Democrat Sherrod Brown defeats Republican Jon Husted in Ohio US Senate race, AP projects

Former Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown will again represent Ohioans in the U.S. Senate, after defeating Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Jon Husted. The Associated Press projected the Brown victory at 11:11 p.m.

Brown, 73, was projected the winner Tuesday in a special election. Husted was appointed by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to fill Vice President JD Vance’s seat at the start of 2025. 

The call came in the midst of what appeared to be a big night for Democrats amid voter anger at President Donald Trump, a Republican.

Husted has served a 25-year career in Ohio politics. But in the 2026 midterm, he ran in a highly nationalized election.

Husted voted in support of unpopular measures such as tax cuts for the rich, cuts to healthcare, against releasing the Epstein files, in support of the Iran war, and to protect Trump’s tariffs, which many economists say made inflation worse.

Brown also painted Husted as “the face of data centers,” and Brown highlighted Husted’s involvement in a scandal in which an Akron-based FirstEnergy paid $61 million in bribes to get a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout.

Brown said Husted was an out-of-touch tool of wealthy interests.

“They say you’re the company you keep,” Brown said at a rally on Monday night. “I want to talk about the kind of people Jon Husted surrounds himself with. Jon Husted had to testify in a criminal trial in defense of the indicted FirstEnergy utility executives in the state’s largest bribery scandal ever.”

While Brown again poised to carry Ohio, he failed to do it with new support from rural voters, said Lee Hannah, a political scientist at Wright State University.

“From what I can tell, Sherrod Brown is not doing better in rural Ohio,” Hannah said. “But in some of these suburban counties and some of the cities, he’s up about 5% if those margins hold. My guess is that he didn’t convert a lot of people in rural areas, but turnout wasn’t as high there.”

He said Brown has only two years before he has to run again, but he could work as a senator to gain support from rural Ohio.

“I would love to see a scenario where they don’t just investigate President Trump, but they also turn around some of these affordability issues,” Hannah said. “If he shows that he is delivering, we can see a turn in some of those numbers.”

As is the case in so many races Republicans didn’t expect to lose, Trump played a central role in the Ohio U.S. Senate contest.

First, he picked then-Sen. JD Vance to be his 2024 running mate. That required the state to conduct a special Senate election when Vance still would have had four years left in his term. So there wouldn’t have even been an Ohio Senate election on Tuesday.

In addition, then0-Lt. Gov. Husted and then-Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost had long been jockeying for the governorship after current Gov. Mike DeWine retired in January. But Trump endorsed Cincinnati billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, clearing them from the field.

That left DeWine to appoint Husted to the Senate seat vacated by Husted, and set up Tuesday’s loss for Republicans. In the end, Husted and Ramaswamy lost in what had been an increasingly Republican state.

Brown, 73, was born in Mansfield. He holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University and a master’s from Ohio State. He was a state representative from 1975 to 1982, Ohio secretary of state from 1983 to 1991, and a congressman from 1993 to 2007.

Then-Sen. Mike DeWine was the Republican incumbent in 2006 — another midterm year when the Republican president was unpopular.

So from the time Brown entered the race this year, both parties had reason to know it would be a squeaker. They have spent accordingly.

With more than $500 million dropped on ads and ad reservations by the end of October, the Ohio Senate race is the second-most expensive this cycle and one of the 10 most expensive non-presidential races in U.S. history, The Hill reported last week.

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