Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.

As Donald Trump scrambles and realigns American politics, it’s a strangely good time to be Sherrod Brown. Ohio’s senior senator is, suddenly, Hillary Clinton’s ambassador to the Rust Belt, her new confidant on trade, her defender when Trump blasts her as a shill for globalism—and now a potential pick as her vice president.

This year, the country is swinging Brown’s way. For decades, he has fought free-trade agreements, forged a deep alliance with labor and won elections in swing-state Ohio with a liberal voting record and a common touch. Now, the presidential candidates are vying to win over his type of voter: workers who feel the economy has left them behind. For Clinton, eager to hold onto blue-collar Democrats who might be tempted to defect to the populist real estate mogul, choosing Brown as her running mate could neutralize Trump’s appeal among that crucial slice of the electorate. Brown, after all, claimed the American-workers-first mantle long before Trump ever seriously contemplated a run for president.


On June 28, when Trump bashed Clinton in Ohio and Pennsylvania for supporting free-trade deals, Brown stepped up as a Clinton surrogate to hit him back. “While he’s talking about putting America first, his accountants are cashing checks from products that he’s had manufactured in other countries,” Brown said on a conference call arranged by the Clinton campaign. When I talked to Brown two days later, he was still at it, taking brickbats to Trump, questioning his integrity and his business record in swift strokes.

“He’s going to be seen as the hypocrite he is,” Brown, 63, growled. “When it comes to making money, he’s glad to take advantage of cheap wages and outsourcing. When it comes to running for president, he talks a different game.”

To pick Brown for her ticket, Clinton would have to pass over top candidates with other strengths: Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s safe résumé, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro’s appeal to Hispanics, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s ability to energize women and the Democrats’ base.

She’d also have to accept Brown’s drawbacks as a running mate: He could wound Clinton’s attempts to get centrist Republicans and businesspeople to defect from the GOP; he’s a career politician in a decidedly anti-establishment cycle; his short temper can get him in trouble; his only executive experience is as Ohio secretary of state in the 1980s; and on his signature issue, fair trade, he’s consistently been on the losing side.

Brown is skeptical of his chances for another reason entirely.

“Chances are, she’ll choose somebody else,” he says. One reason, he says, is a hint from Clinton herself: “I know that she’s concerned about the appointment to the Senate.” If Brown moved up to vice president, Gov. John Kasich would fill his U.S. Senate seat with a Republican. Clinton would also have to decide that Brown is more valuable in the fight for the White House than the fight for the Senate. She’d have to decide that he’s got something that would help her beat Trump that no other candidate has.

And there’s a case to be made that Brown has just that—that he’s not the anti-Trump, but the vaccine. In one sense, Brown is more like Trump than any of Clinton’s other possible running mates—a feisty guy who connects with the working class on the economy and fair trade. But Brown’s stances are more consistent, and he’s been at it for longer. He loves talking about his suits sewn in Cleveland and his sneakers made in Maine, a helpful counter to the criticism that Trump’s clothing line is made in China. So there’s no doubt Brown will play a key role in Clinton’s quest to win Ohio and nearby states. The question is, which role?

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Hillary Clinton and Sherrod Brown have been friends for 10 years, since she campaigned for him in Ohio’s 2006 U.S. Senate race. Brown, a seven-term congressman, won his seat in a landslide, thanks to voter anger at the Iraq War and a scandal that had tainted Ohio Republicans. Brown and Clinton ended up as next-door neighbors in the Russell Senate Office Building, and their staffs became friendly.

“She was very helpful in teaching us how to engage with more rural small towns,” Brown says. His staff patterned their statewide outreach after Clinton’s relationships in upstate New York, which dated back to her famed “listening tour” as a first-time candidate; Brown visited all of Ohio’s 88 counties in his first two years in office. Clinton and Brown also served together (with Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama) on Ted Kennedy’s Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee, and Clinton appeared with Brown on a popular Cleveland radio show during her 2008 run for president.

