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DEMOCRATS MUST BECOME THE WORKERS’ PARTY AGAIN  
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Sherrod Brown
March 3, 2025
The New Republic
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*
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*
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*
*
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_ Reconnecting the Democratic Party to the working class is an
electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the
rest of my life. _

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown spoke with UAW members outside a
Stellantis plant in Toledo in September 2023, photo: Evan Cobb/The New
York Times/Redux

 

In late fall, I was in a break room with 10 or so autoworkers at the
Avon Lake Ford plant near Lake Erie. As they talked about the
challenges they and their families faced, one worker asked everyone
whom they were voting for in the presidential election.

One by one, they went around the table: the vice president. The vice
president. The vice president. Only one was not. Why not? we asked.

“The vice president wants to take my guns away.”

The man next to him turned to him and said, “Well, Sherrod has
basically the same position on guns, and you vote for him.” He
responded, “Yeah, but Sherrod’s on my side. He fights for me and
my family.”

That conversation happened in October … in the year 2000.

That November, Vice President Al Gore lost Ohio
[[link removed]] by
fewer than 200,000 votes. Anyone reading this surely knows Ohio’s
political trajectory since then. Bush
[[link removed]], in
a close race. Obama
[[link removed]],
in a close race. Obama—again
[[link removed]], in
a very close race. And then, the record-scratch moment. 2016,
and Trump’s victory
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points.

In 2020, Trump held that margin
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Biden roughly consistently. But last year, the bottom fell out. Vice
President Kamala Harris lost
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over 11 points, and I lost
[[link removed]] reelection
to the Senate by about 3.5 points.

Since November 5, in the final months of the year, no one has had a
lot of time for licking wounds. Seventy people in our office were
suddenly out of work. My chief of staff and state director and I met
with every member of our staff, working to find jobs for the public
servants who had served Ohio, many for more than a decade.

And we still had legislative work to do. We fought to finally get the
Social Security Fairness Act through the Senate and signed into law
[[link removed]]. After more
than 10 years of work, my penultimate vote in the United States
Senate—after midnight
[[link removed]],
on my last night on the Senate floor—finally restored
[[link removed]] the
full Social Security that more than three million American workers
earned. Teachers and police officers and school cafeteria workers and
bus drivers paid
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over years of hard work. Now, they will finally get the retirement
security they earned.

But in the months since the election, my mind has also often wandered
back to the conversation with those Ford workers 25 years ago.

That exchange would never happen today, of this I’m certain.
Notably, we would have had more—likely far more—than just one
Trump supporter among the group. And while I certainly met plenty of
Trump-Brown voters last year, the number of Ohioans willing to split
their tickets like that one anti-Gore holdout has declined
dramatically. Fewer and fewer voters are willing to differentiate my
work for Ohioans and fight for the dignity of work from the national
party and its leader.

In large swaths
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Ohio, and the country, the Democratic Party’s reputation has become
toxic
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Following the Norfolk Southern train derailment
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Palestine, Ohio, and the subsequent weeks of national media attention,
I visited
[[link removed]] East
Palestine over and over. My staff and I held roundtables
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first responders and small-business owners and farmers. We visited
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derailment site and the temporary health clinic. We demanded
[[link removed]] Norfolk
Southern pay everything it owed residents. We partnered
[[link removed]] with
JD Vance to push legislation to make railways safer and prevent future
crashes. We secured
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new fire station for the town, where the existing fire station
is just 40 feet
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the railroad tracks.

None of it was enough to make a dent in the county’s Republican
slide—so great now is the distrust
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anyone with a “D” next to their name on the ballot. All along
eastern Ohio, it’s the same story—in county after county
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full of union towns that I once considered part of our base are now
outrightly hostile.

There are two questions people have asked me since November: What are
you going to do next? And, where do we go from here, as a party?

The answers to both are the same.

Democrats must become the workers’ party again. It is an electoral
and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my
life. To win the White House and governing majorities again, Democrats
must reckon with how far our party has strayed from our New Deal
roots, in terms of both our philosophy toward the economy, and the
makeup of our coalition.

We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we
are. How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party—the party of the
people, the party of the working class and the middle class—no
longer matches up with what most voters think.

