Mark Williams, who is now 75 years old, spent more than 50 years working in mining and the coal industry before his retirement around 15 years ago. Before that, he served in the Vietnam War. Williams was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2015, he suspects, because of his exposure to Agent Orange, a herbicide used by the U.S. military to reduce enemy cover in the Vietnamese jungle. That diagnosis came just six years after Williams underwent open-heart surgery in 2009 to treat ischemic heart disease, which has also been linked to Agent Orange.
Medical care for those serious conditions is expensive, and could have bankrupted someone with inadequate insurance. But because of the coverage he and other miners won through the United Mine Workers of America, Williams told Salon, he didn’t have to pay a dime. He gives much of the credit to support from former Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who served three terms in Washington before his defeat in 2024.
“We fought tooth and nail to retain those benefits,” said Williams, who is president of UMW Local 1188 in Coshocton County, in central Ohio’s Appalachian region. He told Salon that Brown had helped secure health care and pension benefits for retired coal miners through working to pass the Bipartisan American Miners Act of 2019.
“I just feel that Sen. Brown has always had our back where a lot of these other guys haven’t,” Williams said. “With the way our politics are going right now, we need people like Sen. Brown in there, so that’s why I’m really supporting him.”
Less than a year after losing his seat to Republican Bernie Moreno, the 72-year-old Brown announced on Monday that he will run for Ohio’s other U.S. Senate seat in 2026 against incumbent Sen. John Husted, the Republican appointed to replace JD Vance after the latter was elected vice president.
If Democrats are to have any chance of claiming a Senate majority, winning Ohio’s seat is essential. Brown gives them a name-brand candidate with a history of bipartisan accomplishment in a largely red state. His announcement ended months of speculation about whether Brown might run for Senate again, take on likely GOP nominee Vivek Ramaswamy in the 2026 Ohio governor’s race or leave politics behind for good. It has been met with excitement from union workers across the state, who view Brown as a decades-long champion of workers’ rights.
Williams said he has met Brown “several different times,” adding, “When you talk to him, you always get the feeling that he is actually listening to you. He’s just a good man for Ohio. He’s a good voice for us.”
“When you talk to [Brown], you always get the feeling that he is actually listening to you. He’s just a good man for Ohio. He’s a good voice for us.”
Brown was effectively the last prominent Democrat to hold statewide office in Ohio before his defeat last November. Since Barack Obama carried the state in both 2008 and 2012, Ohio has trended increasingly red. Donald Trump won Ohio relatively easily in the last three presidential elections, and Brown lost to Moreno last year by a margin of 3.6 percentage points, or just over 200,000 votes.
In interviews with Ohio news outlets last week, Brown said that he decided to run for office again after witnessing the first eight months of Trump’s second administration and its effects on working people. He singled out Trump’s “big beautiful” spending bill, enacted in early July, along with continuing inflation in grocery prices.
“There’s not one senator of the 100 on the Senate floor that is fighting for Ohio workers. Zero,” Brown told Signal Akron. He and his wife Connie “thought we’d never run” again, he said. “But we can’t stay on the sidelines when we see these kinds of things happening.”
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Mark Henderson, acting president of United Steelworkers of America Local 169 in Mansfield, Ohio, told Salon that he’d been hoping Brown would run a comeback campaign for the Senate. Henderson and his family have had to cut back on spending due to high prices, he said, and expect they’ll have to tighten their belts further as the budget bill’s provisions roll out over the next two years. Henderson, a 59-year-old electric technician, added that his family is better off than most because of his longtime union membership. That’s why he’s thankful Brown is running.
“He don’t forget where he came from,” Henderson said of the former senator. “He comes from Mansfield, right here, from my hometown. One of his first stops was our local hall, and he’s been back numerous times. He was there for our lockout, he sent letters, he showed up at our rallies.” That reference was to a famous local event of 1999, AK Steel’s 39-month lockout of 620 USWA workers after contract negotiations stalled.
Brown, Henderson said, “is just a big proponent of people being treated fairly, just giving people like me a shot.”
