Democrats winning

The case for Democrats winning the industrial Midwest

Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley says Sen. Sherrod Brown would make the party competitive in states that Donald Trump won in 2016

By DAVE SHAW

As potential presidential candidate Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) gets ready to tour four early-primary states this week, one of the leading voices trying to convince him to run hopes he’ll get into the race right away.

“We want him to make a decision soon,” said Nan Whaley, the democratic mayor of Dayton, Ohio, and the co-chair of a committee called Draft Sherrod Brown. “We recognize that he needs to take this time, so we’re trying to get the message out while he’s doing his process personally and publicly.”

Brown will visit Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina as he tests whether the “Dignity of Work” campaign message that helped him win re-election to the Senate in 2018 will resonate with democratic voters eager to unseat Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

“I think it’s the message that should be central to the Democratic Party for 2020,” Whaley told the Women Rule podcast. “As a party, we have got to figure out a way to win the industrial Midwest. And there’s a lot of discussion about Ohio, whether or not it’s a red state or not. I don’t think it is, but I think we have to have a candidate that will be able to talk to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, those communities and those states, and they’re very similar to Ohio.”

Brown scored a convincing re-election victory last fall, defeating Republican Jim Renacci by six points in a state that Donald Trump won by a 52-44 margin in the 2016 presidential campaign. Other Senators running in heartland states the president carried didn’t fare as well, with Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri all going down to defeat.

Whaley knows Ohio politics. She was the youngest woman to win election to the Dayton City Commission, at 29, and she ran for governor of Ohio last year, before bowing out of the race.

“I loved running for governor and I loved talking about what the state could do better to help support local communities and families. But that was a function of just the money being too hard to come by in the state,” she said. “I’m not well-known in Northern Ohio, it would have taken like $4 million and I just could not get the money to make people get to know me.”

She added, “I always say I did two things really great in that race: I got in that race really well and I got out of that race really well. So I don’t have any regrets about it.”