Sherrod Brown is Ohio’s senior senator. He is a Democrat first elected to the House in 1992 and to the Senate in 2006. He grew up in Mansfield, the son of a doctor, graduated from Yale in 1974, and won a seat in the state House later that year. Another House member, mistaking the boyish-looking Brown for an intern, gave him a dollar to get her a cup of coffee. He later got master’s degrees in education and public administration from the Ohio State University. Brown has spent more than half his life in public office. In 1982, when he was 29, he was elected Ohio secretary of state and worked to increase voter registration and turnout. In 1990, after serving two terms, he lost that office to Republican Bob Taft, who was later elected governor. In 1992, Brown ran for the open 13th District House seat. With solid labor support, he campaigned loud and hard against the North American Free Trade Agreement and championed universal health care. He won 53%-35%. Read More

Sherrod Brown is Ohio’s senior senator. He is a Democrat first elected to the House in 1992 and to the Senate in 2006. He grew up in Mansfield, the son of a doctor, graduated from Yale in 1974, and won a seat in the state House later that year. Another House member, mistaking the boyish-looking Brown for an intern, gave him a dollar to get her a cup of coffee. He later got master’s degrees in education and public administration from the Ohio State University. Brown has spent more than half his life in public office. In 1982, when he was 29, he was elected Ohio secretary of state and worked to increase voter registration and turnout. In 1990, after serving two terms, he lost that office to Republican Bob Taft, who was later elected governor. In 1992, Brown ran for the open 13th District House seat. With solid labor support, he campaigned loud and hard against the North American Free Trade Agreement and championed universal health care. He won 53%-35%.

For many years, Brown has worn a self-designed lapel pin of a canary in a cage, to commemorate underground miners who were at risk back in the days before labor unions and government safety inspections. He had a consistently liberal voting record in the House. On trade, he was one of the most voluble pro-labor and “fair-trade” members from the Great Lakes area, attacking the string of free trade agreements and policies that followed NAFTA in 1993. He sponsored bus trips to Canada for consumers to buy prescription drugs, and he helped to pass the Children’s Health Act, which created a new Pediatric Research Institute. In 2003, he helped to secure an increase in Medicaid funding. He urged a ban on the use of antibiotics in farm animals, including penicillin and tetracycline. He called for enforcement of laws against importing goods made with slave labor in China and helped to increase funding for international programs to fight tuberculosis. He has authored the books Congress From the Inside and Myths of Free Trade. In 2007, his wife, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz, wrote And His Lovely Wife: A Memoir From the Woman Beside the Man about Brown’s 2006 campaign for Senate.

Brown long had had his eye on statewide office. In 2005, he at first said he would not challenge two-term Republican Sen. Mike DeWine, which left Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett as the Democratic front-runner. Hackett, who had won some fame after nearly pulling off a major upset in an August 2005 House special election, was an attractive candidate, but there were questions about whether he could raise enough money, and his shoot-from-the-hip style aroused concerns about how he would play statewide. Brown reconsidered and entered the race in October 2005. “The culture of corruption plaguing state and federal government has led our state down the wrong path, and it is time for a change,” he said. Although incensed at Brown, Hackett withdrew from the race and Brown breezed to the Democratic nomination.

DeWine, meanwhile, won a lackluster 72% in the GOP primary against two little-known opponents, a reflection of conservative dissatisfaction with his votes on gun control and his role in the bipartisan compromise to end Senate filibusters on federal judicial nominees. DeWine also had the misfortune of running for re-election in an unusually hostile political environment for Ohio Republicans. There was an undertow from various scandals associated with the Republican-controlled state government, though DeWine was not implicated, plus the drag from the unpopular Bush administration. Brown charged that DeWine was a “rubber stamp” for President George W. Bush and tied him to Bush’s Iraq policy. He campaigned as a populist progressive, calling for an increase in the minimum wage, denouncing free trade pacts and criticizing the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law as a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry. While Brown sought to nationalize the race, DeWine pursued a more localized approach. He focused on his accomplishments and his ability to work across party lines, hoping to heighten the contrast between himself and the more sharply partisan Brown, whose legislative effectiveness had been limited under Republican rule.