It Wasn’t Just Inflation

But, you may ask, over the last four years, haven’t we been the
party of workers?

Joe Biden was inarguably the most pro-labor president
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my lifetime. He talked about
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He ushered in
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new era of industrial policy, making dramatic investments
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create jobs and move production of crucial technologies home to the
United States. He hired
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for top jobs who prioritized worker power in the labor market. He had
the most pro-worker
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trade representative likely ever. He presided over rising wages
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unemployment
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He walked
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picket line.

But he was horribly unpopular
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Americans repeatedly told us that they hated
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economy, thought
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country was on the wrong track, and felt
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off than ever.

So what happened?

There is no one simple answer. Inflation
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played a large role. For most people, the cost of living
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already too high before inflation hit—health care, housing, and
childcare, in particular, were becoming ever more unaffordable. Layer
on top of that watching the price go up
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week after week, for eggs and paper towels and diapers and a hundred
other things you hadn’t thought much about before, but that you need
and that are now stretching your already tight budget. It should not
be that surprising that workers were angry.

The White House called it
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if that meant anything to a parent who has to figure out how to pay
their bills this month. They said it
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worse in other countries—as if that would help anyone afford
groceries that week and still make rent or pay the mortgage.

But it would be a mistake to simply excuse ourselves as a party and
chalk this defeat up entirely to inflation that, messaging tone
deafness aside, was largely out of the president’s control.

The march away from the Democratic Party among working-class
voters—now including
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workers—began long before inflation hit. And the road back is going
to require more than just waiting for Trump to fail and voters’
memories of inflation to fade.

For all the legislating over the last four years—much of it designed
to put government to work for working people—Americans did not see
this administration as a break from the status quo. Instead, they saw
us as defenders of it: defenders of institutions that people believe
have fundamentally failed them.

Much ink has been spilled since 2016 on the origins of working-class
discontent, and the seeds of Trumpism. Journalists parachuted into
[[link removed]] Youngstown. Dispatches
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the Mahoning Valley reporting on
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men working in factories who had voted for Trump quickly became a
cliché.

The more that’s been written, the less we seem to have learned.
It’s not that complicated. We have an economy today that does not
reward
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and does not value
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work of Americans without four-year college degrees. Over the past 40
years, corporate profits have soared, executive salaries
have exploded [[link removed]], and
productivity keeps going up
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flat [[link removed]], and
the cost of living keeps getting more expensive
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Productivity and wages used to rise together. That changed
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the late 1970s. Since then, workers produce more and more, but they
enjoy a smaller and smaller share of the wealth they create.

And when work isn’t valued, people don’t see a path to economic
stability, no matter how hard they work. A couple of years of modestly
rising wages are not going to make up for decades of Americans working
harder than ever with less and less to show for it.

Most people in Ohio believe the system is rigged against them.
They’re right. Today, income and wealth inequality rival the Gilded
Age
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Using one of the most classic definitions of the American dream—that
children will be better off than their parents, moving up the economic
ladder with each generation—we are going backward. More than 92
percent of children born in 1940 earned more
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their parents did. For children born in 1984, it’s only 50 percent.

These changes hit working-class kids particularly hard. Children born
to parents without college degrees are less likely
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get a four-year degree, setting them back in nearly all aspects of
life.

Some years ago at a Cincinnati labor dinner
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I sat around a table with a half-dozen custodial workers. They cleaned
office buildings overnight downtown. With a bargaining unit of 1,200
workers, they had just signed their first union contract.

“What does that mean to you?” I asked.

I’ll never forget one woman’s answer: “I’m 51 years old. This
will be the first time in my life I’ll have a paid one-week
vacation.”

That’s the reality that much of the country lives in. College
graduates have
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times the net worth and four times the retirement savings of Americans
without degrees. Americans with a bachelor’s degree live eight
years longer
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those without a bachelor’s degree.

None of this is a coincidence. People in power make decisions that
benefit themselves and people like them, whether intentionally or not.
And those in power are less and less reflective of the country. In the
1960s, about one in four members of Congress only had a high school
degree [[link removed]]. Today
96 percent of members are college graduates.

