Republican Jon Husted was appointed by Gov. Mike DeWine (R) to fill the unexpired Senate term of JD Vance in January 2025 when he became vice president. Now he is facing a stiff election challenge from former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), who was defeated by Ohio's other senator, Bernie Mareno, in 2024.
In an aggregation of several polls compiled by RealClearPolling (RCP), Husted trails Brown by an average of 2.6 points. The individual results have varied considerably over the summer, but the polling has shifted toward Brown (pictured above) over the course of the campaign.
Even so, Husted, who was elected lieutenant governor before his Senate appointment, does not think the voters are ready to rehire Brown.
"They rejected him by over 200,000 votes in the last election," the Republican notes. "Sherrod Brown has been in public office in Ohio for 50 years. He just spent $300 million on his last campaign, so, he has high name recognition."
Donald Trump won Ohio by roughly 11 percentage points in the 2024 presidential race, and Brown's defeat underscored how the state's increasingly Republican electorate had turned against the longtime Democratic senator.
Still, Husted understands that this is a midterm election.
"In midterm elections, whoever the president is, that particular president's party tends not to do as well in those elections," he acknowledges. "But I'm hopeful that in this particular case, that the voters have supported me in the past by overwhelming margins [and] recently rejected Sherrod Brown by a solid margin, I'm hoping that they'll remember why they supported me and why they've rejected him and that that will lead us to win in November."
"As we run a campaign and people are reminded about why they fired him two years ago, I don't think they're going to vote to rehire him this November," Husted says.
RCP currently classifies the race as a toss-up, and its Aug. 31 Senate analysis described Ohio as one of three races separated by less than 3 points in its averages.
Sherrod Brown's campaign did not respond to AFN's request for comment.
