Politico: Sherrod Brown sets his sights on Trump in 2020

• Brown’s worker-centric populism — protecting the “dignity of work,” as he puts it — is already a proven commodity with the blue-collar voters a Democratic nominee would need to compete in the upper Midwest states that handed Trump the presidency. He’s a Washington veteran who still looks and talks like an outsider. He played up his regular-guy persona in his most recent campaign, with an ad titled “Disheveled.”
• Brown “offers an alternative to what we’re for and what we’re about,” said Dayton, Ohio, mayor Nan Whaley, who worked on Brown’s 2012 reelection bid. “I don’t see someone speaking that message” besides him, she added.
• What voters would get in Brown can’t be neatly defined. He’s assembled a staunchly liberal voting record over 25 years in the House and Senate, voting against the 1996 law that tried to define same-sex marriage out of existence and against the 2005 bankruptcy bill that galvanized years of anti-Wall Street antipathy on the left. (Former Vice President and 2020 contender Joe Biden, who later vocally embraced same-sex marriage, voted for both of those measures.)
• Brown also has legislative experience that some others in his party’s presidential mix haven’t yet accrued. He’s served as the Banking Committee’s top Democrat since 2015 and played a key role in securing a permanent extension of improvements to the earned income and child tax credits.

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