Most Democratic policymakers and serious journalists know all of this.
But we keep acting shocked by the results. Decade after decade of a
system that is fundamentally failing large swaths of the country is
going to have consequences.

David Brooks—with whom I’ve often disagreed over the years—put
this
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in _The New York Times_ the day before Trump’s second
inauguration: “if you build a system in which the same people win
every time, the people who have been losing will eventually flip over
the table.” If Democrats continue to be seen by voters in places
like Ohio as the defenders of a system that rewards a minority of
coastal elites at the rest of the country’s expense, we will
continue to lose ground among the very people we claim to represent.

It All Goes Back to NAFTA

This isn’t a two-year or a four-year problem. It goes back at least
to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The fight against NAFTA formed
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large part of my political education in Congress. When I got to
Washington in 1993, George H.W. Bush had dropped
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proposed trade deal in President Bill Clinton’s lap. We wondered if
the new president would reopen it for negotiation or forge ahead with
the woefully inadequate deal that had little in the way of standards
to prevent a race-to-the-bottom on wages across the continent. We soon
got our answer—unfortunately, the wrong one.

I led the opposition
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the freshman class that year. I remember Bill Richardson—the
pro-NAFTA member of Democratic leadership from New Mexico—lamenting
congressional recesses to me. He said, “Every time members of
Congress go home, my side loses votes.”

There was a reason for that. And as a party we are still paying for
our failure to listen to workers. There was—still is—a visceral
sense of betrayal that the party of Roosevelt had sold out these
communities.

Today in the Mahoning Valley, I still hear about NAFTA. One member of
my Senate staff who grew up in the valley told me last year that, to
this day, Clinton is not to be spoken of in his family’s steelworker
household, so deep runs the sense of betrayal.

People in Youngstown and Dayton and my hometown of Mans­field
expected Republicans to sell them out to multinational corporations.
But we were supposed to be the party that looked out for these
workers—to be on their side, to stand up to corporate interests.

And as a national party, we failed.

Yes, plenty of us in Congress protested. But a party is represented by
its president, and the president and his administration made a choice.
And that choice had reverberations for decades.

Ohioans weren’t wrong to think the Democratic Party was changing.
The Clinton administration’s follow-up to NAFTA was an inexorable
march toward normalizing trade relations with China. Unbelievably,
they called it
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status”—policy-speak for allowing a flood of Chinese imports into
the country. There was little debate among the supposed “serious
economists.” Yes, we would lose some manufacturing jobs, the
thinking went, but the labor market would adjust.

Talk to anyone in a manufacturing town in Ohio, or anywhere across the
country, and they will tell you this was lunacy.

And then the young staffers in the Clinton administration became the
seasoned experts in the Obama administration, attempting to ram
through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and confidently pushing a vision
of an ever-more-interconnected global order. To people in Ohio, that
sounded like a recipe for more of the same: more shuttered
storefronts, more kids moving away, and more good-paying careers
replaced by dead-end jobs at big box stores that have few benefits and
opportunities for upward mobility.

In 2020, the same researchers who proved just how many manufacturing
jobs we lost in the wake of what they dubbed the “China
shock” looked at
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political shifts in places hit hard by increased competition with
China. They found that, in these communities, more people began
watching Fox News, and they became more likely to elect Republicans to
Congress.

Spend time in a place like my hometown of Mansfield, and it can be no
surprise that working people have lost faith in our party and in their
government. People feel gaslit, and they feel condescended to.

Leaders in both parties said these deals would lift everyone up; they
said this was the future—free trade would stop wars, end poverty,
and usher in a new, glorious era of prosperity and innovation.

And they looked down on anyone who disagreed. I remember campaigning
with one national Democrat in Ohio. In between events, the
conversation turned to trade, and he said, “You’re fighting the
last war.”

“You’re on the wrong side of history,” was another one I heard.

During the NAFTA fight, I remember talking to one woman, a business
owner, who told me, “I can’t believe you went to Yale and you’re
taking this position.” We Ivy Leaguers were supposed to know better,
apparently. And any time you raised a concern about workers, they’d
say, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll compensate the losers,” with
seemingly no awareness of how insulting that sounded to all those
“losers."

As if any amount of compensation could replace the dignity you get
from a good, middle-class job, with skills you’re proud of, where
you can support your family.

