29 Minutes With Sherrod Brown

Is looking this rumpled a path to the presidency?

- Gabriel Debenedetti

Settling into a small meeting room in the seventh-floor office he inherited from Barack Obama in 2009, U.S. senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio clasps his hands, creases his brow, and doesn’t exactly deny that this is a slightly strange, and very busy, time for him—the unpolished, suddenly great, gritty hope among all the bright, shiny things that make up the overflowing 2020 Democratic presidential field. “It is unexpected. I mean, we all go into elections thinking we’re going to win,” he says, “and I guess I did. And I thought it’d be a nice celebration, then go back to work.”

In case you haven’t noticed: There’s a bit of a messy civil war going on in the Democratic Party, and one of the more boisterous battles is between those who think it should move hard left in 2020, to chase a progressive base, or to the center, to woo the working-class voters whose support Donald Trump rode to the presidency in 2016. This fight, and all of the party’s disagreements, have an identity aspect, like everything in American politics: Should Democrats lean further into being the party of women and minorities or focus more on the white voters who turned out last time? But Brown seems, to himself and a growing group of fans, at least, like he could square the circle. He’s the rare surviving old-school midwestern Democrat who thrives among the kinds of workers who voted for Trump, and he’s among the most progressive senators—he wins in big cities. He was just reelected again in Ohio, after all, where most Democrats not named Sherrod lost on November 6. That night, he called his campaign a “blueprint for America in 2020.”