Brown Crushing DeWine
by Matt Stoller, Thu Oct 12, 2006 at 11:47:13 AM EDT
This is stunning.
In an election for United States Senator from Ohio today, 10/12/2006, Brown defeats DeWine, according to a SurveyUSA poll conducted for WCPO-TV Cincinnati, WKYC-TV Cleveland, and WYTV-TV Youngstown.Brown, who represents Ohio's 13th District in Congress, unseats DeWine, 54% to 40% in a vote today.
Since an identical SurveyUSA poll 9/21/06, Brown has gained 2 points and DeWine has lost 2 points. Brown's lead has grown from 10 to 14 points.
Sherrod Brown is one of the most progressive candidates we have this cycle. I got this email from Bob McChesney, who is a deep thinker on media reform issues, and he explains the significance of this race.
With Labor Day behind us and the final sprint for November begun, the most exciting news on the political landscape comes from Ohio, where Democrat Sherrod Brown is maintaining a steady lead over two-term Republican Senator Mike DeWine. This is an extraordinary development with tremendous and positive implications for progressives and the netroots. DeWine is swimming in money and has Karl Rove drawing up plays in the dirt for him. With help from the same firm that produced the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Ads" against John Kerry in 2OO4, DeWine and Rove have been doing everything in their power to smear Brown. Yet, the Democrat keeps moving up in the polls.What gives? Why is Brown holding his own in a state that has broken more than a few Democratic hearts?
It's got everything to do with the fact that Sherrod Brown is precisely the sort of aggressive progressive that Democrats have needed to carry the party banner in high-profile contests. He's from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, a liberal in the very best sense of the term. This is no Bob Casey Jr. we are talking about, nor some former Reagan administration official. He is not triangulating; selling out women or gays or peace activists to win white working-class votes. Rather, he is winning over those white working-class voters with a solid economic message that takes apart the Bush administration's failed free trade policies -- which DeWine has backed with poodle-like consistency -- and promises to fight for workers, the environment and communities.
Brown has the politics of a Wellstone. He has established himself in the U.S. House over the past decade as the smartest progressive on the debilitating labor and environmental consequences of pro-corporate trade deals, not only in the United States but worldwide. He has an innate sense of fairness and a clear commitment to social justice. Sherrod has worked quietly and effectively to earn the trust of Ohioans, especially poor and working-class Ohioans, which is why DeWine's million dollar attack ad mudballs have so far rolled off the Democrat.
If Brown wins, it points the way forward for progressive electoral politics in the country, and gets us off the downward spiral of Republican vs Republican-lite thinking that dominates inside the beltway. If a progressive can defeat an incumbent Republican in Ohio, red state Ohio, with Karl Rove calling the plays, and rich people and corporations lining up to write checks for the incumbent, it hammers the last nail in the Democratic Leadership Council's coffin. A Brown win will prove that the DLC's "move-to-the-right-or-lose" mantra not only calls for repulsive politics, it is a loser at the polls. A Brown victory will also send a message to Hillary Clinton and the other 2008 presidential candidates that they had better take issues of class and economic inequality a whole heckuva lot more seriously than they seem to at present.
I have had the privilege of getting to know Sherrod Brown personally in my work on media reform politics over the past few years. It has been an eye-opening experience. He did not know much about the issue but he was keen to learn about the topic. Sherrod and his wife, Connie Schultz, a Pultizer Prize-winning newspaper reporter, attended Free Press's First National Conference on Media Reform in Madison in November 2003. Like the other members of Congress, he spoke to the main plenary before an audience of around 2,000 people. But unlike all the other members of Congress, Sherrod stayed for the entire three-day conference, and sat with Connie incognito during sessions taking notes. John Nichols and I were the only people at these sessions who even knew who Sherrod was. It was a revelation. Here was a member of Congress who thought he had something to learn from bloggers, grassroots activists and media reformers.
Since then Sherrod has stayed on top of all the issues we care about. This year, when net neutrality became the most important media issue in some time, Sherrod faced considerable pressure to take the side of the cable and telephone monopolies and denounce net neutrality. He could have cashed in and collected hefty campaign contributions from the corporate sector, while buffing his credentials with the few unions that oppose net neutrality out of concern for preserving jobs in the unionized telecommunications sector. But Sherrod studied the issue, consulted with activists in the blogoshere and the media reform movement, and decided that he had to vote for net neutrality. He explained his position to his labor supporters, and they understood and they stood by him. Why? Because they know that, in a pinch, Sherrod will always stand by them.
Let me close with my favorite Sherrod Brown story. Back in 2000 just before the November election Sherrod Brown was sitting with a bunch of workers in a factory in Lorain, Ohio, and the workers were going around the table discussing who they planned to vote for for president and why. Several of the workers said they were planning to vote for Bush because he was against gun control and against gay rights and for school prayer. One of the workers grew exasperated and confronted one of the Bush supporters. "You are voting for Bush for all these reasons, but Sherrod is for gun control and gay rights and against school prayer and you are voting for him. What gives?" The worker responded, "Yeah, but we know Sherrod is always with us on the stuff that counts."
There you have it. Sherrod Brown is a uniter, not a divider, and he does so without watering down his principles or selling out progressive values. He is also humble and has integrity. Candidates like that don't come along very often and they almost never have a chance to win a historic race with the eyes of the nation upon them. It is not just that the road to having the Democrats take control of the Senate goes through Ohio; it is that the road to establishing genuine mass-based progressive political majorities for the first time in decades, possibly generations, goes through Ohio. The race is that big.
Tags: Mike DeWine, Sherrod Brown (all tags)
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