Commentary’s Noah Rothman, always smart and worth a follow, remarked this morning on the announcement that Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel will be taking his second shot at unseating Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.
“If you’re Sherrod Brown, you’ve got to feel like the floor has buckled out from under you,” he said. “The Democratic Party in Ohio is a shell.”
To offer a counterargument, Brown is the one Democrat I would think most likely to survive the age of Trump — a labor Democrat, and someone whose political skills the Republicans in the state have long feared. He used to represent one of the areas (Lorrain County and parts south) where Trump did surprisingly well by winning white working-class Democrats. (More than 12 years ago, it was explained to our own Tim Carney that when Republicans drew that district after the 2000 Census, they actually tried to give then-Congressman Brown as safe a House seat as they possibly could just because they didn’t want to give him any encouragement to make a statewide run.)
Having said all that, Rothman has a good point. Ohio Democrats have just been shut out in two straight elections that weren’t very close at all. Their working-class voter base just rebelled against them throughout the state.
Ohio had been pretty competitive leading up to 2010 (Kasich defeated Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland by only 2 points that year), and of course Obama carried Ohio in 2012. Then in 2014, Republicans swept all five statewide constitutional offices for the second time in a row and expanded their already veto-proof (three-fifths) state legislative majority. Gov. John Kasich carried Cuyahoga County, the site of Cleveland.
That win had all the appearances of a fluke, the result of a weak 2014 Democratic nominee for governor. But in 2016, that result was fully ratified by the larger presidential-year electorate. We have the benefit of hindsight to tell us Ohio wasn’t even a true swing state in the presidential race. Trump ended up carrying it by 8 points, about the same margin by which Clinton Carried New Mexico.
The implication is that whatever party support system Democrats have counted on to remain competitive in the past, it’s broken down. Brown can win, but he has to win on his own.
The last time the two men faced off, Brown beat Mandel by just over 5 points, or about 270,000 votes — a respectable loss for Mandel against a strong incumbent, but a decisive win for Brown. Mandel, who supported Rubio in 2016, is not a Trump Republican, and he fared quite poorly in Youngstown and the other eastern Ohio counties where Trump did unexpectly well. (Speaking of which, Mandel immediately received the backing of the Senate Conservatives’ Fund, whose feud with Senate leadership was kind of an afterthought in 2016, for obvious reasons.)
It’s telling, and indicative of the Republicans’ likely messaging for 2018, that Mandel’s first ad contains Trumpian (or even Sandersite) rhetoric about a “rigged system.”
But of course, he will be running in Trump’s midterm, and that’s never easy for the incumbent president’s party. And I’m sure he isn’t counting on his ability to out-Trump Brown, who just minutes ago sent a missive to his campaign email list that is a sign of things to come:
On Monday, Paul Ryan and House Republicans decided to choose countries like China and Russia over states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
House Republicans stripped out a Buy America provision which would have required the use of American steel and iron in water infrastructure projects. So now, instead of supporting manufacturers and workers here in the United States, these projects can support manufacturers and jobs overseas.
