Sherrod Brown
October 24, 2026 · Newsletter
There's more of us than there are them
Hey friends,
Last week I joined Dan Pfeiffer for a segment on his show, Pod Save America.
We got into a lot – data centers, AI, Donald Trump, President Obama, organized labor, and the Guardians. Here are a few of the highlights:
Crypto: I’m enemy #1 to crypto and they’re spending so much against me right now – over $50 million – because I’ve spent my career taking on Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Oil, and in many cases I’ve been successful. The other reason they’re throwing the kitchen sink at us is because my opponent, Jon Husted, is in their back pocket. He’s been called FirstEnergy’s “golden boy.”
Data centers: Our campaign is in lockstep with Ohioans on data centers and our message is resonating because I listen to people. I travel all over the state and hear about it all the time. I’m not going to let them continue to come into our state, bully our communities into projects without our consent, and then leave Ohioans holding the bill.
How to help: When people ask me how they can help, I say go to sherrodbrown.com. $10, $15, $20 bucks – it makes a big difference. We will win this race because our contributions are grassroots. Theirs aren’t. You can also sign up for a volunteer shift with our field team to canvass, make calls, or write postcards to voters. We need the help.
Watch our interview here, or read parts of our conversation below (edited for length and clarity).
More soon.
In solidarity,
Sherrod Brown
Sherrod Brown, welcome back to Pod Save America.
Good to be on with you guys. Thanks. Or with you, personally, not you guys.
Thank you. Well, we’re a collective, a royal we. I got a lot of important things to talk to you about, but you are wearing a Cleveland Guardians sweatshirt. Game three tonight. How are you feeling?
Game three right now, one o’clock. They moved it from six to one because of weather. So we got campaign stuff to do today, but this fit and game three and it’s pretty exciting in Cleveland. I got seats way up in the upper deck, in the cheap seats. So people, I’ll meet a lot of people there that are, their tickets aren’t that expensive, like regular people in the upper, in a third of three decks.
So will we see your opponent in a luxury box somewhere? Is that possible?
Yeah. Yes, that’s right. If he knows where Cleveland is.
I’m glad you brought up the baseball game because we love baseball and sports here, but also because my first question to you is about the ungodly amounts of money being spent in Ohio. The Senate Republicans just took out money from North Carolina and Georgia. They’re putting more money into your state to try to defeat you. I cannot imagine what it’s going to be like to watch the game today. I imagine every commercial will be about you or Amy Acton or the other side. How are you surviving this sort of unprecedented financial assault?
My daughter was a huge fan as a kid. We used to keep score together. She and Connie and I watched game one, and Chicago game five. It’s a little unnerving to sit there with your kid, even though she’s in her 40s, and watch these nasty lying ads. It’s what they do. They’re up to $280, $290 million. The crypto data center crowd are up to $40 million now. But there’s more of us than there are them. And they’re talking about stuff that’s just not true. Instead of talking about the war, talking about prices, talking about cuts in rural health and cuts in insurance. It’s not working this year because people realize the real problems in our society.
The amount of money is so obscene that I live in California and I see ads about you if I watch Ohio State on Saturdays because they’re running national ads in some of these places just to reach the small slice of voters in Ohio.
Yeah, I didn’t even know these were national ads. Most of our money, literally 60% of our money we raise, $10, $25. And I ask people to come to sherrodbrown.com. That makes a huge difference, 10, 15, 20 bucks. That will win this race because our contributions are grassroots, theirs are not.
You mentioned the crypto PACs. The crypto industry spent a ton of money to defeat you in 2024. They’re back at it this time around. Why are you at the top of their enemies list?
Well, it’s two things. One, I’ve spent my career taking on Wall Street, taking on Big Pharma, taking on Big Oil, and been successful in many cases. The other reason is Jon Husted is their boy.
He’s called the golden boy by First Energy executives, and there was a $61 million bribe from them to send the Speaker of the House to prison. He’s called the face of data centers, and they are immensely unpopular in both parties. All that money, they know he’s their guy, they know I’m going to hold him accountable, and I guess it’s the perfect storm. So they spend literally tens and tens of millions of dollars.
…
Do you have thoughts on if and when you’re elected, what a Senate could do to rein in data centers, put some rules of the road to deal with AI even more broadly?
Sure. AI is the next step, and there is no real consensus there. But to start with, you take away tax breaks, you require that the electricity costs are paid by the billionaires mostly from out of state, and you give local communities more say.
