast his ballot that day in Columbus, he stopped to talk with a group of reporters. I asked him whether his campaign has a positive message to voters, or if tapping into frustration is the driving force heading into the final weeks of the campaign. “The positive message for my campaign,” Brown said, is, “I don’t see politics as left or right. I see it as whose side you’re on.” Not a Democrat—just on your side.
Obama himself is the one massive exception to the “don’t remind people you’re a Democrat” strategy. This weekend, the former president will make his first visit to Ohio since 2018, the last time Brown won. When Obama announced that he would speak at a rally with Brown and Acton in Cleveland, he said that he wants to elect “Democrats up and down the ballot.” That includes Brown—just don’t expect him to say so.