What Sherrod Brown says went wrong in his Senate race — and for Democrats

By Manu Raju and Clare Foran, CNN

(CNN) — For more on CNN’s interview with Sherrod Brown, watch CNN’s “Inside Politics Sunday with Manu Raju” this Sunday at 8 a.m. ET and 11 a.m ET.

Sherrod Brown can boil down the loss of his Senate seat to this: Donald Trump and withering GOP attacks.

And the top of his ticket didn’t help him much, either.

As the veteran Ohio Democrat takes stock of the loss in his marquee race, he also has a blunt message for his party: Win back working-class voters or lose more elections.

“I think that we don’t appear to be fighting for them,” Brown said when asked why Trump won the same blue-collar workers whom the Democratic senator has prided himself in courting through the course of his three-plus decades in Congress. “Workers have drifted away from the Democratic Party.”

In a wide-ranging interview with CNN, Brown bluntly criticized his party for not addressing voter concerns over rising consumer costs and declining economic conditions. And he accused Republicans — including his foe in the Senate race, Trump-aligned businessman Bernie Moreno — of distorting his record as he battled the headwinds at the top of the ticket.

And when asked whether he would run in 2026 for the seat being vacated by Vice President-elect JD Vance, Brown pointedly refused to say.

“I’m not dismissing anything at this point,” said Brown, 72, similarly leaving the door open when asked if he would run for governor.

Brown held one of four Senate seats that Republicans flipped as they seized control of the chamber. They will now command a 53-47 majority over the next two years.

But Brown, along with Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, had among the toughest slogs of any Democrat: running in red states while trying to maintain distance from their party’s nominee, Kamala Harris, as they tried to court Trump voters. Both men lost seats they’ve held since 2007.

“I lost, but we ran ahead of the national ticket,” said Brown, who fell to Moreno by 4 points. “When the leader of your ticket runs 12 points behind, almost, you can’t overcome that, even though it was a close race in the end.”

Asked whether he believed that Trump was the deciding factor in his race, Brown took a swipe at Moreno.

“A lot of things made the difference. I’d say it’s the money and Trump. That kind of money, month after month after month, with nasty negative ads,” Brown said. “I guess that’s how you win a race. You lie, you spend a lot of money, and then you, as my opponent, hope that your candidate, Trump in this case, would win by a lot.”

Moreno’s camp hit back.

“Sherrod Brown is a bitter career politician who’s lashing out because he has to find a real job for the first time in his life and work for his paycheck like everyone else,” Moreno spokesman Phil Letsou said.

Moreno’s campaign and his GOP allies outspent Brown and his allies on the air, with $251.9 million in total GOP spending compared with $232.7 million in total Democratic spending on the race, according to AdImpact data.

But there was a late surge of Democratic spending in the final month of the campaign, with Brown and his allies edging out the GOP with $83.3 million on the air compared to $77.4 million for the GOP.

In the interview, Brown said he believed going into Election Day that he would win his race.

“I expected to win because I’m out a lot, and I talk to workers. I talk to people year-round … I saw the enthusiasm in the crowds,” Brown said. “What I didn’t see is the ad they did at the end where Trump said, voting for Sherrod Brown is voting against me.”

In one ad for the Moreno campaign, Trump called Brown “a radical left politician” and said: “You’ve got to go out and back Bernie Moreno.”

And an ad from the Senate Leadership Fund — a top GOP super PAC — told Ohio viewers: “A vote for Sherrod Brown is a vote against Donald Trump.”

Moreno’s attacks over Brown’s record are particularly grating to the vanquished senator.

Asked whether he believed that Moreno ran a clean campaign, Brown said: “You can be the judge of that. I think when you run ads and they’re proven to be lies by fact checkers … you can connect that dot.”

‘A complete lie’

Republicans targeted Brown heavily over trans issues during the race — a line of attack the GOP deployed across the country and that Trump wielded against Harris.

After the primary, and through Election Day in the Ohio race, GOP advertisers spent a whopping $33.8 million on TV ads that referenced LGBTQ rights and transgender people’s access to bathrooms and involvement in sports.

In one GOP ad, a narrator’s voice says, “Six more years of Sherrod Brown? He’s for they/them, not you.”

“I cut an ad showing they lied,” Brown said, pointing to fact checks, including one that rated as false an ad that claimed Brown voted to “allow transgender biological men to compete in girls’ sports.”

“But that’s what they do,” Brown said. “They spend, they lie about — they take an issue that they know polls well, they lie about it.”

“They weren’t talking about how to make Ohio a better state,” he said.

Brown cut two ads worth about $3.3 million defending himself on the issue, including one where a narrator calls the ad a “complete lie.”

Letsou, the Moreno spokesman, defended the campaign’s attacks.

“The truth is Sherrod Brown lost because he chose to lie to Ohioans repeatedly,” the spokesman said, citing the senator’s record on issues including trans people’s involvement in athletics, border security and “endless wars” during the Biden administration.

When asked whether Democrats were out of touch on cultural issues and whether more should have been done to counter GOP attacks, Brown fired back.

“I’m not out of touch with those issues,” he said. “I go home. I hear people all the time. I know how they focus group and they lie. I mean, how do you call me out of touch when they lie about an issue?”

Democrats’ blue-collar problems

Brown, who served in the House for 14 years before being elected to the Senate in 2006, has long built a populist brand aimed at courting blue-collar workers, an appeal that has been successful over the course of a political career that started nearly half a century ago in the Rust Belt state.

But he says his party has fallen sharply out of step with working-class voters, starting with the enactment of NAFTA in 1994 and subsequent policy decisions. And he said the problem also stems from a failure to communicate.

“Republicans put inflation totally at the feet of higher government spending. That’s not what caused inflation,” he said. “Corporate profits are up. Stock market’s up. Wages have been flat. We need to take on those interest groups that cause that.

Early on in his administration, President Joe Biden attempted to reassure Americans by arguing that price hikes would be temporary, with some administration officials describing the issue as “transitory.” The president later turned away from that messaging, but high consumer costs continued to dog Democrats through November.

“That’s the mistake we made,” Brown said when asked about the “transitory” messaging.

CNN exit poll data shows Trump won voters without a college degree by 14 points over Harris, 56% to 42%. Four years earlier, he won the group by only 2 points over Biden.

Brown says Democrats consistently miss clear opportunities to appeal to those voters.

A federal judge in Texas recently struck down a Biden administration rule that would have expanded overtime eligibility for about 4 million workers. Brown said it’s an issue that Democrats should hammer Republicans over, especially since the judge was nominated by Trump.

“I’m pretty angry about it,” Brown said. “As you can see, one judge denied 4 million workers in this country their overtime. We ought to be talking about that. … And I know that very few Democrats have talked about it. And Trump and his crowd, his corporate crowd, they’re always looking out for their rich friends, hope it goes away and hope it gets ignored.

“But I’m not going to let it get ignored.”

CNN’s David Wright and Sheden Tesfaldet contributed to this report.

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