COLUMBIANA, Ohio — Heading into Election Day two weeks ago, the Ohio race between Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Republican challenger Bernie Moreno was technically neck and neck, with Moreno having an average lead of 0.8 percentage points.
Moreno, joined by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), stopped in this picturesque Columbiana County town before speaking at the Mahoning County Lincoln Day Dinner event in Youngstown.
Brown was also in Youngstown at the Teamsters Union Hall Local 377. He was also in Lordstown a couple of weeks earlier to speak with union autoworkers.
The Mahoning Valley counties of Mahoning, Stark, Trumbull, and Columbiana have been the beating heart of the working class for over 100 years — and for 92 years, Democrats had their votes.
That all began to change in the presidential election of 2016, when voters here looked around at the impact of a combination of automation, technology, and trade deals they thought benefited China and Mexico. As they lost jobs, all under the watch of national Democrats whom they helped place in office, they began to vote independently from the party with which they had identified by birth.
Donald Trump did not win Mahoning County that year. Hillary Clinton won the county with 49% of the vote to Trump’s 46.9%. The closeness of that vote total, however, in a historically Democratic area, signaled the beginning of a political earthquake that few noticed. Why? Well, because four years earlier, then-President Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney by a whopping 28 percentage points, earning more than 63% of Mahoning County’s vote.
Four lifetimes of elected Democrats for every office up for grabs had people looking around at the scarred landscape of empty storefronts, brownfields where factories once stood, shuttered churches and barbershops, and dwindling hope — so they finally voted for something better.
In 2018, when Brown was up for his third term, he won, but it was much narrower than the races he won in 2006 and 2012. Perhaps the Brown calculation was that his left-leaning populism still held appeal and that by 2020, Trump would not win “the valley.”
The opposite happened, and Trump won Mahoning Valley in 2020, at the same time that then-Rep. Tim Ryan, a Niles Democrat from the valley, barely won the seat he had held for two decades. To showcase the erosion among working-class voters in Ryan’s home county, Trumbull, his support went from an all-time high of 74% of the vote to just under 48% that year.
Knowing it was unlikely in 2022 that he could hold on to this congressional seat because of the center-rightward shift of the working class, Ryan ran for Senate that year against political novice J.D. Vance, of Middletown, Ohio, who had just won a bruising Republican primary and was untested running against a Democrat.
Despite predictions that Vance did not have the chops or message to win that Senate race against Ryan, he did, earning 53.1% of the vote to Ryan’s 46.9%. Every Mahoning Valley county went for Vance.
Despite the warning signs, Brown announced in December 2023 that he was seeking a fourth term in office, and the national Democratic Party and its union leadership made his reelection their highest priority. What they failed to understand was that while the national party and union leadership, which had gone far left, had Brown’s back, center-right Ohio Democrats and rank-and-file union members did not.
Even after Ryan lost in 2022, he exemplified Democratic denial of reality this year, telling Politico in a July interview that the middle class would reward Democrats because “Trump is not trying to reach out to independent voters, moderate voters, [in] that he’s doubling down on extremism.”
Brown, who tries to present himself as a champion of the working class, lost his Senate seat on Nov. 5 to another Republican novice, Moreno, by 4 percentage points, with the Mahoning Valley giving the Republican businessman its support. The Mahoning Valley has become the poster child for that slow drift of the working class away from the Democrats. It is the epicenter of the shift in our political parties, and it was always available for Democrats and reporters to try to understand, but they did not.
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The evidence that Moreno was on his way to a healthy victory was no more apparent than in his primary election results in March during his three-way primary race. He clocked in his biggest wins in Mahoning County with 61.4% of the vote and in Trumbull County with 61.1%.
Last week, Brown told Politico in a wide-ranging interview on why he lost that he is not going away and that he is going to stay in this arena. And on the speculation that he might run for Vance’s seat when Vance becomes vice president, Brown said he has “not ruled anything out.”