Ohio Gravel--Sherrod Brown is the Democrat we need now

A week or so ago, Sherrod Brown posted on Substack: “My voice might be gravelly, but I’ll always be a voice for Ohio.”

My reply was: “Well, that is Ohio gravel in your voice, thanks to the glaciers, so it is a very Ohio voice indeed.”

Raised in Ohio myself, it just occurred to me--gravel is abundant back home, thanks to glaciers, so this sounded amusing. Since then, my offhand, friendly reply to a casual post became a stone in my shoe. My subconscious presented me a sentence that required some digging.

The importance of gravel

Gravel is everywhere. In the industrial age, iron, coal, and oil got the press. Today, rare earths are limelit. While all are important, without gravel, the roads, rail beds, and concrete structures used to extract and transport them would not exist. Gravel makes the modern world possible—look out any window and you will see something made possible because of gravel. But gravel works without fanfare, doing the job we all need gravel to do—near always hidden, buried, bonded, or covered. There is no celebration or appreciation; gravel just does what needs to be done to make our economy possible.

Sherrod’s gravelly voice speaks out for all those whose labor is our economy, our health care, our schools—every job that is the gravel binding our modern life. From fighting against NAFTA to building a green economy in the Rust Belt, Sherrod has been a champion fighting for opportunities and the dignity of work for everyone whose jobs otherwise recede into our society’s aggregate.

And Sherrod Brown fought the Ohio Republican tide election after election because his gravelly voice spoke to the gravel. He did not try to piece together a winning coalition cobbling this group to that group, cutting up voter lists in some database. Sherrod gets what Democrats need to understand. In America, most of us get paychecks. We need a job to pay the bills. Workers without a union are at-will, guilty until proven innocent if fired, and can have their livelihoods snatched away at any moment because some crazy billionaire buys a company. Even people who no one would call poor are a few paychecks away from disaster as they care for kids and grandparents.

Democrats have lost the New Deal voting bloc because they stopped advocating for people earning paychecks. Fighting for workers is the very thing to unify a winning coalition. Along the way, we must fight for respect for everyone, regardless of ethnicity or gender, because we are all equal. Democrats, as a party, need to be gravel. We must be the people who stand up for every worker—from hospitals to factories, daycare to construction, from offices to loading docks.

MAGA flourished because Trump made workers feel heard and powerful. MAGA voters feel betrayed by those Democrats they once supported. While Sherrod fought NAFTA, Democrats pushed for it. While he fought the big banks, Democrats deregulated the financial industry, making the Great Recession. Every time Democrats hold the House, Senate and Presidency, we lose the set in two years. A Democratic president has not had a Democratic House and Senate for an entire term since Jimmy Carter. Time and again, Democrats have failed workers. We have triangulated and bipartisaned our way to failure for nearly a half-century.

Canary-in-a-coalmine

Sherrod always wears a canary-in-a-coalmine lapel pin, symbolizing the gains workers have made in safety and, by extension, a broader set of rights and fairer pay than the days when a dead bird was a miner’s only protection. But there is another aspect to this pin. Sherrod has consistently called out those policies Democrats support that will ultimately lead to the party’s failure. He has been the alarm for so many issues. This prescience protected Sherrod against Ohio’s Republican shift election after election because voters who left the party still trusted him, because he told the truth about what they all cared about most. He finally lost re-election only after Democrats committed the final self-immolation of dumping Joe Biden from the presidential ticket.

But Sherrod Brown is back on the campaign trail for 2026, bringing his gravelly voice to advocate for Ohio’s gravel. And there is hope that, finally, a majority of Democratic candidates will change their donkey for a canary, so the rule of Trump and MAGA will begin its ignoble end.