- Brown’s campaign — emphasizing the need to protect health care coverage and shore up workers’ pensions, railing against what he framed as a regressive Republican tax cut, while continuing to underline his opposition to free trade deals — was emblematic of his lunch-bucket approach over 12 years in the Senate. And it likely formed the spine of a national run, should he make one.
- But it wasn’t Brown’s message alone that lifted him to victory. His $27.7 million war chest was the biggest of any Democratic campaign in Ohio’s history.
- Yet a closer look at Tuesday’s results reveal Brown showed strength by limiting his losses in rural conservative strongholds.
- Brown recaptured a handful of Trump counties in the northeastern corner of the state — steel country — including Ashtabula, Trumbull, Lake and Portage counties. He also carried Montgomery County in southwestern Ohio, home to the midsize city of Dayton, by more than 23,000 votes. Cordray, by contrast, lost it by about 1,100. The county is something of a bellwether within a bellwether, with a roughly even split between urban, suburban and rural voters. President Obama carried it in both his campaigns, then Trump won it in 2016.