Politics

Democrat Ex-Sen Sherrod Brown Returns After Two-Year Absence By Flipping JD Vance’s Former Seat Blue

Sen. Sherrod Brown (Screenshot YouTube/WTOL11)

Two years after losing reelection to a Republican, former Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown will return to the upper congressional chamber and take the seat once occupied by Vice President JD Vance.

Brown defeated incumbent Republican Ohio Sen. Jon Husted on Tuesday by a margin of two percentage points winning 48.6% of the vote to the incumbent’s 46.5% with 89% of ballots counted, according to the Associated Press. Outgoing Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Husted, who was then the state’s lieutenant governor, to the Senate in January 2025 to replace Vance, who resigned to assume the vice presidency.

The returning Democrat represented Ohio’s other Senate seat from 2007 to 2025, having lost reelection to a fourth consecutive term to Republican Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno in 2024.

Ironically, Brown had initially unseated DeWine, then a two-term senator, in 2006 to win his first election to the upper chamber. His earlier victory also occurred during a midterm cycle influenced by widespread backlash to an unpopular Middle Eastern war waged under a Republican presidential administration. Prior to beating DeWine, Brown served continuously in elected office for all but two years since 1975. He served in the Ohio House from 1975 to 1981, as Ohio’s secretary of state from 1983 to 1991, and in the U.S. House from 1993 to 2007.

President Donald Trump won the Buckeye State — which had previously been a hotly contested swing state — in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Since Ohio’s 2026 contest was a special election to fill the remainder of what would have been Vance’s term, Brown will be up for reelection in 2028.

The seat was widely viewed as crucial to the ambitions of Democrats, who had been relegated to being the chamber’s minority party for two years, in taking back the Senate. Brown was notably ahead of his opponent by 2.5 percentage points, within most surveys’ margin of error, according to RealClearPolling’s polling average, which aggregated survey results between Sept. 23 and Oct. 22.

The race was both the second-most expensive Senate race of the 2026 cycle — behind only Texas — and the third of all time, according to The Hill. Brown and Husted spent a combined $500 million in ads alone, the outlet reported Friday.

During the campaign, artificial intelligence (AI) data centers notably emerged as a hotly contested issue. Brown sought to use their unpopularity in the state to attack Husted. Ohio had 154 operational data centers, plus 27 under construction and 57 planned, according to US Data Center Map, relying on October tracking information. Four polls conducted from August to September indicated between 65% and 75% of Ohioans would oppose building one in their local community.

In addition, an August memo the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) sent to AI companies warned that the centers “are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”

“If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one,” the memo cautioned.

In October, Brown called Husted the “face of data centers” in the state, referencing how the then-lieutenant governor played a prominent role in recruiting tech companies to come to Ohio to build them. Brown, however, had supported early data centers being built in Ohio during his previous Senate tenure, calling one “great news” for the state in 2015.

Husted in July became the lead Senate sponsor of the Ratepayer Protection Act, which sought to shield taxpayers and businesses from paying steep energy costs brought about by data centers. While the House in September passed its version of the bill nearly unanimously, Senate Democrats blocked it.

Data centers were also a recurring topic which came up during a September town hall in Marietta, Ohio — which the Daily Caller News Foundation attended — as residents of Ohio’s predominantly conservative southeast expressed concerns over the prospect of AI-powered projects to the state’s Republican gubernatorial nominee at the time, Vivek Ramaswamy.

During the 2026 Senate campaign, Brown came under scrutiny by law enforcement personnel in Ohio for what they characterized as a shift in favor of left-wing, anti-police sentiment in the year following the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. His Dignity of Work Institute nonprofit aimed at appealing to working-class voters also hired an activist with far-left views on racial politics to be its inaugural executive director, the DCNF reported in April.

The NRSC’s messaging related to the race, meanwhile, focused on the fact that Brown has had a several-decades-long political career. The Senate Republicans’ campaign arm put out a daily press release series titled “Did You Know…” detailing famous events from Brown’s early career in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Did you know that Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object, was launched in 1977 – three years after Sherrod Brown was first elected to public office?” one such release stated. “Then for half a century – including 32 years in Washington – Brown collected taxpayer-funded paychecks while serving as Mission Control for the far-left agenda.”

While in the House, Brown had the reputation as a progressive and was notably part of a minority, mostly left-wing Democratic lawmakers, to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The 1996 bill, defining marriage as being between one man and one woman at the federal level, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton and had the support of many other prominent Democrats, such as Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Rosa DeLauro.

As he is set to serve alongside Moreno, Brown’s win marks the first time two senators from opposing parties who previously ran against each other will represent the same state since former Democratic Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and former Republican Arizona Sen. Martha McSally did so from 2019 to 2020.

The last time a seat vacated by a member of a winning presidential ticket flipped to the opposing party in the subsequent midterm election was in 2010, when Republican Mark Kirk won the Illinois Senate election to represent the seat previously held by Barack Obama.