One day I was near Bowling Green, a city, good state universities there just south of Toledo, very good flat farmland. You can almost see Chicago from there. One of the biggest data centers in the Midwest is there. They’re building 280 acres, just gargantuan. And you drive from the city of Bowling Green out in the country, and you see family farms everywhere. All of a sudden, you see these cranes and these trucks.
And if you’re a farmer, and you’ve had your farm for three or four generations, or you just bought land out there to live or to farm, it’s just stunning how they have taken over without any input at all from local farmers, local small businesses, local people wanting to live there.
You’re someone who’s been a huge supporter of organized labor throughout your career. Have you gotten pushback from labor unions on your data center position, or have you guys sort of come to a consensus?
I haven’t for two reasons. One they can count on me to make sure whatever jobs there are, they’re union, good paying, good benefit jobs. The other thing is clearly these workers don’t want their electricity prices going up. They want some local control over where these data centers are in their area. And they don’t think that Ohio taxpayers should be feeding these very greedy billionaires that run these companies.
You are running in a state that Trump won three times by double digits. How’s it different this time than when you were running in 2024?
It’s different because the voters did not vote for this war. Trump voters did not. The voters did not vote for fertilizer prices almost doubling, diesel prices going dramatically up, gas prices, food prices.
Voters didn’t vote for health care increases on their premiums, which caused 160,000 Ohioans to drop their insurance in January and February. And hundreds of thousands more are very fearful of what’s going to happen in January. Republicans voted on the Medicaid cuts in the big beautiful bill and they put it off till January.
Voters understand that and what’s already happening in rural hospitals. So Husted has no answer on any of that. He said his only answer was he said, we’ve got to end this war.
Two weeks later, he voted to continue it. He said, we’ve got to protect Medicaid. He told a woman with a disabled daughter, he told her, looked her in the eye and said, I will never cut Medicaid.
Two weeks later, he voted for the huge Medicaid cuts. He’s been a guy that’s done nothing against this war, done nothing to rein in prices in the grocery store, done nothing to protect rural health care, none of those things. And voters know it.
We’re making sure they know it. He can run all the ads about nasty stuff and distractions. But he’s got to answer these issues to everyday Ohioans of all political stripes on how he’s done nothing to make their lives better.
Nothing.
President Obama is coming to campaign for you, I believe, in the next couple of days here.
Yeah, you know him, I hear?
Yeah, I do. I do. A lot of people running in red states have sort of eschewed national Democrats coming to his campaign for them. Obama, he did win Ohio twice. What does he bring to the table, and what do you hope to get from that event with him over the next couple days here?
He brings an excitement to the table. And I think he’s coming because he sees what I hear and see in Ohio, that people’s lives have gotten worse. And Barack Obama, he loves this country, he cares a lot about this country, and he sees people’s lives getting worse.
Whether it’s a farmer that lost his soybean markets. He talks to small business owners, he hears them as I do, who have seen the tariffs make it so much harder to run a restaurant. We have particularly small retailers, people that were regular customers and now come once a week instead of twice, or don’t come at all. President Obama knows all that, he’s got a good antenna.
We talk once in a while, he knows I need the help. I guess you compare President Obama coming in to Jon Husted sending a missive out to the tech crowd saying I need tens of millions of dollars. And I’ll make that contrast any day.
Yeah, and I will say also, cause I know him, he likes Ohio and he also likes you a lot too. He’s happy to do anything he possibly can to help you. Okay, last question for you. I just can’t emphasize enough to our listeners the amount of money Republicans are pouring in to defeat you. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen in American politics. If anyone here wants to help out, if they have $5, $10, or even more to help you, where can they do that?
Contribute 10, 15, 20 bucks, at sherrodbrown.com, and volunteer to send postcards, or come to the state to do weekend canvassing. We need the help. It’s $280 million now. It’ll be another who knows how many. Probably the most expensive Senate race in history. And we won’t have as much, but we just want enough to compete, and we’re on track to do that.
And being with you on this show really matters. So I appreciate that.
Sherrod Brown, thank you so much. Good luck over the next two weeks here, and we’ll be rooting for you on election night.
Thanks so much.
That’s our show for today. Thanks to Sherrod for coming on.
Before you click away! Republican spending in Ohio has reached $317 million, and Sherrod Brown is counting on your support to keep up. We can’t outspend them, but we can outwork them.