By Maggie Severns and Lindsay Wise | Photography by Brian Kaiser for WSJ

It was a matter of weeks from when Sherrod Brown brutally lost his 2024 Senate re-election campaign to when he started calling old friends to workshop his next move.

Should I run again? Brown would ask confidantes on the phone. If I do, do I run for governor or the Senate? Brown doesn't like complaining -- "No crying on the yacht," he used to tell fellow lawmakers. So he finished his work on Capitol Hill and passed a bill to expand Social Security benefits on his last day. With seven of his eight grandchildren nearby, he choked back tears as he thanked his staff in a farewell address on the Senate floor. His days in Congress seemed done.

Back in Ohio, he relocated from Cleveland to Columbus, started a nonprofit to advocate for the working class and started driving his wife, who was nursing a broken shoulder, to her university teaching job. There he would sit in its wood-paneled library, working on a book about the labor movement and reading the news about Republicans' work to pass President Trump's tax bill. That's when Brown, 73 years old, began to realize he wanted his old job back.

"My wife and I thought that, in five years, I didn't want to look back and say, 'I could've beaten that guy,'" Brown told a supporter recently at a Cincinnati brewery. In August he entered the Senate race, where he faces Republican Sen. Jon Husted to fill out the last two years of the term JD Vance vacated when he became vice president.

Now Brown is staring down all of the Democratic Party's problems at once. To his right, blue-collar workers have defected over the last decade to Republicans, and a handful of unions have even endorsed Brown's GOP opponent. To his left, voters are thirsty for a younger and more disruptive type of progressive who will break from a party establishment they think failed them.

That's making the comeback bid for the septuagenarian Yale graduate, who was first elected to the House in 1992, an uphill battle. Not only has Ohio long ceased being a swing state and is now solidly red, Brown is also a veteran politician trying to persuade voters he is the one to take on Washington's ills.

The capital is where Brown over seven House terms and three Senate terms built a record of negotiating money for Ohio. It is where he burnished his reputation as a union ally and made powerful friends.

At campaign stops, Brown promises he can tackle affordability problems by going after health-insurance companies and making data centers pay for their own electricity. He taps his antiwar roots to argue against the war in Iran, and high gas prices that followed it. He argues he has a record of success standing up for the little guy, while his opponents say he is too embedded in the system to change it.

"Nothing says 'outsider' more than a guy who's only been in elected office his whole life and spent three decades in Washington, D.C.," said Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, who defeated Brown in 2024. "The voters of Ohio just realized, 'Oh, this guy's a total phony.'" Added Husted: "More people think he's a senator than me."

The story Brown told at the Cincinnati brewery reflects the argument that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made to Brown and his wife, the journalist Connie Schultz, over dinner in Columbus a year ago. The New York Democrat told Brown he would never feel at peace if he didn't run for the seat, according to a person familiar with their conversations. A group aligned with Schumer has pledged to spend $60 million helping Brown win.

Most years a candidate would kill for such advantages, but in 2026, they come with downsides. Attention-grabbing leftists such New York's Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic Socialist who unseated a congressional-caucus chair to win her primary, have stolen the spotlight by signaling a break from a party that many of its own voters dislike. In one recent Associated Press poll, when asked about their current party, two in 10 Democrats gave a positive response while others used words like "weak" or "ineffective."

Brown's supporters note he is the only Democrat to win statewide in Ohio in more than decade. He won his 2018 race by nearly 7 percentage points but in 2024 lost by 4. Recent polling shows the contest to be close.

"I'm so glad that Sherrod Brown is running again -- and what a damning indictment of the situation Democrats are in that he's the only option in Ohio," said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits young candidates.

An early antiglobalist

Brown was born in the small city of Mansfield, Ohio, the son of a physician. During high school, he organized student anti-Vietnam War protests, and he was recruited to run for the Ohio statehouse when he was senior at Yale. He later won elections for secretary of state, U.S. representative and, in 2007, senator. He eventually rose to chair the powerful Senate Banking Committee.

In Washington, he would hit the Senate gym not just with Democrats like Schumer but also Republicans. On Wednesday mornings he hosted an interfaith prayer group. After Brown lost his Senate seat, the group moved from his office to Zoom, where it continues to meet.

