YOUNGSTOWN, OH — The sweeping industrial policy implemented during Joe Biden’s presidency would appear perfectly designed to boost a blue-collar Democratic candidate like Sen. Sherrod Brown — it’s brought the promise of high-paying jobs, rebuilt infrastructure and helped leverage a national boom in manufacturing investment.
But at a rally in Youngstown on Tuesday, one week before Election Day in his hard-fought reelection race, that agenda was barely part of Brown’s closing argument.
Speaker after speaker at a local Teamsters union hall praised the senator’s record, focusing on his efforts to provide health care for veterans, fight for abortion rights, fight against bad trade deals, cap the price of insulin at $35 and stop fentanyl smuggling. Almost unmentioned were the senator’s efforts to bring manufacturing jobs to the state, which was referenced once in passing by the head of the ironworkers union in a speech that — like others at this rally — otherwise dwelled heavily on Brown’s efforts to save union pensions.
Near the end of his own speech, Brown name-checked the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, but spent more time talking about a law mandating that the government buy American flags produced in the United States.
“Think of what we’ve done the last four years for workers, for women, for civil rights, for consumers, for people just to have a decent standard [of living],” Brown said concluding his speech. “Because if you love this country, you fight for the people who make it work.”
The focus of Brown’s rally wasn’t an anomaly — either for his campaign against Republican Bernie Moreno or for other Democrats running for reelection.
Two years after backing a multitrillion-dollar investment into labor-intensive projects like infrastructure repair and manufacturing construction, the Democrats’ industrial agenda is playing, at most, a minor role in 2024, sidelined by issues like abortion rights that the party finds more politically favorable.
“It’s talked about to some degree, but if you’re watching as a viewer, you’re largely not seeing that coming through the ads as much as you’re seeing the back and forth of Moreno versus Sherrod,” said David Pepper, the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party.
Brown’s limited acknowledgement of that agenda, Pepper added, was a function of the party’s broader hesitancy to embrace Biden’s agenda when it was passed.
“It comes from an inability to really communicate on the ground what was happening between ‘21 and ‘23 and taking credit for it,” Pepper said. “And that leads to candidates in ‘24 not seeing that that’s a good strategy for them either. It’s too late.”
The virtual silence caps a disappointing political era for many Democrats, one in which their party embraced a muscular agenda of big payments aimed at working-class and GOP-trending voters only to see the attention largely go unrequited.
Democrats say the industrial agenda remains an important, if relatively small, part of their overall argument that they are fighting to make the lives of middle-class voters easier. Brown’s campaign, for example, has taken credit for securing money to repair a key bridge connecting Cincinnati to Kentucky. And Republicans, for their part, are also cautious in their own way about industrial policy, preferring instead to talk about transgender rights and immigration while hedging on whether they would repeal policies like the Inflation Reduction Act.
But critics of the policies say they are ultimately a drag on Brown.
“There are some silver linings out there in places like the Mahoning Valley, but I think the overall message from voters is it’s too little, too late,” said Donovan O’Neil, a senior adviser to Americans for Prosperity Action, a libertarian-leaning free-market advocacy group.
AFP Action is running a TV ad targeting Brown in Ohio over the Inflation Reduction Act, blaming it for widespread inflation.
Both parties agree Brown held a sizable lead in the race over the summer that had shrunk considerably by October and left the race a de facto toss-up. Republicans say Moreno’s gaining strength is proof that his momentum will carry him over the finish line next week; Democrats counter that in a margin-of-error battle, the incumbent’s superior field program will help him win a squeaker.
Helping Brown and other Democrats win in the industrial heartland was part of the political rationale for Biden’s industrial-heavy agenda when he took office in January of 2021. Since then, Brown has voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which authorized more than $1 trillion in spending on repairing and building infrastructure; the CHIPS and Sciences Act, which authorized spending tens of billions of dollars to help build semiconductor manufacturing plants; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided billions of dollars in direct payments and tax credits for clean-energy investment.
Such legislation helped spur a manufacturing investment surge nationwide, and there’ve been visible benefits in Ohio. A bridge connecting Cincinnati and Kentucky, for instance, received more than $1.5 billion for a long-sought rehabilitation and expansion project. Intel is building two semiconductor plants outside of Columbus. And a new electric-vehicle battery plant in northeast Ohio opened with financial assistance from some of the federal government’s clean-energy subsidies.
When asked after his Youngstown rally whether manufacturing was on the right track in Ohio, Brown responded by praising the CHIPS Act and the union jobs it had brought to the state. But his answer quickly detoured.
“A big part of an industrial policy is enforcing trade rules,” Brown told reporters. “And I’ve stood up to presidents of both parties to make sure that we enforce trade rules better than we have, because too often, companies use outsourced jobs and our trade rules aren’t enforced the way they should be.”
Brown’s campaign has taken a similar approach much of this election: It’s happy to talk about policies that affect workers — or take credit for prolabor policies he’s passed in recent years — while mostly avoiding association with many of the party’s signature legislative achievements.
His campaign has run ads, for instance, touting a law Brown supported that forced government-funded infrastructure projects to use American-made steel, in addition to one focused on buying American-made American flags. Other ads have a similar focus on the working class, including his work to save pensions of some of the state’s workforce and expand health care access for veterans affected by exposure to toxic burn pits.
And though Brown has talked about manufacturing jobs while in office, many of the recent ads from his campaign and allied groups focus on Moreno’s business record or his position on abortion rights.
Brown’s critics and allies say there’s a combination of reasons for his lack of emphasis on infrastructure and industrial investments in Ohio. For one, many people might not know about even high-profile developments like the Intel plants near Columbus.
“I’m not so sure the average voter knows that there’s 500 ironworkers working on a project in Columbus,” said Eric Dean, general president of the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers, who spoke at Brown’s rally on Tuesday.
Dean said his union was doing all it could to tell people about the jobs, but other Brown allies agreed that any proliferation of jobs hasn’t quite sunk in with the electorate.
“I think it’s happening on a smaller, non-newsworthy scale,” said Ed Barker, a longtime supporter of Brown who attended the senator’s event in Youngstown. “So it’s happening, but it’s not a show-it-out event.”
Other Democrats said touting any economic success at a time when people are pessimistic about the economy is politically dangerous.
“If people are struggling, and some people obviously are, running things that sound too rosy makes you look out of touch,” Pepper said. “That is an important thing to keep in mind.”
Other voters might associate the spending programs with increased inflation.
“People know a lot of money has been spent in Washington,” O’Neil said. “They know that coming out COVID, they spent a lot of money after shutting down the economy. And they know they’re paying more and getting less.”
—
Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS.