A week before the election, a young Republican asked Vice President JD Vance how her generation is supposed to afford a family. He opened his answer with a joke about Sen. Jon Husted’s backside, then admitted his party hadn’t done enough. On Tuesday, Husted lost his Ohio Senate seat to Democrat Sherrod Brown, who spent the campaign talking about grocery prices, gas prices and electric bills.
Vance had warned his party about this weeks earlier. After a Gallup poll found a record 43% of Americans viewing socialism positively, he told Republicans not to blame young people for socialism’s appeal when housing costs keep them from buying homes.
Brown defeated Husted, CBS News and the Associated Press projected, flipping a seat in a state Trump won by more than 10 points two years ago. Brown, 73, became the first senator since 1988 to win back a seat after losing reelection, CBS reported.
The question
At a Fox News town hall in Fort Worth, Texas, Kate White, a Texas Christian University student and vice president of the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, asked how Republicans expect young people to start families when the average home costs more than $415,000. Vance’s first response was that he had “only gotten one question about Jon Husted’s a–,” a reference to a running joke Trump had made at rallies about the former college cornerback’s physique.
Vance then conceded that Republicans hadn’t done enough on affordability for young people. He blamed high prices on illegal immigration and Wall Street investors buying up homes, and said the administration was addressing both. His advice to White was not to wait. “It’s never the right time, so go ahead and do it,” he said.
What Republicans talked about
Trump rallied for Husted three times in October. His remarks focused not on Husted’s Senate record but on his physique, which Trump claimed was boosting Husted in the polls. Late in the race, the AP reported, Trump promoted Husted as the better-looking candidate. Husted’s campaign, meanwhile, argued Brown was out of date, with one ad noting Husted was a 7-year-old playing pee wee football when Brown first went to Congress.
Trump’s main economic pitch was a $5,000 check for every adult if Republicans held Congress. An Economist/YouGov survey found 57% of registered voters doubted he would deliver the payments.
What Brown talked about
Brown ran almost entirely on the cost of living. His winning message was affordability, WCPO reported, focused on lowering costs for working Ohioans. “Sherrod is fighting to lower the price of groceries and health care and protect Ohio’s jobs and small businesses,” campaign manager Patrick Eisenhauer said earlier in the race.
He made electricity costs a defining issue, tying rising bills to AI data centers and calling Husted “the face of data centers” because of the data center deals Husted worked on as lieutenant governor. Both men had previously supported bringing data center projects to Ohio, and both reversed their positions after facing criticism, the Christian Science Monitor reported.
“In an affordability election, it’s hard to imagine a candidate better than Sherrod Brown,” Ohio House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn told the Monitor before the vote.
What voters said
Nationally, voters named the cost of living and government corruption as their top two issues in AP exit polls. NBC’s exit poll found Republicans had lost their advantage on the economy, and negative views of the party had risen from 52% of voters in 2022 to 59%.
In Ohio, AP reported, Trump’s tariffs, the trade war with Canada and the Iran war that drove up fuel prices gave Brown an opening with rural and working-class voters.
Not everyone reads the result as a lasting shift. Political scientist David Niven told Newsweek the outcome would start as “a reaction to Trump,” but cautioned against seeing it as a fundamental partisan realignment.