| AUSTINTOWN, Ohio — Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown’s political future — and perhaps his party’s chances of holding on to the Senate — could come down to voters like Tom McGuire. McGuire voted for Barack Obama twice but flipped in 2016 to support Donald Trump. He’s planning to vote for Trump again this year — but he’s also backing Brown over his Republican challenger, Bernie Moreno. - “When you see all the ads on TV, [Moreno] barely talks about anything that he’s doing,” McGuire, 54, a contractor who lives in this Youngstown suburb, said as he loaded groceries outside the Giant Eagle supermarket wearing a Cleveland Browns cap and a Foreigner T-shirt. “It’s all about slamming the other guy.”
- Brown, he added, “just seems like a good guy.”
Brown might need to win hundreds of thousands of Trump voters as he seeks a fourth term in a state increasingly inhospitable to his party, as Theo reports. Trump is all but certain to win Ohio — and no Democratic Senate candidate has ever won a state Trump carried when he was on the ballot. Moreno is betting there are not enough McGuires for Brown to prevail in a state that has shifted to the right in the Trump era. The race could be pivotal as Democrats desperately try to hold their Senate majority. The clearest road for Republicans to retake the chamber is defeating Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana), who faces an uphill battle in a state Trump won by 16 points in 2020. But if Democrats manage to beat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in an upset or the independent candidate Dan Osborn defeats Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska), Brown’s race could be decisive. The margin of Senate control also matters. If Democrats lose the Senate next week, they’ll have a better shot at retaking it in 2026 if Brown and other vulnerable incumbents hold their seats. A changing coalition When Brown was last on the ballot in a presidential year, Ohio was a crucial battleground state. Obama held six rallies there in the final days of the 2012 campaign, en route to winning the state. Those days are over. Trump won Ohio twice, as White working-class voters who once backed Obama voted for him, and he is expected to carry it again next week. Neither presidential campaign is investing there this year for the first time in living memory. Brown has managed to keep winning as his state turned redder in part by running up bigger margins in the Columbus and Cincinnati suburbs alone — but he also needs to hold on to working-class voters elsewhere in the state who once voted for Obama but now support Trump. Moreno, a businessman and former car dealership owner from the Cleveland suburbs, is working to win over those voters by tying Brown to Vice President Kamala Harris and the rest of his party — a strategy that even Democrats acknowledge could repel some voters Brown used to win. - “The Democratic brand today is not resonating with those same working-class people,” said Tim Ryan, a former Democratic congressman who lost the 2022 Senate race in Ohio to JD Vance, a Republican who is now Trump’s running mate. “They think the party has left them. They think the party has gone coastal.”
But after 18 years in the Senate, Brown has his own brand — and a narrow edge over Moreno, according to several recent polls. Brown, Ryan said, “has a unique ability to be able to withstand what would hurt most Democrats across the state — including me.” ‘Might as well be called Trump County’ Nowhere epitomizes Brown’s challenge more than the Mahoning Valley, the industrial region of northeastern Ohio devastated by the decline of the steel industry. When Brown won his Senate seat in 2006, he carried Mahoning County, a traditional Democratic stronghold, by 47 points — a bigger margin than any other county in Ohio. Brown has never lost the county, but voters there have turned against other Democrats in the Trump era. Obama carried Mahoning County easily in 2012, but Hillary Clinton barely won it four years later. Trump won it in 2020. And in 2022, Ryan lost it to Vance even though Ryan represented part of the county in the House for two decades. - “I would have never thought in my lifetime that a Republican could carry that county in a statewide election,” said Bob Paduchik, a former Ohio Republican Party chairman whose mother grew up there. Now “Mahoning County might as well be called Trump County.”
Dave Chase, who managed Ryan’s Senate campaign, said focus groups in Mahoning County and elsewhere had underscored many voters’ growing antipathy toward Democrats. “We’d show clips of Tim Ryan on the House floor talking about cutting taxes or whatever, fighting for workers,” Chase said. “And you’d get people who would say, ‘Wow, I love him. I want to vote for him.’ And then you’d inform them he’s a Democrat, and they’d go, ‘Oh, I can’t vote for a Democrat.’ That’s the headwind that Sherrod’s facing this cycle.” A Brown voter switches sides Some Trump voters who stuck with Brown in 2018 are abandoning him this year. John Mshar, 67, a union backhoe operator who works for Youngstown’s city government, was a lifelong Democrat before he voted for Trump in 2016. He backed Brown two years later because Brown had championed legislation that would let Mshar take the full Social Security benefits he earned working in a stamping plant earlier his career, which he said he’s barred from receiving because he now works in the public sector. But Mshar is fed up with Democrats’ handling of inflation and immigration, and he is planning to vote for Moreno. He does not think Brown has done enough to break with a party he no longer recognizes. “They’re not for the working people,” Mshar said. “They used to be, but they’re not no more.” Read Theo’s full story here. | 
Theodoric Meyer and 