This is what leaders of both parties have missed—and not just on
trade, but on the entire project that often gets dubbed neoliberalism.
The bargain for Democrats was supposed to be, allow the supposed
“free market”—the financial industry, multinational
corporations—to run wild, and we would do enough redistribution in
taxes to make up for all the inequality it created.

Of course we didn’t. Not even close.

But beyond that, the solutions to try to fix this economic regime’s
fundamental unfairness have been unpopular. Most people don’t want
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they view as government handouts. Nor do they want to be left to fend
for themselves in an unfair market, rigged by multinational
corporations, that only benefits the people at the very top.

They want a level playing field so their hard work can actually pay
off. And they want a government that will actually fight to create
that level playing field, which means taking on corporate interests.

But instead, the message they’ve heard from party elites, over and
over, has been: We know better than you do. Voters sense it. They hate
it. And until we fix it, working-class voters will continue to abandon
us.

Becoming the Party of Work

As Democrats debate where to go from here, sometimes this is presented
as a trade-off: The party has lost working-class voters, but it has
gained
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educated and upper-income voters. And if we become “too populist,”
we risk losing the voters we have gained, the thinking goes.

But my hunch is that the above equation conflates donors with voters,
and it far underestimates the economic anxiety among even the upper
middle class.

Most families at all income levels feel squeezed by soaring housing
costs, unaffordable childcare, rising insurance prices, stubbornly
expensive health care—not to mention trying to save for retirement,
higher education for their kids, and care for aging parents. Life
feels unaffordable even for workers whose incomes put them well ahead
of their working-class neighbors.

And most people get their income
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a paycheck, not an investment portfolio. Work unites all of us.

We’re all trying to do something productive for our family and our
community and our country. We want to develop skills and take pride in
them, and we want our work to be valued, and for our paychecks to be
enough to provide for our families.

That should be our party’s North Star, the foundation on which we
build.

How Americans view work and opportunity, and the role of government in
creating the conditions for their hard work to be valued, is not well
enough understood by Democratic politicians and policymakers.

We have plenty of research showing the precariousness of most
Americans’ economic situation, at all income levels. And we have
many well-intentioned policy experts who have churned out ideas that
would improve workers’ economic lives. But we have not been able to
weave it all together into a coherent and compelling agenda that
resonates with a broad majority of working Americans.

Sometimes people in Washington assume that if an idea is good for the
working class on paper by the calculations of D.C. policy experts, it
must be popular with ordinary workers. But workers don’t always see
things the same way. Other times, the ideas are left on the shelf
entirely—often the victim of the filibuster—or they’re filtered
through the prism of the same sorts of people who talked about
“transitory” inflation.

Too often, well-meaning public officials end up sounding like they
think workers in the heartland are charity cases. No matter how
beneficial a policy may be, if it sounds like a handout bestowed out
of the goodness of the hearts of Ph.D.-toting experts in Washington,
it’s unlikely to feel empowering to working people who want to feel
in control of their own lives.

Following the election, CNN reported
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one focus group Harris supporters conducted after the presidential
debate with undecided voters in western Pennsylvania, which shares
much political DNA with eastern Ohio. One woman described Trump as
“crazy” and Harris as “preachy,” but, asked to pick between
the two, she chose the former, “because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look
down on me. ‘Preachy’ does.”

To become the workers’ party, we need to better understand workers
and their lives, and we need to have ordinary workers more actively
involved in the party and its decisions. The easiest way to understand
the working class is to be of the working class: to spend as much time
as possible outside D.C., to talk with people working regular jobs, to
hire people from all kinds of backgrounds who have worked different
types of jobs—or to be from that background yourself.

And we need to trust workers. If they tell us that inflation is
killing them, we need to believe them. If they tell us that they
don’t like “free trade,” we need to believe them. If they tell
us they like tariffs and see them as showing allegiance with American
workers, we need to believe them.

Sometimes workers are going to tell us things that make us
uncomfortable or that we may not want to hear. But if we are going to
be the workers’ party, that can’t apply only when the opinions of
working-class voters happen to match up with those of current party
leaders and elite donors.

