Sherrod Brown: Clinton could have won election
Ohio senator says if he had been running mate, he would be VP.
They could hear him before they could see him - that low, rumbling outboard motor of a voice. It could only be Sen. Sher- rod Brown.
“Oh, that voice,” said Jose Arroyo, a third-generation steelworker, as it reverber- ated through the union hall. “I love that voice.”
Brown doesn’t know how he ended up sounding that way. It wasn’t from smoking or drinking, he says; maybe all those years of yelling at the Cleveland Indians on TV. His laryngologist routinely sticks some awful thing down his throat but hasn’t found anything wrong with him yet. And politically speaking, it’s his voice that’s keep- ing him healthy.
“When he talks to you,” said Arroyo, now a union rep, “he knows the language. He sounds like a working man.”
The Democratic senior senator from Ohio arrived at United Steelworkers Local 1375 for a roundtable discussion on trade in a pressed suit (made just 12 miles from his house by union workers, he’ll have you know) that belied his second-only-to Bernie Sanders reputation as “rumpled,” paired with black Velcro shoes.
He’d been coming to union halls like this ever since he first ran for office at 21, long before his voice started to sound, as Sen. Al Franken says, like he’d been hit in the throat by a hockey puck. He’s fluent in pension plans,
overtime work rules and what he calls the “myths” of free trade. It’s what helped one of the most progressive members of the U.S. Senate win this county, Trumbull, with 63 percent of the vote in 2012 - the same place where Trump would go on to score a 6-point victory.
In an alternate universe where Hillary Clinton picked Sherrod Brown as her vice-presidential candidate, which she almost did, the Democratic ticket could have won Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and the White House.
At least that’s what Brown thinks.
“I mean, if I had gone to Wisconsin and Michigan a lot, anything would have changed those two states,” he said in an interview with
The Washington Post. “My wife thinks we would have won. She thinks we would have won Ohio.”
But instead of settling in to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Brown finds himself up for reelection in a red state. His party, desperate to figure out a way to win back Rust Belt voters, will be scrutinizing this race like a laboratory experiment.
The senator took a seat in a cavernous main room with chipped marble floor and fluorescent lights. He noted that Trump talked a big game on manufacturing - but that he had come here today mostly to listen.
“All too often we feel like no one listens to what we have to say,” said John Moliterno, a local council- man. “So thank you for com- ing.” Listening may not be enough for Brown to hang onto his Senate seat. But it’s a good place to start.
“People keep asking me how I’m going to win back the Trump voters” Brown said. “Well, I don’t think I’ve ever lost them.”
S herro d Brow n never wanted to be vice president, until one day he did.
“I have zero interest in being vice president,” he told the Post in 2015.
“He’s not running for vice president, Chris,” Brown’s wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Connie Schultz, told Chris Matthews on MSNBC. “No matter how many times you champion him to do so.”
Yet for all his protestations, the Clinton team saw Brown as a definite possibility, who might help win over white working-class voters, espe- cially men. So whether out of a sense of duty or secret ambition, Brown decided to go through the vetting process.
“It was pretty uncomfortable,” he said. “It was excruciating,” said Schultz.
Both Brown and Schultz spent nearly three hours locked in a room with lawyers, answering deeply inva- sive question. They were asked about their acrimoni- ous divorces from their first spouses. They were asked about decades worth of finances and every public statement they ever made.
They were asked to share all their social media pass- words. (That one, Schultz declined.)
“Jesus, this is one hell of a process,” Brown recalled telling one of the investigators during a bathroom break. “I’ve seen a lot worse than you,” the lawyer replied.
At the time, Brown didn’t publicly acknowledge his participation in the veep- stakes. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t gunning for the job.
“By t he end, I really wanted it “Brown said recently. “Because that’s human nature.”
He relished the idea of campaigning in the Midwest, he says now, and offered to live out of a bus that would spend all its time in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michi- gan, Wisconsin and Iowa.
Three days before the selec tion he heard from “someone who knows this process” that it was down to him and Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. Later, after Kaine was unveiled as the No. 2, Brown says he heard from a former high-ranking Dem- ocratic official that Clinton had initially picked him but changed her mind.
A key factor: Clinton didn’t want to give Ohio’s GOP governor, John Kasich, the chance to appoint Brown’s replacement in the Senate. They worried Brown might be the only way to keep the seat in Democratic hands. Now, they get to find out. It’s an oversimplification, of course, to say that Don- ald Trump became president because of the white working class. In fact, most of Trump’s voters were richer than the average American. But the Democrats’ difficulties winning working-class votes in the Midwest was a real prob- lem, with no clear solution.
“It’s not out of the ques- tion that in 2020, if nothing changes, Democrats could win the popular vote by 5 million and lose the electoral college because of the Great Lakes states,” Brown said.