Sherrod Brown Takes Down Jon Husted in Ohio, Completing Senate Comeback

Sherrod Brown is heading back to the Senate. NBC News projects the 73-year-old Democrat has knocked off Republican incumbent Jon Husted in Ohio — one of the nastiest and most expensive Senate fights of the cycle. The win caps a comeback for Brown, who lost his bid for a fourth term just two years ago.

Brown won't get a fresh six years. He'll serve out the final two years of the term JD Vance claimed in 2022 and then abandoned when he became vice president. Husted, Ohio's former lieutenant governor, had been handed that seat last year by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Now the 59-year-old is out of a job, with a long political career suddenly facing an uncertain next chapter.

The race turned into a flood of attack ads, and it played out against a national backdrop that left Republicans exposed: the war with Iran, gas prices climbing because of it, and voter anxiety over the economy and affordability. In Ohio, one issue landed hardest — the rush to build data centers for AI companies. Husted spent years championing those projects as the future, and Brown's team hammered him for it relentlessly. The National Republican Senatorial Committee was so worried it warned in an August memo that the data center issue could sink his candidacy outright.

Husted never fully escaped the sense that the Senate wasn't his real goal. He'd been running for governor — a job he's long wanted — when the Vance vacancy upended Ohio politics, and taking DeWine's appointment let him dodge a brutal primary against friend and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. He also kept his $6 million gubernatorial war chest intact, which some GOP observers read as a plan B. 'I'm, like, an Ohio guy. D.C. is not my place,' Husted told a Stark County GOP picnic in August, adding that he understood how important the seat was.

Brown had his own baggage to carry: Husted and Republicans painted him as a career politician with 50 years in public office and little to show for it. Brown fired back by casting Husted as a Trump loyalist who backed the Iran war and initially voted against releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. In the closing weeks, an ugly ad in the governor's race — a $4 million attack from Ramaswamy's campaign featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Amy Acton — raised fears that backlash would spill onto Husted.

President Donald Trump fought hard to keep the seat red, rallying with Husted twice in nine days, with cameos from former NFL coach Jon Gruden, Husted's old football teammate at the University of Dayton. Trump's endorsement had earlier helped Husted avoid a messy primary. At an Oct. 12 rally in Youngstown, Trump marveled at Husted's athletic build, saying he only learned of it from Gruden — and describing his hands as 'claws.' It wasn't enough. Brown, now the most successful Ohio Democrat of the last three decades, gets two more years in the chamber he never really left behind.