Sherrod Brown on what comes next for his party – and himself: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, senior national political reporter Henry J. Gomez sits down with Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, to discuss what went wrong for the Democratic Party in 2024 and what comes next. Plus, national political correspondent Steve Kornacki breaks down how more than 40% of the country’s counties were decided by at least 50 points in November.

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Outgoing Sen. Sherrod Brown talks of rescuing a ‘corporate’ Democratic Party

By Henry J. Gomez

CLEVELAND — Fresh off a comfortable re-election victory in 2018, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, considered running for president on a populist message aimed at the many working-class Midwest voters who had fled the Democratic Party in favor of Donald Trump.

Brown passed on the White House campaign. Now, six years later, he is soon to be unemployed, having recently lost his bid for a fourth Senate term. It will be the first time since 1992 — and only the second time since 1974 — that he will not hold an elected office.

Trump, meanwhile, will return to the presidency next month, and the existential challenges are already roaring back for Brown and the Democrats. The challenges ring true to Brown, 72, who has been warning about them for years. And, despite his defeat, Brown’s perch in a part of the country where Democrats are a tarnished brand presents him with the opportunity to have a vocal role in the party if he wants one. 

In a recent interview with NBC News, Brown talked like someone who does. He spoke of a “post-Senate mission” to reorient Democrats as the “party of workers” in Middle America. He also revealed that he has received calls from people encouraging him to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee, though he added that the position does not interest him.

“Being the national chair, you have a platform,” Brown said. “You also have to run an organization with 50 state chairs. … I don’t want to spend my time on an airplane raising money.” 

But Brown’s post-Senate mission could lead him back to the Senate. He left the door open to running for office again in 2026, when Ohio will hold a special election to fill the remainder of Vice President-elect JD Vance’s term. Brown also noticeably described the final remarks he delivered in the Senate on Tuesday as his “last” speech — not a “farewell,” as such addresses from outgoing senators are commonly known. 

“I’m not making decisions yet on that,” Brown replied when asked if he was already considering a comeback in 2026, when Ohio also will elect a new governor. “I’ve got time.”

For now, Brown is unleashing stinging critiques about his party.

“I’m not going to whine about my loss,” he said. “But I lost in large part because the national reputation of the Democratic Party is that we are sort of a lighter version of a corporation — a corporate party. We’re seen as a bicoastal, elite party. And it’s hard to argue that.”

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The places where the 2024 election was a blowout

By Steve Kornacki

Nationally, the presidential race was close, with Donald Trump besting Kamala Harris by 1.5 points in the popular vote. But at the county level, there were landslides galore.

In the 2024 election, 1,267 counties were won by Trump or Harris by margins of 50 points or more. That accounts for just over 40% of all the 3,143 counties in the United States. It also represents a four-fold jump from the number of landslide counties a generation ago, when the narrow 2000 contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore (where the popular vote margin was 0.5 points) yielded just 304 of them. 

The number of landslide counties ticked up in the Bush and Barack Obama years before exploding in 2016, the first of three straight races with Trump at the top of the GOP ticket.

The trend toward these local landslides reflects demographic divisions that have sharpened over the last quarter-century. Vast swaths of rural America, for instance, have become redoubts of red. Trump’s 2024 vote share exceeded 90% in 53 counties, virtually all of them sparsely populated. His biggest vote margin on the map was 92 points in Nebraska’s Hayes County, which has fewer than 1,000 residents and a population density of two people per square mile.

Geographically, the terrain that Trump claimed with these landslides is broad. He won by at least 50 points in 75 of Tennessee’s 95 counties, 39 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, and 184 of Texas’s 254 counties.

Harris’ county-level landslides, meanwhile, were far fewer in number. But cumulatively, the 42 counties she won by 50 or more points account for millions of votes. These counties tend to be in and around major cities, reflecting Democrats’ strength with Black voters and white voters with college degrees.

Her biggest landslide was 75 points, scored just outside Washington, D.C., in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, the largest Black-majority county in the country. She also crushed Trump by 64 points in California’s upscale Marin County, which sports one of the highest median household incomes in the country and where two-thirds of the majority-white population have at least a four-year degree.

While the rise in landslide counties is the product of two decades of deepening divisions, there has been one notable shift in the other direction. A number of heavily Hispanic counties where Democrats once routinely posted massive margins have moved dramatically to the right (or away from the left) in the Trump era. Webb County, in deep South Texas, for instance, gave Hillary Clinton a 52-point landslide eight years ago. This time around, Trump won it by 2.

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That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at [email protected]

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