Steve Ackerman, a USWA staff representative for nearly 1,500 employees, described Brown as an “open ear” who would hear out union officials, do what he could to help and even, in moments of disagreement, provide further context and understanding.
“That’s the difference with Sherrod Brown [and] most senators,” Ackerman said. “If there’s a dispute, he’s reaching out to you wanting to know, ‘What do you need? What can I do to help you?’ Usually it’s the other way around. We have to beg them to even hear our side of things.”
Kelsey Gray, a member of the Columbus Education Association, a chapter of the Ohio Education Association, was more skeptical about Brown’s newly launched campaign. She isn’t convinced that Brown, or any other career politician, is the best candidate for working Ohioans or their unions. Brown’s campaign website, she said, didn’t list any issues or mention any labor unions when she viewed it this past week.
If Brown is “feeling some kind of fighting energy or passion, it is not coming through,” she said, “and he would really have to sell it in order for that to work.” Gray is disappointed, she told Salon, that the Democratic Party couldn’t find a better candidate than someone who just lost his seat. “I don’t want to be sold anything else.”
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Gray agreed that Brown had scored some wins for workers during his time in D.C., such as the Social Security Fairness Act, which ensures that former government workers like teachers and police can collect full retirement benefits. That legislation will clearly help some teachers, she said, but given the current climate that’s not nearly enough.
“Things have been horrific in the past eight months,” Gray said, with the Trump administration’s attacks coming at “warp speed” and worsening by the day. But “things have been horrific for a lot longer than that,” she cautioned. “This is not the first go-around with oppression in America coming from the White House.”
“I don’t know another person in the state of Ohio who has more of a résumé to help the little guy than Sherrod Brown.”
Marty Perlaky, president of the Springfield Education Association in Holland, Ohio, agreed that the Democrats lack strong candidates and need to unify their message. But Brown’s return to politics, he said, couldn’t have happened soon enough.
“We need somebody who has a proven Democratic track record” to run against Husted, he said. “I don’t know another person in the state of Ohio who has more of a résumé to help the little guy than Sherrod Brown has,” Perlaky added, pointing to the Social Security Fairness Act as just one of many examples of Brown’s accomplishments for the working class.
“We have a large number of middle-of-the-road people who are out there looking for someone to sing their song,” Perlaky said. “If nobody does, they’re going to keep voting Republican just because.”
Brown’s 2024 campaign against Moreno, a political newcomer and former Cleveland-area car dealer, became the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history as crypto investors flooded it with tens of millions of dollars. Given Ohio’s rightward political lurch over the last decade, Brown’s campaign hoped to rely on independent and moderate voters, including “ticket-splitters” who might vote for Trump and a Democratic senator.
Despite his defeat, Brown outperformed the top of the Democratic ticket as Ohio voters favored Trump over Kamala Harris by an eight-point margin. While it’s too early for opinion polling to be meaningful, an Emerson College survey published last week showed Brown trailing Husted by 6 percent.
Union members mostly told Salon that they recognize Brown’s odds next year are slim. But they hold out hope. For John Esterly, state legislative board chairman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, Brown’s candidacy presents an opportunity for Ohioans to return to common sense and elect a politician who he believes actually cares about his constituents.
Esterly remembered Brown holding a speaking tour at his union’s local chapters around Ohio about the need for rail safety reform after the derailment of a freight train transporting hazardous materials in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023. When Lou Shuster, a BLET local president and train conductor, died after his train collided with a dump truck a month later, Brown traveled to Cleveland to meet with union members. After another union member named Fred Anderson was struck and killed by a remote-controlled train near Toledo that September, Brown reached out to Esterly personally and asked to pass along his regrets to Anderson’s family.
Brown became “an outspoken advocate for common-sense rail safety” after the East Palestine tragedy, Esterly said, praising Brown for championing the unsuccessful Rail Safety Act of 2023, along with then-Sen. JD Vance.
“We feel so comfortable and positive about Sherrod getting back in that race,” he said. “We know he’s going to pick up the torch and continue to carry it.”
