by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
I spent the weekend in Cincinnati, the town that gave us Charles Keating, Larry Flynt and WKRP. Keating spent a good part of his life trying to put guys like Flynt out of business, and WKRP spent one Thanksgiving learning that turkeys can’t fly. I was there for the Cincinnati Comic Expo, getting my geek on.
On the drive home I was streaming Q101 out of Chicago, because you can take the boy out of Chicago, and so on. Roughly every other song, the music stopped for a commercial telling me Sherrod Brown is a socialist.
For those who don’t follow Ohio politics, Brown is a Democrat who represented Ohio in the U.S. Senate for 18 years, until Republican Bernie Moreno beat him in 2024. Before that he was in Congress, and before that he was Ohio’s secretary of state. He’s back this year in a special election for the seat JD Vance gave up to become vice president. His opponent is Republican Sen. Jon Husted, whom Gov. Mike DeWine appointed to the seat last year.
I don’t live in Ohio. I don’t vote in Ohio, and Q101 is not an Ohio station. None of that matters. Streaming ads follow your phone, not the transmitter, and somewhere along I-74 my phone told an ad server I was fair game.
There’s plenty of money to go around. AdImpact says close to $300 million in advertising has been committed to Brown-Husted, which would make it the most expensive Senate ad fight in the country this cycle. That buys a lot of spots aimed at people in Batesville who can’t vote in the race.
Now, about the socialist business.
I had just spent two days around people in costume, and this was the least convincing one I saw all weekend. Sherrod Brown is a gravel-voiced guy who wears a canary pin on his lapel and whose suits always look like he slept in them. He has spent more than three decades in Congress and has yet to nationalize anything. If he’s a socialist, he’s a lousy one.
But that’s the paint job. What caught my ear was the close. The announcer drops his voice and tells you that if you think things are expensive now, just wait.
All right. Let’s talk about who’s in charge now.
Republicans hold the White House. Republicans hold the House. Republicans hold the Senate, including the very seat on the ballot. So the message to Ohio voters is that prices are too high under Republican management, and the solution is more Republican management.
Groceries, too high. Electric bill, too high. Keep the same people in charge, wonderful.
Let me get ahead of the email. I have no dog in an Ohio fight. But as a student of politics, I’ve always found my neighbors fascinating, especially here in the Midwest, where Ohio can elect Sherrod Brown three times and then turn around and vote for Donald Trump three times. So I’m not grading the race. I’m grading the ad. And the first rule of political messaging is you don’t concede the other side’s premise. Brown has spent this campaign talking about drug prices and utility rates. This ad agrees with him in the first half of a sentence and then asks you to be scared of the second half.
To be fair, it may work. Voters don’t check who controls Congress before they get mad at the checkout line, and the ad doesn’t need anybody to love Jon Husted. It only needs enough people to be a little more nervous about Sherrod Brown. Brown lost by less than four points two years ago in a state Donald Trump carried by double digits. Nobody in Columbus should be measuring the drapes.
Ohio is on round two of Brown versus a Republican and a truckload of outside money. Different opponent, same playbook.
Meanwhile, back home, Republicans have held the governor’s office for more than 20 years. So if anybody here is thinking about running a spot that opens with “if you think things are bad now,” a word of advice: check whose name is on the lease first.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He does not live in Ohio, but his phone apparently does.
