DEMS/ELECTION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Connie Schultz stood at her stove this week and stirred a big pot of thick vegetarian chili. On the long brown table set and waiting for lunch was a copy of that day’s New York Times, folded and opened to a page with a column with a headline I couldn’t help but notice, ‘The Secret to Winning in 2020,’ and on the refrigerator and the walls around her were pictures of her four children and her seven grandchildren and of course her husband, too—the only statewide elected Democrat in Ohio, the potential presidential candidate, Senator Sherrod Brown. Brown, 66, the curly-haired progressive populist who was preaching fair trade over free trade back when Donald Trump was reintroducing himself as a reality television business boss, last month won a third term in the Senate in part by winning back a sufficient slice of those who had voted for Trump two years before. His 6-point victory in a state Trump carried by 8 prompted immediate 2020 chatter. Brown himself labeled it ‘a blueprint for America.’ Hailing from this perennially critical swing spot—and this region of the country that decided the last presidential election and almost certainly will decide the next one as well—he has the unusual and proven ability, according to strategists from both parties, to appeal to black voters and urban liberals and workers in fading factory towns. For these reasons, Trump aides say, Brown is on a short list of possible foes the president fears.”
–Michael Kruse, “‘I Am the Woman Trump Hates’: Meet Sherrod Brown’s Louder Half,” Politico, December 21, 2018