There’s a case to be made that Sherrod Brown is not the anti-Trump, but the vaccine.

Their working relationship is a less-noticed reason Brown is considered a contender to join Clinton’s ticket. She knows him better than many other potential running mates, and if she’s looking for a team player who won’t overshadow her, she might have more confidence in Brown than, say, Warren.

If Clinton chose Brown, she’d also double down on her move left on trade. “He would bring authenticity to Hillary’s conversion,” says Harriet Applegate, head of the AFL-CIO in Cleveland and a longtime Brown ally.

Brown is best known on Capitol Hill as a leading critic of free trade agreements. He marched in the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization and was the lead House whip against CAFTA, which passed by two votes in 2005. Brown’s book Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed, published in 2004, argues that globalization doesn’t lead to growth in either developed or developing countries. Brown has voted for only one trade agreement in his 24 years in the House and Senate: the 2000 pact with Jordan, which included labor and environmental standards that satisfied him.

In a normal election year, opposing free trade would hurt a Democrat’s running-mate prospects. Since Bill Clinton endorsed NAFTA during the 1992 presidential race, only one free-trade critic, John Edwards, has been chosen for either slot on a Democratic presidential ticket. But the politics of the 2016 race are completely different. Last fall, Clinton turned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she supported as secretary of state. Her switch failed to inoculate her against attacks from Sanders. Meanwhile, most Republican voters have turned against free trade, and they’ve rewarded Trump for his sweeping opposition to it, overthrowing decades of Republican orthodoxy.

“What’s happened to the Republican Party,” says Brown, “shows that traditional Republican economics don’t work for people.”

So Clinton and Brown’s alliance on trade—unlikely a few years ago, when Clinton supported several trade deals he opposed—makes sense in 2016. It shores up Clinton’s left flank and helps her answer Trump.

“I’ve worked with her a lot, on the TPP issue especially,” Brown says. His aides say Brown helped Clinton sharpen her stance against TPP in March, after Sanders beat her in the Michigan primary with an anti-trade message. “If you look at how the Clinton campaign spoke on issues, in Michigan versus Ohio, you see the Sherrod Brown effect,” says Brown’s state director, John Ryan. In Youngstown on March 12, Clinton, with Brown at her side, announced that she opposed TPP’s lenient “rules of origin” for cars partially made of foreign materials.

Now, Brown says Clinton’s command of TPP’s details make her more credible on trade than Trump. “She understands the currency issues, and she understands rules of origin, what it would do to autos,” Brown says. “I would guess Trump couldn’t speak five sentences on why TPP’s a bad thing, except it’s a bad trade deal—that’s all he says.”

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Brown has allied himself with the working class for so long, it’s surprising to find out he’s never been a manual laborer himself. The son of a doctor from Mansfield, Ohio (population 46,000), he graduated from Yale in 1974 (the year after Clinton graduated Yale Law School) and was elected to the Ohio state house the same year, at age 22. In his 42 years in politics, he’s always been close to organized labor.

“His entire career, he’s gone to plant gates early in the morning and shared coffee and doughnuts,” says the AFL-CIO’s Applegate. “He likes working people. He always has.”

That’s one reason Brown’s such a valuable ally to Clinton this year. She’s a starchy candidate—more like Al Gore or John Kerry than her husband—who has had to work extra hard to appeal to “everyday Americans.” That’s a special handicap in this post-middle-class election, when both parties are scrambling to appeal to the disgruntled worker. As a surrogate for Clinton in swing-state Ohio, and maybe as a running mate nationwide, Brown could be Clinton’s Joe Biden, the seemingly aloof candidate’s down-to-earth alter ego.

