Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) dropped out of the 2020 presidential race on Thursday, barely five weeks after taking the first early steps toward a campaign.
Brown released a statement indicating that he had decided not to run for president after conducting a tour of several key early primary states, which he had billed as his “Dignity of Work” tour.
“I will keep calling out Donald Trump and his phony populism,” Brown added. “I will keep fighting for all workers across the country.” But he will do so from the Senate, where Democrats feared a Republican might replace him in 2020 if he dropped out to run for president.
Brown had been seen as a good candidate to appeal to working-class voters Democrats lost to Donald Trump and the Republicans in the Midwest in 2016. But Democrats Prominent Democratic super PAC says Ohio isn’t a top priority in 2020 on Ohio entirely, even though Republicans consider it crucial to their White House hopes.
Notably, Brown was the only major office-holder among current candidates for the Democratic Party nomination who had declined to support both “Medicare for All” and the “Green New Deal” — at least in the specific legislation that other Democrats had proposed.
Though seen as a left-wing Democrat, Brown “said he would prefer to see incremental changes to Medicare like lowering the eligibility age from 65 to 55 or 50,” according to Politico.
He also said that while he supported “a green new deal,” he would not join other candidates in co-sponsoring the legislation introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-MA): “I’m not going to take position on every bill that’s coming out.”
Both proposals have been described as “socialist” by Republican critics.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.