Sen. Sherrod Brown has been willing to listen to the finance industry's concerns and sometimes take action, especially when it comes to smaller financial institutions that call Ohio home. | Win McNamee/Getty Images 2020 elections Sherrod Brown’s opening: Less liberal than the liberals Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown has railed against banks but also developed relationships with them, setting him apart from potential presidential rivals.

In the Senate, Sherrod Brown is known as a scourge of Wall Street. But in a Democratic presidential primary with fellow Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren thundering away at bankers, Brown is viewed by many in the industry as a reasonable alternative.

The Ohio senator has called for breaking up the big banks and has even fought against Democratic colleagues who supported financial deregulation. But according to bank representatives, Wall Street watchdogs and others who have worked closely with him in Congress, Brown has also earned a reputation as someone open to dialogue with the industry in his role as the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. He has taken corporate PAC money and shown a practical streak focused on protecting workers in his home state, where finance is a major employer.


Brown’s nuanced relationship with the banking industry illustrates the leftward shift in the Democratic Party and the rationale of his possible presidential campaign, as he travels the country arguing that he is a consistent progressive who doesn’t go too far and has proven how to win in the red-trending Midwest. Warren and Sanders have taken more belligerent approaches to finance, while Sens. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris have all been criticized at times as too close to big banks.

And then, in the middle, there’s Brown, who has built a reputation as a fighter on finance but could yet be outflanked on the issue in a Democratic primary.

"The financial services industry knows where it stands with Senator Brown, which isn’t something that can be said for the entire Democratic presidential field," said Isaac Boltansky, the director of policy research for Compass Point, an investment bank. "Senator Brown has strong views on the regulatory regime, which often places him in diametric opposition to the banking industry during key policy debates. But he has an appreciation for the industry’s role in Ohio and the national economy.”

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Brown told POLITICO he will take a step to further distance himself from big business if he runs for president: refusing corporate PAC money, which he has long accepted for his Senate campaigns.

“My head is not turned by that,” Brown said in an interview. “And I can prove it."

“It’s personal to me what Wall Street overreach and Wall Street greed can do,” Brown said, recalling the damage the foreclosure crisis wrought on Ohio. “It’s not personal that I aim at their executives or aim at them as a company as much as it is, how do we make good things happen? And we’ve had some success doing that.”

After the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, Brown led a bipartisan push to break up "too-big-to-fail" banks. It fell short after fellow Democrats refused to join the cause. He opposed appointees picked by former President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump whom he saw as too cozy with corporate America. He prodded executives like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to pay bank tellers and other workers higher wages.

And last year, Brown led the charge against a landmark deregulation bill backed by 16 of his fellow Senate Democrats — a tense fight that played out for two weeks on the Senate floor. Brown was unable to stop the legislation, which became law in May.

But Brown isn't following potential rivals in the 2020 primary's progressive lane on some big financial issues. He does not plan to endorse a push by Warren and others on the left that would revive the Glass-Steagall law, a set of Depression-era banking restrictions that were undone during the Clinton administration. He said it was a good law but that reimposing it isn't the panacea some make it out to be.

“I do hear about Glass-Steagall oftentimes at town halls or whatever, but nobody’s convinced me it would make an appreciable difference,” Brown said. "Breaking up the banks is important. Consumer protections are important. Higher capital standards are important. Fighting deregulation is important. Glass-Steagall is well below that in importance."

In an interview, Warren said she's never tried to convince Brown to sign on to her proposal to revive Glass-Steagall but said the two "share the same values."

Brown has been willing to listen to the finance industry's concerns and sometimes take action, especially when it comes to smaller financial institutions that call Ohio home.

“If you look at the Democrats’ side of the ledger, he’s more attractive than many others out there,” said Michael Adelman, the president and CEO of the Ohio Bankers League.

One lobbyist for a large bank who declined to be named said Brown is "always willing to have the discussion."

Brown championed one of the first changes to Democrats' signature financial reform law, Dodd-Frank, leading to a revision in 2014 that benefited insurers facing stiff capital requirements. When Senate Republicans later sought to water down the law in significant ways, he fought back and rallied Democrats, including Warren, to back a counter-proposal targeted at helping the smallest banks.

And before Brown tried to tank last year's bank deregulation bill, which had big benefits for regional lenders with headquarters in Ohio, he was at the negotiating table trying to forge a potential compromise with the GOP chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

“Even when I disagree with him, what I find is we can both get into the weeds pretty quick, which is a more productive conversation than just slinging slogans," said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who co-authored the deregulation bill that Brown opposed.

Brown is often on the opposite side of the "biggest, most dangerous banks on Wall Street," but most U.S. banks and financial institutions would agree with his view of the world, said Better Markets President and CEO Dennis Kelleher, who advocates for tougher finance industry oversight.

"There's nobody who says they could not get a fair hearing from Sherrod Brown," Kelleher said.

Brown already has ideas for how the finance industry would fit into a possible presidential platform, which is likely to revolve around the "dignity of work" theme that he's hitting on in a tour of early primary states.

The list includes breaking up big banks, strengthening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, scrutinizing the payday lending industry and reinforcing bank capital standards.

Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said there was "a helluva lot of distance" between Brown and other Democrats when it comes to Wall Street.

"Sherrod seems to be able to keep an appropriate distance in terms of dependency on the banking interests in a way that some of the others do not," he said.

But Brown is unsurprised that, to some bankers, he may be more palatable than others on the far left of the 2020 race.

Brown said he works "all the time to understand what they're doing" as he tries to change bank behavior that may hurt consumers. Brown said he knows many Ohio bankers personally but that he's spent no more than three hours in aggregate with any Wall Street CEO.

"I don't surprise people," Brown said. "My politics are what they are. If you deal with people honestly, they're more likely to understand what you're doing."