Sherrod Brown thinks he could have helped Democrats win in 2016. But what about 2020?
By Ben Terris July 24 at 7:00 AM
WARREN, Ohio — They could hear him before they could see him — that low, rumbling outboard motor of a voice. It could only be Sen. Sherrod Brown. “Oh, that voice,” said Jose Arroyo, a third-generation steelworker, as it reverberated 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 keeping 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 that did not. His hair was a thicket of gray and white.
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 six-point victory.
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