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COLUMBUS, PAINESVILLE AND AKRON, Ohio — It was a raucous homecoming for Sherrod Brown.
AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" blared from ballroom speakers. Union stalwarts representing steelworkers, utility workers, construction workers and others greeted the 73-year-old Democrat with resounding cheers and endless handshakes.
This was the biennial gathering of the Ohio AFL-CIO, a crowd Brown has kept at the forefront of his agenda throughout his 50 years in public office, including 32 years in the U.S. Congress.
And these are the people Brown is counting on to send him back to Washington after suffering defeat at the polls two years ago.
"I want you to talk to people, because people will listen to you," he implored. "I want you to share information — how I spent my whole career fighting for workers."
If you're a pipefitter, he told the room, other pipefitters will listen to you, as will your friends at church and school and in your neighborhood.
"Tell them how important this election is, and how important it is that they get out and vote," he said.
A pivotal race
Brown's appeal to labor unions comes two years after the three-term U.S. senator was unseated by GOP businessman Bernie Moreno, losing in a year when President Trump won the most votes of any presidential candidate in Ohio history.
Now, Brown is hoping to regain a U.S. Senate seat by defeating incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted, who was appointed to fill JD Vance's seat early last year. The race remains a toss-up, one that could determine control of the Senate for Trump's final two years in office.
With early voting set to begin Oct. 6, union members are knocking on doors, phone banking and showing up at rallies for Brown. They're hoping to drum up enough support to overcome a shift that took hold in Ohio in 2016, when Trump ran on a promise to revitalize factories and put people back to work. That year, Trump won 54% of union households in the state, while Hillary Clinton won just 41%.
"Back when Hillary was running, so many people just — they wanted change," says Dave Janiszewski, a Democrat who split his working years between a steel plant and a paper plant before retiring nine years ago.
Now, donning a navy and gold United Steelworkers Political Action Committee jacket, Janiszewski is spending his days canvassing middle class neighborhoods around Columbus, doing exactly what Brown called for: knocking on the doors of union households, trying to persuade voters who aren't sure about Brown, or about voting in the midterms at all, that he's their guy.
"I've personally met him, know him — I've been around him since 2012," Janiszewski tells one young man who comes to the door. "He's always been there for working people."
A Democrat in an increasingly red state
Initially, Brown withstood Ohio's electoral shift to the right, winning re-election to a third Senate term in 2018, two years after Trump was first elected president. Aside from judges, Brown was the only Democrat still winning statewide races in Ohio.
Janiszewski says Ohio workers were clear on what Brown stood for. People knew him as the guy who vehemently opposed NAFTA, who showed up on picket lines, who only wore suits made in Ohio. In 2021, Brown pushed through legislation that saved the pensions of millions of union workers from insolvency. It was called the Butch Lewis Act, named after an Ohio truck driver who died while working to protect retiree benefits.
"Anything that we needed, he was there for us," says Janiszewski.
Still, by 2024, conditions proved insurmountable. At the top of the ticket, Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris by more than 11 percentage points. Brown lost to Moreno by less than 4 percentage points.
Dorsey Hager, executive secretary-treasurer of the Columbus/Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council, says those numbers are telling.
"It's no secret that President Trump won the state in '16, '20, and '24. A lot of that was due unfortunately to our members voting and supporting him and supporting some downballot Republicans, too," says Hager, noting that the council has supported Republicans in the past but has endorsed Brown this fall.
Hager is hopeful many of his members will follow that endorsement. Even though jobs are plentiful, he says many construction workers have told him they're suffering from high gas and diesel prices, high food prices and overall inflation.
"They're feeling it very hard," he says.
A split among labor
It's often said that union voters are not a monolith, and that's ever apparent in the U.S. Senate race in Ohio this fall. While most labor organizations have endorsed Brown, the building trades councils in Cleveland and Toledo have endorsed Husted, calling him a "friend and advocate" for construction workers. The Boilermakers union is also backing Husted, citing his support for union jobs in power plants, refineries and shipbuilding.
On the campaign trail, Brown is trying to counter those narratives, arguing that Husted is only looking out for Wall Street, drug companies, and the tech companies now building data centers across Ohio, thanks to massive tax breaks Husted championed as lieutenant governor.
But in Lake County, one of eight Ohio counties that abandoned Brown in the last election, Republican commissioner John Plecnik is confident union members will choose Husted this fall if only because Husted supports Trump.
"People aren't stupid. They know that the borders were wide open during President Biden's term, and it was hurting labor. It was hurting salaries," Plecnik says. "Now that we see strong border security, you're starting to see salaries tick back up again, jobs tick back up again."
A boost from public employees
While the phrase "union voter" often calls to mind a blue-collar worker, the Brown campaign is also focused on the state's unionized teachers, local government workers, and other public sector workers.
As part of his stump speech, Brown is reminding them of his final act in the Senate. Weeks after losing the 2024 election, Brown, along with Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, pushed through the Social Security Fairness Act, restoring full social security benefits to millions of public employees, including a couple hundred thousand in Ohio.
One of them is Patty Taylor, who worked in IT for the Akron Housing Authority for almost 30 years. To supplement her income, she sometimes took seasonal work with employers like UPS, FedEx and the department store Kohl's, and then worked a full-time job for a private company after retiring from the government. Those private sector jobs earned her social security benefits. But under a decades-old provision, those benefits would have been significantly reduced because she also has a government pension from her housing authority job, where she didn't pay Social Security taxes.
Brown and his cosponsors called it an unjust penalty. Their bill cleared the Senate by a vote of 76 to 20. Taylor, who's now 69, credits Brown with saving her retirement.
"He stood up for me, and he didn't even know me," she says. "If it wasn't for me getting the [full] Social Security, I would really, really be hurting right now."
So now, she's giving back.
In her retirement, Taylor is serving as secretary-treasurer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Retiree Chapter 1184. This fall, she's been spearheading a postcard writing campaign for Brown and the Democrat running for Ohio governor, Amy Acton. She has handwritten hundreds of postcards urging AFSCME members to vote and recruited other retirees to do the same.
Along the way, she's made sure to talk up Brown's last vote in the Senate.
"It has changed some of the people's lives that are in our subchapter," she says. "They said, 'We'll do postcards. How many postcards can I do?'"
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