Unlike Tim Kaine, Brown could also help Clinton win over reluctant Sanders voters, and not just because of his progressive record (he got a 95 percent rating from Americans for Democratic Action in 2014). He’s been friends with Sanders since their days in the House, and they moved up to the Senate in the same year. Though Brown endorsed Clinton in the primaries, he kept in touch with Sanders during the campaign, according to Brown’s daughter, Liz, and took care not to criticize him in media appearances. Brown shrugged off POLITICO’s June report that Sanders was bitter about his endorsement of Clinton and quickly accepted Sanders’ disavowal of the anecdote.

Ohio is a key swing state in the Clinton-Trump race, just like it’s been in national elections since 2004. Democrats always face a slight headwind in Ohio; Obama eked out a 2-point win over Mitt Romney in 2012. Brown is the expert at winning Ohio with a D next to one’s name. He’s done it four times, including twice as Ohio secretary of state in the 1980s. He’s Ohio’s only statewide Democratic elected official, and the only Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race there in 22 years.

Brown’s support could help Clinton whip up enthusiasm among the Democrats’ Ohio base—voters around Cleveland, where he lives. Northeast Ohio is the largest blue spot in the purple state, so Democrats need to run up the score there. “In many parts of Ohio, he is such a rock star among Democrats and the Democratic base,” says David B. Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron.

He could also help Clinton where Trump is strongest. In the March primary, Trump outpolled favorite-son Kasich on Ohio’s eastern edge, in an arc of counties from Youngstown’s Mahoning Valley to Appalachian Southeast Ohio.

Youngstown is solidly blue, but the Democrats will have to prevent Trump from cutting into their typical lead there. It’s no coincidence that Clinton debuted her stance on TPP’s effects on the auto industry in Youngstown; the Mahoning Valley is deeply skeptical of international trade. Some voters there still think fondly of Jim Traficant, their late congressman, who made vindictive rants, crass wit and rage on behalf of the cast-off worker a winning electoral strategy long before Trump got into politics. “Jim Traficant, in many ways, was an early version of Donald Trump,” says John Green, chair of the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute of Applied Politics. “He expressed the same kinds of resentments that Donald Trump is having an effect with.”

Southeast Ohio is a tougher sell for the Democrats. It’s a swing region, and like most of Appalachia, it’s economically depressed, socially conservative and skeptical of establishment politicians. It’s also coal country, where Clinton has a problem. Her careless campaign-trail comment—“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—may have been taken somewhat out of context, but it turned her “Breaking Down Barriers” bus tour of Appalachia in May into an awkward apology tour.

Ohio. Pennsylvania. Virginia. North Carolina.



“I think Sherrod would do better in those places than Elizabeth Warren,” says Green.

In Southeast Ohio, Clinton will likely try to limit the damage by campaigning with former Gov. Ted Strickland, an Appalachian native who’s running for Republican Rob Portman’s U.S. Senate seat. She may also turn to Brown, who swept all but one Southeast Ohio county in his 2006 landslide and carried a few counties there in 2012 that Obama didn’t.

Coal miners are a constituency close to Brown’s heart. He wears a lapel pin of a coal-mine canary to symbolize his commitment to worker safety. He’s supported just about every effort he can to address coal mining’s legacy, from preserving pensions to addressing black-lung disease. He’s taken a slower approach to the transition from fossil fuels than most progressives, sometimes pressing Obama to slow down new coal-plant regulations. Republicans still accuse him of joining a “war on coal,” but he’s found a middle ground that might help Clinton. “There’s a future for coal,” Brown says.

Step back from Ohio, and Brown’s potential as a running mate emerges. His record and personality could also help her in Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina, all swing states with industrial and Appalachian regions where Trump could thrive. “I think Sherrod would do better in those places than Elizabeth Warren,” says Green. “I don’t think she has experience with the diversity those states would represent.”

***

But the idea that Brown offers Clinton some unique 2016 swing-state mojo is hardly universal. Matt Borges, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, argues the two Democrats are mismatched.