When many Democrats were eager to jump on former President Bill Clinton's free-trade bandwagon, Brown whipped votes against the North American Free Trade Agreement. He wrote a book in 2004 about how globalism was a lie sold by elites that would harm workers -- a decade before Trump seized on the message to overtake the Republican Party.

Yet he failed to enact his biggest priorities, including single-payer healthcare during the Obamacare debates, targeted tariffs on Chinese imports and banning institutional investors from owning homes.

These days Brown usually wakes up at home, where he and Schultz have two rescue dogs. In a blue Chevy Traverse SUV, Brown zigzags the state, often sporting a quarter-zip and chinos, an Apple watch and all-black New Balance sneakers.

He frequently holds public events at local breweries, often before they open. While people sip on early-afternoon IPAs, he works the crowd like an enthusiastic party host, remarking, "I know you!" or "Haven't we met?"

One recent afternoon in Cincinnati he was delivering a diatribe against stock trading in Congress -- his most-used anti-Washington cudgel -- when he paused to wave to a woman in a brand-new Sherrod Brown T-shirt.

"When you're doing stock trades, you're looking out for these companies' interests -- hi Harriet, how are you?" said Brown. He fumbled, then teased: "You broke my rhythm!"

At recent events in Toledo and Cincinnati, more than a hundred people showed up midday. Many were retired liberals, and some came clutching copies of his books to have signed.

An apathetic barber

The devoted supporters mask a challenge lurking beneath the surface for Brown. Cities hold troves of Democratic voters but many are apathetic. In some urban areas, voter turnout in the 2024 election hovered just above 60% -- far lower than the 80% or more who voted in some Trump-loving regions.

Ohio politicians said the Democratic Party neglected organizing urban voters and took them for granted. On the far left, some said Brown failed to take on issues that animate the electorate most, including a harder line against Israel.

"Things have shifted," said 30-year-old Cleveland City Council Member Tanmay Shah, one of few Democratic Socialists elected in Ohio. "I would like to see [Brown] take a stronger stance on things like the war in the Middle East. I think that would energize the base." Brown has historically been a staunch ally of Israel, and has criticized the war in Iran.

The neighborhood surrounding the brewery Brown visited had low turnout last election, which a group of young Democrats is trying to change. One organizer, Doug Walton, is on a quest to get his barber, Ted, to vote.

"I begged and I pleaded," Walton said. "I text him stuff about the evil things Trump is doing." During May's Democratic Primary, statewide turnout among Democrats was up, but Walton had no luck. He is hoping he can get Ted to vote in November.

A tough crowd

On a recent afternoon, Brown sat in the shadow of a 20-foot combine harvester at a barn in Lima, the heart of Ohio's soybean-and-alfalfa country. He was face-to-face with voters who have turned away from Democrats. The county surrounding Lima voted by nearly 3-to-1 for Trump over Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.

Surrounded by seven farmers, Brown avoided politics and talked about alfalfa. "What would make me bale alfalfa instead of selling?" he asked. "What about alfalfa prices? What makes them move?"

One guest explained that farmers can analyze semen to breed almost all heifers, which is ideal for milk and meat. Brown seized on the remark to land a laugh: "That isn't going to, like, spread to human beings is it?"

Denny Verhoff, the host, said it was a "tough" area for Democrats these days. His guests said they liked Brown but were divided on whether they would vote for him. "I'm very disappointed in the Democratic Party," said one guest. "Every politician wants to hear what people have to say -- but can they actually get anything done?" asked another.

Brown said it was important to meet with rural voters regardless of party. "I get votes that maybe some other Democrats don't get because I listen, and I translate that into action," he said.

After about an hour in the barn, Brown stepped into the afternoon sun to take questions from local television stations and the farmers indoors drifted toward a cooler of Busch Light.

With Brown standing in front of cameras, politics was again front and center. Prices are too high, he said, and healthcare too costly -- and the Republicans have only "made things worse."

Write to Maggie Severns at maggie.severns@wsj.com and Lindsay Wise at lindsay.wise@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 25, 2026 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)