Let’s call it a Red State Reset. 

A raft of klieg-light Senate candidates are driving coverage of Democrats looking to retake the majority in this fall’s elections. Maine, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska all have high-wattage, younger nominees who are raising hopes among party insiders that John Thune won’t be the Senate’s Majority Leader much longer.

But missing from much of the breathless coverage of this year’s Senate map are the pair of understated, gray-haired, grind-it-out baby boomer Democrats running in Ohio and North Carolina—where Donald Trump won three times in a row. Both Sherrod Brown, a former Senator from Ohio, and Roy Cooper, a former North Carolina Governor, are perhaps the only Democrats who have a shot at flipping those particular Senate seats back into the blue column. 

Both races are worth attention, but I’m going to focus here on Brown, who is leading in polls in Ohio, which was not too long ago dismissed by Democrats as a lost cause. Now, it may be the lynchpin to Democrats winning the Senate.

In conversations with operatives in Washington and Ohio, it’s clear Brown is running the playbook for how to run against Trump without giving him control of the conversation. 

Making all the difference here is that, unlike Graham Platner in Maine or James Talarico in Texas, the 73-year-old Brown doesn’t have to spend a lot of time introducing himself to the state’s voters. Brown already represented Ohio for almost two decades in the U.S. Senate, and notched more than 30 years in Ohio politics before that. Brown, who remains the most powerful endorsement available in Ohio, is a progressive voice who knows how to balance being a loyal Democratic elder statesman while also landing blows against Clinton-era free-trade policies.

“Sherrod is not looking for a viral moment,” one former Democratic elected official told me. “Voters in Ohio know him and he’s the only Democrat to win statewide in near-on two decades.

“Yes, he’s an old white dude in a Red State. But he knows who he is. So do voters.”

The incumbent, Jon Husted, was only appointed to the role last year, replacing J.D. Vance as the state’s junior Senator. In a Fox News poll that closed June 1, Husted was trailing Brown by eight points. 

It’s hard not to view those numbers as largely a proxy on Trump. In that same poll, a remarkable 57% of Ohioans carry an unfavorable view of the President. To put that in context, Trump had a 52-46% positive rating in 2024, when he won the White House. It’s a massive shift that is leaving Republicans in Washington

All this helps explain why increasingly frustrated Republicans are sketching out plans to shift the conversation away from Trump, and onto another national figure: Chuck Schumer. The New York Democrat is in line to take back the Majority Leader’s gavel if Democrats win back the Senate. Schumer has seen his unfavorables jump from 52% at the start of Trump’s second term, to 68% earlier this year. 

By casting Brown as a vote for Schumer in charge, Republicans hope to galvanize Republicans and dampen Democratic enthusiasm. It’s not far off from the plan to nationalize the 2010 House races as a referendum on then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

It was ugly as heck. But it worked. It’s why no one in Brown’s orbit wants to bathe in Schumer’s glow. Asked directly about Schumer’s return to Leader, Brown has a dodge at the ready: “I’m not doing punditry.”

Ohio is a weird place politically. In 2004, we all looked at Ohio at the barometer of the national mood. Heck, there was even a documentary about its abilities to predict the national mood, … So Goes the Nation. Ohio also happens to be my home turf—I grew up there, went to undergrad there, got my first newspaper job there, worked in The Associated Press bureau in Columbus, took my Youngstown-based family to the Nats game last night. 

I’ve watched the state go through a massive political reset. George W. Bush won re-election there. Then Barack Obama, Obama, Donald Trump, Trump, Trump.

Down-ballot, the results were dramatic. Republicans over the last 20 years—with the help of demographics and redistricting commissions—moved the state from a 10-8 Democratic split in 2009 when Obama moved into the White House to the current 10-5 GOP advantage. (Population loss in Ohio and growth in other states accounts for the loss of three House districts.) 

If Ohio is suddenly in play, that spells big problems for a GOP majority. While Republicans are defending seats in Maine, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska against charismatic candidates that are also drawing huge FEC numbers, their hopes of flipping seats in Georgia, New Hampshire, and Minnesota seem less sure than when the year started. 

That means Ohio (and North Carolina) may be where the fight for Senate control is actually decided.