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By Sam Stevenson
Associate News Editor
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Democrat Sherrod Brown won Ohio’s special U.S. Senate election on Tuesday, returning to the chamber two years after voters removed him from office.
CNN projected Brown as the winner at 11:01 ET, with 88 percent of the estimated vote counted. He had received 48.5 percent, compared with 46.6 percent for Republican Senator Jon Husted.
The victory gives Democrats a Senate seat from a state carried by President Donald Trump by 11.2 percentage points in 2024 and restores Brown, a three-term former senator, to the office he lost that year.
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Ohio became the latest state to flip to Democrats, with the party's candidate leading by 1.9 points with 88 percent of the vote counted. Democrats had already flipped South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire and Texas, where James Talarico held a 20-point lead with 69 percent counted.
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Why The Result Matters
The winner will serve through January 2029, completing the final two years of the six-year term Vance won in 2022 before resigning to become vice president. Republican Governor Mike DeWine appointed Husted to the seat in January 2025.
Ohio also became a crucial part of the Democratic route to Senate control. Republicans entered the election with a 53-47 majority, so Democrats needed a net gain of four seats because Vance could break a 50-50 tie in favor of the GOP.
David Niven, a University of Cincinnati political scientist who studies campaigns and Ohio politics, described the contest before the election as potentially “the most important Senate race in the country.”
He told Newsweek in a pre-election phone call that the central force shaping the contest was dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump and Republican control of state and federal government.
“The biggest factor right now is that Trump’s popularity has plummeted,” Niven said. “He has given away the Republican advantage that they otherwise have here.”
Economic concerns had made the state more competitive despite its longer-term movement toward Republicans, he added.
“If Ohioans vote economics, this is a very competitive state,” Niven said, pointing to Ohio’s combination of manufacturing, agriculture and major corporations.
National investment reflected that uncertainty. By June, the campaigns had already spent $16 million on advertising, while outside partisan groups had pledged tens of millions more. Niven said at the time that “money flows in politics to uncertainty.”
The total advertising expenditure later surpassed $500 million, according to reporting by the Columbus Dispatch, placing the contest among the most expensive Senate races in the country.
Test of Ohio’s Republican Shift
Ohio once occupied a central place in presidential elections. Its combination of agriculture, manufacturing, large cities and smaller industrial communities made the state broadly representative of the national economy.
“What Ohio was and the reason it was a competitive state is it was economically representative,” Niven said. “This is a state with big agriculture and a state with big manufacturing, and an economy that looks a lot like the American economy.”
That bellwether status faded as the state moved toward Republicans. Trump won Ohio by about 8 points in 2016 and 2020, then expanded the margin to 11.2 points in 2024.
Brown nevertheless continued to run ahead of his party’s presidential ticket. He lost his 2024 Senate race to Republican Bernie Moreno 50.1 percent to 46.5 percent, a 3.6-point margin that was considerably narrower than Trump’s statewide advantage. That performance helped persuade Democrats that Brown retained a path in Ohio unavailable to a less-established candidate.
Two Deeply Familiar Candidates
The race differed from many battleground contests because both nominees had lengthy records in Ohio government.
Brown served in the Ohio House, as secretary of state and in the U.S. House before winning election to the Senate in 2006. He served three terms from 2007 until his defeat in 2024, building a political identity around labor, manufacturing and what he called the “dignity of work.”
Husted served as speaker of the Ohio House, a state senator, secretary of state and lieutenant governor before entering the U.S. Senate. His career placed him firmly within the state Republican establishment associated with DeWine.
The special election, therefore, presented voters with two forms of incumbency. Husted held the seat, but Brown possessed greater experience in the Senate and a political brand established over decades.
If Sherrod Brown Wins: What It Means (delete if Husted wins)
Brown's victory demonstrates that Ohio’s movement toward Republicans is not absolute, particularly when Democrats field a candidate with a long statewide record and an established working-class identity.
Speaking before the election was called, Niven said the result would begin as “a reaction to Trump,” but cautioned against interpreting it solely as evidence of a fundamental partisan realignment.
He said Ohio voters had become much more Republican over the previous dozen years without becoming equally conservative, leaving an opening for a candidate who could persuade them “that he was on their side.”
If Jon Husted Wins: What It Means (delete if Brown wins)
Husted’s victory is a “devastating” result for Ohio Democrats, according to Niven, because it shows that even their strongest established candidate could not overcome the state’s Republican advantage under unusually favorable conditions.
“If he [Brown] can’t win this race with Trump 20 points underwater, it will call for a reimagination of the Democratic Party in Ohio, because if their best isn’t good enough in 2026, then they really have to essentially break it all down and start from nothing,” Niven said before Election Day.
The outcome exposes the limits of Brown’s personal appeal. His working-class profile allowed him to run well ahead of the Democratic presidential ticket in 2024, but a second consecutive defeat suggests that candidate strength alone can no longer overcome Ohio’s Republican baseline.
For Democrats, losing the state closes an important route to Senate control and raises questions about whether Ohio should remain a first-tier target in 2028.
Republicans can present the result as validation of Husted’s appointment to the seat and further evidence that Ohio has moved beyond swing-state status.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: John Fitzpatrick and Dave Siminoff.
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