Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, weighing his political future, launches a pro-worker organization
Now former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, speaks at a campaign rally, Oct. 5, 2024, in Cincinnati. Brown has launched a pro-worker organization to promote the “Dignity of Work.” It’s an idea the Ohio Democrat has advanced for years as an officeholder and candidate. The announcement on Monday comes as the 72-year-old Brown is weighing a run for the Senate in 2026, after losing his bid for a fourth term last year. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean, File)
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown launched a pro-worker organization on Monday to promote the “Dignity of Work,” a creed that he has advanced for years as an officeholder and candidate and that he recently described in a national magazine column as the key to the future of the Democratic Party.
The non-partisan Dignity of Work Institute will focus on better understanding the lives of American workers, through polls, interviews and other research, Brown said in an Associated Press interview.
The move comes as speculation swirls about Brown’s political future and adds a familiar voice to the national conversation among Democrats about how best to respond to their poor showing in the 2024 election, which saw Republicans take control of all three branches of the federal government.
But Brown said the institute is not political or partisan. Its first national poll did not mention his name but rather explored how politicians talk about the economy. The political dialogue is “fundamentally flawed” and “doesn’t reflect the reality of workers’ lives,” he said.
Brown, 72, is weighing whether he’ll run for office ever again, he said, after losing his bid for a fourth term to Cleveland businessman Bernie Moreno last year. Before that, the Ohio Democrat had spent three decades in Congress and consistently won statewide elections even as the former bellwether state turned reliably Republican in the era of Donald Trump.
“My focus isn’t there now,” he said. “I’m not going around the state campaigning. My focus is on getting this up and running.”
The institute will be based in the state capital of Columbus, where Brown and wife Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, moved last week to be closer to their grandchildren. They previously lived in Cleveland.
Brown said he wanted it in Ohio, not the coasts. “This isn’t a plaything, this isn’t a launch for higher office,” he said. “I’m serious about this. I always have been on these issues.”
Brown recently offered a treatise of sorts in The New Republic magazine for restoring the national Democratic Party and regaining the support of working class voters.
“We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we are,” he wrote. “How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party -- the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class -- no longer matches up with what most voters think.”
Brown told AP neither party is doing an adequate job centering workers.
“The Democratic Party is the compensate-the-betrayed (party),” he said. “You know, we pass a trade agreement, people lose jobs we give them a little money. The Republicans are the party of compensate-the-winners, tax cuts for rich people.”
“Neither party is the make-workers-the-winners party, and that’s what this is about.”
The progressive Center for American Progress Action Fund has scheduled Brown as its keynote speaker on Wednesday at an event titled, “Working-Class Voters, the Economy, and the Democratic Party.”