Former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) is projected to defeat incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted in a hotly watched race in Ohio on Tuesday.
Brown, who previously served three terms as Ohio senator from 2007 to 2025 and seven terms as a congressman before that, will return to the Senate after losing reelection in 2024 to GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno. His victory marks a key pickup for Democrats in their push to retake control of the Senate after losing it just two years ago.
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Husted to fill the seat, previously occupied by current Vice President JD Vance, in January 2025. The former lieutenant governor had not previously run for federal office. His first Senate campaign faced significant headwinds as rising gas prices and President Donald Trump’s collapsing approval ratings dragged down Republicans across the country.
During the campaign, Brown hammered Husted for voting for Trump’s budget bill that slashed Medicaid and other government assistance while cutting taxes for the rich. The Democrat also knocked Husted for voting against releasing the Epstein files and ending the Iran war and for supporting data center expansions across the state.
But as Election Day drew near, the message from Republicans focused less on these issues and more on their candidate’s rear end. At rallies in Ohio and across the country, Trump sang the praises of Husted’s “great ass.”
“He has a great ass, a very powerful ass,” Trump said in a video promoting Husted.
Husted’s ass, however, couldn’t power him across the finish line. Neither could the flood of big money propping up his campaign.
The closely contested race was one of the most expensive in the country — and in the history of Senate campaigns — exceeding $500 million. Both campaigns were backed by super PACs funded by unlimited and sometimes undisclosed donors, though Husted’s campaign relied far more heavily on this kind of spending.
After spending years as a closely fought battleground state, Ohio had flipped to solidly Republican territory beginning with Trump’s win in 2016. Trump won the state by 8 percentage points in 2016, 8 in 2020, and 11 in 2024. Brown bucked this trend with a 7-point victory in 2018, but lost by nearly 4 points in a much more difficult presidential election year in 2024.
Brown took advantage of the negative environment that Trump created for Republicans when he increased inflation through his tariff policy and the Iran war. Both policies drove up costs for producers and consumers, and a particularly steep rise in diesel prices in the final months of the campaign hit farmers hard.
Trump’s embrace of data centers, which became a political flashpoint in 2026, also hindered Husted as Brown’s attacks on data centers became a central piece of his affordability message. The GOP senator tried to counter both Trump’s love for data centers and his own previous efforts to attract them to the state by introducing legislation he claimed would limit energy-cost increases for consumers caused by data center energy usage. But Democrats blocked that bill in the Senate.
Brown will take office immediately, as this was a special election to fill a vacated seat. He will also need to keep running, as the seat is up for a full term in 2028.