If anyone could have broken through as a progressive in red America, it was Sherrod Brown. For decades, the Ohio senator railed against corporations for shipping good-paying jobs overseas and pleaded with Democrats to take the struggles of deindustrialized communities seriously. Yet in 2024, even Brown, a model economic populist, fell to a Republican challenger.
Does that prove, as writers such as Jonathan Chait have argued, that the idea of winning back the working class with progressive economic policies has been tried and has failed?