“I think he’s probably been more at odds with Hillary Clinton throughout his career on any number of matters,” Borges says. “It’s hard to see how they’d justify each other.” Clinton supported NAFTA and voted to authorize the Iraq War, he notes; Brown was against both. If Clinton does “bring Sherrod’s wildly liberal point of view to the ticket,” Borges adds, it’ll be “to try to shore up some of her base that’s abandoning her.”

Brown’s record of progressivism and electability inspires intense rhetoric from Ohio Republicans. Borges says Brown “has been ranked in the past the single most liberal member of the United States Senate.” That’s an exaggeration, but not by a lot: In 2009, National Journal ranked Brown in a five-way tie for most liberal senator—further left than Sanders, a point Borges likes to mention. “Seems to me those two would make more sense together,” he scoffs.

Brown has a reputation as a liberal street-fighter. But there are character witnesses who’ll vouch for his pragmatic, bipartisan side.

Brown relishes partisan warfare. He bragged about his hate mail in his 1999 memoir, Congress From the Inside. He’s a populist brawler, slamming “the Republican way of more tax cuts for the rich and weakening worker safety laws, [like] they always do.” It’s a style that endears him to the Democrats’ Elizabeth Warren wing. But his rhetoric and temper can flare too hot—a possible minus for Clinton as she tries to position herself as the sensible, stable candidate. Once, on Cleveland’s public radio station, Brown yelled so loudly at a conservative caller that he triggered the station’s sound filters into cutting his mic’s volume. In 2011, he broke the political version of Godwin’s Law: Never compare your adversaries to Hitler. “I look back at history and some of the worst governments we’ve ever had—you know one of the first things they do? They went after the unions,” Brown said on the Senate floor. “Hitler didn’t want unions; Stalin didn’t want unions.” He apologized the next day.

Brown has such a reputation as a liberal street-fighter that his staff tries to compensate by directing reporters toward character witnesses who’ll vouch for his pragmatic, bipartisan side. That includes local chambers of commerce and Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, with whom Brown worked on breast cancer and advanced manufacturing bills. “There have only been a handful of things we agreed on,” Blunt said in a May conference call with reporters, “and all of them, I believe now, are federal law.”

Despite serving in the Senate majority for eight years, Brown is known as much for what he’s against—trade—as what he’s gotten passed. Successful legislation he’s introduced includes a 2012 program to bring broadband to rural areas and a 2015 law that helps American businesses make trade cases against foreign competitors. A member of the Agriculture Committee, he was part of the conference committee that negotiated the 2014 farm bill. He’s also credited with rallying the Ohio delegation behind the 2009 auto bailout. Last year, he worked to make expansions of both the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit permanent, something he considers a major advancement against poverty.

If Clinton were to pick Brown, Borges says, the GOP would expose “his real, actual, out-of-the-mainstream liberal record and agenda. And [if], heaven forbid, they were to win, we would put another Republican in the U.S. Senate.”

That’s one reason Brown downplays his running-mate prospects. “I’ve made it clear I don’t really want this job,” he told CNN in April. In his June 30 interview with POLITICO, Brown said he’s had “zero” talks with Clinton or her staff about the vice-presidential nomination, though he wouldn’t directly answer a question about whether he’s being vetted.

He told me when Paul Wellstone died that he thought someone should fill that role,” says Applegate.

Those close to Brown say he’s reluctant to leave the Senate. “He would love to serve in a Senate majority,” says his daughter, Liz Brown, a Columbus city councilwoman. A critic of the financial industry who pushes to break up “too big to fail” banks, Brown is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. “Being able to chair that committee would be a truly wonderful opportunity to work on issues very important to him,” his daughter says.

Applegate says Brown enjoys his role as a Senate progressive. “He told me when Paul Wellstone died that he thought someone should fill that role,” she says. She hopes he stays where he is.

“I don’t think of him as presidential, exactly,” Applegate says. “I don’t think he’s that focused on foreign policy. … I think he’s way too far to the left to be a presidential candidate. He seems more like a friend of people, not so much a leader of men as our ally.”