Democrat Sherrod Brown Explains How His Party ‘Let’ Voters Flip to Trump

Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said on Friday that the Democratic Party “let” voters side with President-elect Donald Trump this election cycle by not focusing on the working class.

Brown spoke with Politico’s Eugene Daniels on the Playbook Deep Dive podcast on Friday. The senior senator shared how “there’s no reason” Democrats “can’t focus on the dignity of work and human rights.” Brown lost his seat in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race to Trump-backed businessman Bernie Moreno.

The Ohio Senate contest was seen as one of the toughest for Democrats in the 2024 election, with Brown running for reelection in a red-leaning state that went for Trump by margins of about 8 points in 2016 and 2020. While Brown previously won reelection in 2018 during the Trump era, this was the first election where the Democrat shared the ballot with the former president.

Brown aimed to play up his support for unions and labor rights throughout the campaign. He also highlighted his efforts at being bipartisan and working with Republicans.

“I’m not an expert in psychoanalyzing how voters get to Donald Trump, but I know that we’ve let them get to Donald Trump by not focusing on them and listening to them and showing we’re on the side of workers all the time,” Brown said. “The national Democratic brand has suffered.”

Newsweek has reached out to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via email for comment.

By income levels, Trump seems to have won over working-class families during this year’s election. In 2020, President Joe Biden won over voters making under $50,000 annually by 11 points. This year, that group swung toward Trump by 3 points (50 percent to 47 percent), per CNN’s exit polling.

The Ohio senator pointed to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as when the Democratic Party started to move away from the working-class voter. The trade agreement went into effect in 1994 and eliminated most tariffs and trade barriers on products between the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Brown said progress has been made over the last four years under the Biden administration, but the “drift” has been going on for 30 years, so he can’t “pin the blame on anyone.”

While the plan was meant to close the gap of living standards, The Nation reported in February that the working class in all three countries is worse off today than they were prior to the agreement.

Democrats are “more blamed for it,” Brown explained because “they expect Republicans to sell out to their corporate friends and to expect the rich, but we don’t expect that from my party.”

The senator called this his “future” within the Democratic Party, adding that he does not see his own loss on November 5 as a “failure,” but as a way to refocus.

“I see it as sort of a new start in a sense of my continuing my work, focusing on workers,” Brown said. “Democrats have seen support of the workers party and the Democrats have historically been the party of workers. I’ve seen that support erode from workers because Democrats haven’t focused on workers the way that we should over the last 30 years.”

Brown is not the only lawmaker that has spoken out about the Democrats’ lack of worker support. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic Party, wrote a statement following the election suggesting that that Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat “should come as no great surprise” because Democrats had “abandoned working-class people.”

While Sanders praised Harris for her messages on abortion rights, democracy and Trump’s perceived unfitness for office, he—and other progressive critics—said the campaign fell short on bold, economic policy plans that they believe would have appealed to more working-class voters.

DNC chair Jaime Harrison pushed back on claims the party had left working class voters.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Harrison said Sanders’ comments were “straight-up BS,” adding that Biden was the “most pro-worker president of my lifetime—he saved union pensions, created millions of good-paying jobs, and even marched in a picket line.”

Harrison added Harris’ economic plans would have “fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country.”

In August, Sanders told Newsweek that “many working-class people feel that the Democratic Party has kind of abandoned them.” He had hoped at the time that Harris and her campaign would reprioritize the working-class voters.

“It’s the slow drift away from workers that our party needs to restore,” Brown said Friday.