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By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor, associate publisher, and political and investigative reporter
CLEVELAND, Ohio-Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio lost reelection last Tuesday by 3.8 percentage points to millionaire businessman Bernie Moreno, a Trump-endorsed Republican who has never held public office. Brown says big business and national Republicans seeking to win control of the U.S. Senate targeted him. Some others, both supporters and opponents alike, say his multi-million dollar campaign failed to engage key voting blocs during the election of his lifetime, like the Black community of Cleveland for example.
The big question is how the popular Brown, a Cleveland Democrat and three-term incumbent, and the only current Democrat elected statewide in Ohio other than three Democratic Ohio Supreme Court justices, two of whom tragically lost reelection Tuesday, managed to lose. He had moved in recent years from Columbus, Ohio's capital city, to the largely Black city of Cleveland with his popular journalist wife, Connie Schultz, and he has a reputation for fighting for Ohioans and worker's rights and Civil Rights and reproductive rights in Congress. Moreover, he is skilled in reaching across the aisle as a congressional Democrat to gain Republican support for some bills he pushed through Congress. But that was not enough to bring him an election night win.
Cleveland is a Democratic stronghold like Cuyahoga County and it is roughly 60% Black with a population of nearly 370,000 people. Voters in Cleveland elected the first Black mayor of Cleveland and of a major American city when the late Carl B. Stokes was elected mayor in 1967, a truly historic election. Cleveland, itself, is a historical Black city where Black inventor Garrett Morgan invented the flashlight and the gas mask and the city has many other Black achievers of history. How quickly they forget, sources said when asked why Blacks are taken for granted and subordinated by white candidates who think they can win without the Black vote in competitive elections.
The reality, said political sources, is that Black voters matter and they are consequential, and shunning them during election campaigns often has consequences.
Pointers suggest that not only did the Ohio Democratic Party and its chairwoman not do all they could do to get Brown over the hump, but the Brown campaign also failed to effectively court Black voters and Black leaders and elected officials of Cleveland, not to mention Black churches and Black clergy. Grassroots greater Cleveland activists seeking to help the campaign were ignored altogether, sources said.
Cleveland.com reported that only 46% of Cleveland's registered voters even bothered to vote to make a difference relative to the 2024 general election cycle in which former President Donald Trump won Ohio and defeated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris to win a second term in the White House. Harris did not visit Cleveland, or Ohio for that matter like Obama did when he won in 2008, and again in 2012 when he was reelected. Obama had a ground campaign and Obama knew that Black people mattered in major American majority Black cities, and he won, twice.
"I haven't heard from the Brown campaign and it is rumoured that Harris has given up on Ohio altogether because Trump won it in 2016 and in 2020," a Black elected official of Cleveland told Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com weeks before the Nov 5 election under the condition of anonymity. "Sherrod Brown acted like another Richard Cordray, who also lost." That same elected official said last week after the election that "Bernie Moreno and Republicans ran a better campaign in Ohio, and Democrats lost despite spending millions partly because they took Black voters for granted."
To be sure, Cordray, a white former consumer watchdog guru with the Obama administration, lost Ohio's 2018 statewide gubernatorial election to Republican Gov. Mike DeWine by 4.2 percentage points and some Black elected officials say that he too did not effectively engage Black elected officials and Black voters of Cleveland.
While Hillary Clinton lost Ohio and her bid for president in 2016 to Trump, she too failed to engage Black voters of Cleveland, possibly believing that a stop at the 11th Congressional District Caucus Parade and Festival on Labor Day that year in Cleveland alongside then Congresswoman Marcia Fudge would do the job for a national win. It did not.
Research reveals that when she lost the Democratic nomination for president to Obama in 2008 Clinton ran a better campaign in Ohio than she did in 2016 when she lost the presidency to Trump. Why was motivation lacking in Clinton's second bid for president regarding engaging the Black community nationwide and in largely Black cities?
So what is the lesson to be learned from all of this? It is none other than that Black leaders and elected officials and Black voters make a difference in elections, and if you shun them, whether deliberately or inadvertently as an embattled Democrat seeking to win a competitive statewide election or a neck and neck presidential election, you will lose.
Kathy Wray Coleman is a 25-year Black investigative journalist and political reporter out of Cleveland, Ohio and a longtime Cleveland activist and community organizer.
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com the most read Black digital newspaper and blog in Ohio Tel-216-659-0473. Emaileditor@clevelandurbannews.com
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