We also need solutions and a response to the Trump administration that
meet the level of frustration people rightly feel with the status quo.
Trump is a wrecking ball to the system, but there’s a reason people
wanted a wrecking ball. The problem is, what comes in its wake? Eight
years ago, Americans rebelled at
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first Trump administration’s supposed “repeal and replace” plan
for Obamacare because people knew it was a con—there was no
“replace.”

There is no “replace” this time either. There’s no better system
on the other side of Trump’s wrecking ball where workers are better
paid and have greater retirement security and lower prices. But there
are farmers
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are losing sales and kids
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are losing after-school programs and workers
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are losing jobs. And there will—of course—be massive tax cuts
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the very same corporations that are raising our prices and sending our
jobs overseas.

Where is the wrecking ball for them?

We have to acknowledge that, yes, people have legitimate
frustrations—including with their government—and want to tear
things down. We need our own vision for what we’re going to
break—starting with corporate special interests’ stranglehold over
the country, a stranglehold that makes it impossible for people’s
hard work to pay off. And we have to show Americans that we have the
better vision for what could replace it. We don’t want to wreck the
country—we want to fix it.

Coming up with that vision is easier said than done, of course. One
place we can start: overtime pay.

The first harbinger of what was to come for working people in the new
administration came in mid-November. To little fanfare, a single judge
in East Texas, at the behest of the Plano Chamber of Commerce, struck
down
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Labor Department rule guaranteeing overtime pay for workers making
around $40,000 a year. That judge was appointed by
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Trump in his first term, and because of that ruling, four million
workers lost overtime pay.

This is such a fundamental principle: If you put in extra hours, you
ought to earn extra pay. Yet most people know nothing about the
overtime expansion, or the fact that it was blocked. Yes, it was a
Biden administration decision. But if you ask most people what
President Biden did for working people, I doubt anyone would tell you,
“expanded overtime pay.” It was not pushed as a signature
accomplishment by the White House. It wasn’t a major fight—we had
a bill to expand overtime pay
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further and put it into law permanently, but there was no real attempt
by party leaders to pass it, another case of preemptive surrender.

And when that Texas judge struck it down, we heard next to nothing
from Democrats. Most of my colleagues didn’t know it happened.

No, overtime pay alone is not an agenda. But we are going to have to
start making these fights. And we have to take into consideration the
message they send to workers about our broader values. This fight goes
to heart of what the dignity of work is—it’s about rewarding hard
work. It’s about working people finally getting what they earn.

Of course, no one can claim to have all the answers right now. Anyone
who does has not put in the work or done the self-reflection we will
need.

And no matter how we may adapt our policies, our message, and the
types of candidates we recruit and leaders we elevate, we know that we
face a daunting disadvantage in how most Americans now get their
information—with the California CEOs who control
[[link removed]] the
levers of attention in this country now firmly ensconced
[[link removed]] in
the upper echelons of the Trump administration. Figuring out how to
reach working-class Americans will be its own massive undertaking.

None of this will be a project measured in months, or in one or two
election cycles. We need a generational effort to transform our party,
with the dignity of work at the center.

This is what much of my work will center on over the coming months: We
need to reset the narrative on American workers, to push our country
to take their views seriously, and to put their work and aspirations
at the center of all we do.

And as we do this work, we need humility. If the results of this
election have taught us one thing, it should be that the class of
people who have been running the country have much to learn about
their fellow citizens: the people whose work built the strongest
economy the world has ever seen, and who haven’t gotten nearly
enough credit for it. Their work has dignity, and it must be valued.
Let’s start there.  

_Sherrod Brown served as a United States senator from Ohio from 2007
to 2025._

_The New Republic was founded in 1914 to bring liberalism into the
modern era. The founders understood that the challenges facing a
nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution and mass immigration
required bold new thinking. Today’s New Republic is wrestling with
the same fundamental questions: how to build a more inclusive and
democratic civil society, and how to fight for a fairer political
economy in an age of rampaging inequality. We also face challenges
that belong entirely to this age, from the climate crisis to
Republicans hell-bent on subverting democratic governance._

* Sherrod Brown
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* Democratic Party
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* neo-liberalism
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* Bill Clinton
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* NAFTA
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*
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*
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*
*
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