Brown won 56%-44%, dominating nearly all of Ohio’s population centers: Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County (71%-29%), Toledo’s Lucas County (66%-33%), Akron’s Summit County (64%-36%), Columbus’s Franklin County (59%-41%), and Dayton’s Montgomery County (53%-47%). DeWine carried Cincinnati’s Hamilton County, but by just 2,000 votes. DeWine carried much of the state west of Interstate 75, where the tone is more Midwestern. Brown carried everything east of Interstate 77, where the coal and steel counties look to Pennsylvania and West Virginia and where his high-profile opposition to free trade resonated.

In the Senate, Brown went on the attack against Bush’s troop surge policy in Iraq. “The president calls it a surge, but it’s an escalation of the war. It’s reprehensible and it’s wrong,” he told the Cleveland Jewish News in 2007. But his major focus has been on trade issues. Early in 2009, Brown fought to include in the Democrats’ economic stimulus bill requirements that stimulus money be used on American-made goods. The provision was included in the bill that passed the House and Senate, but it was watered down to allow goods to be purchased from some of America’s largest trading partners. “While they call those of us who support labor and environmental standards protectionists, they call it free trade when they protect drug companies and Hollywood films,” he said. “Now, I support intellectual-property protections. But if we can protect Hollywood films, we can protect the environment. If we can protect the drug companies, we can protect workers.”

He also co-sponsored a bipartisan bill allowing competitors to bring lawsuits against companies that profit from sweatshop goods, and he sought to reinstate the law, repealed in 2006, that allocated penalties in dumping complaints to the complaining companies. In 2009, Brown called on President Barack Obama to take a tougher stance with China on trade, saying the White House should prod the Chinese government to allow its currency to float rather than keep it pegged to the dollar, which would have the effect of raising prices for Chinese goods.

Brown says one of his proudest achievements in the Senate was a bill he passed with the help of the late liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. During reauthorization of the Food and Drug Administration in 2009, Brown won passage of an amendment creating incentives for drug companies to produce drugs for diseases common in the developing world. Within weeks of it going into effect, an international aid group reported a flood of new TB drugs on the market.

As a liberal from a coal-producing state—coal provides 90% of Ohio’s electricity— Brown is a key swing Democrat on environmental issues. And he was a pivotal player in the 112th Congress (2011-2012) in efforts to regulate carbon emissions thought responsible for climate change. In early 2011, when Obama announced that the Environmental Protection Agency would issue new regulations for carbon emissions, Brown said he would insist on protections for U.S. manufacturers. “I want them to come up with how they’re going to do this … and how they’re going to, at the same time, make sure it doesn’t cause massive job loss and more pollution,” Brown told National Journal. The new rules would apply mostly to coal-fired plants and oil refineries.

Brown was also a negotiator on the climate change bill that the Senate worked on in 2010 but failed to pass. He was the point man for a bloc of Democrats who dubbed themselves the “Brown Dogs,” and refused to support a bill without robust protections for U.S. firms. Brown surprised environmental groups in 2007 when he said nuclear power is safe and should be an option for the country.

On the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Brown worked on the financial industry regulation bill in 2010 and tried unsuccessfully to pass a proposal to limit the size of banks in light of the $700 billion government bailout of financial firms deemed to be “too big to fail.” He called for capping banks so they cannot hold more than 2% of the national gross domestic product or 10% of total insured bank deposits nationally. The cap would have affected three large banks: Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase. In 2007, he and several other big-state Democrats co-sponsored a bill providing $300 million for housing foreclosure relief.

On another hot issue in 2010, Brown was a proponent for including a government-run insurance option in the Democrats’ health care overhaul. When the public option was dropped because it would have sunk the bill, Brown voted for the legislation anyway, saying it at least contained “good insurance reform.” Later in the year, he opposed Obama’s deal to allow the Bush-era tax cuts to continue even for the top income-earners, but wound up voting for final passage because the legislation also extended unemployment benefits for 13 months. “My principle of not wanting tax cuts for the rich doesn’t help an unemployed worker,” he told Politico.

Brown is up for re-election in 2012, and was being targeted for defeat by Republicans and tea party groups after Ohio Democrats fared poorly in 2010, losing the governor’s office, a Senate seat and dropping from 10 to five seats in the U.S. House.