Jon Husted Keeps Trump at Arm’s Length on the Campaign Trail
Massillon, Ohio — As Senator Jon Husted campaigned Thursday evening before a local Republican group in the northeastern part of his state, he attacked Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and his opponent, Sherrod Brown, all by name, but there was one person he never mentioned: Donald Trump.
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Although the crowd at the Stark County GOP picnic was the audience most likely to respond positively to a stump speech prominently featuring Trump, who won Ohio comfortably all three times he ran for the White House, the president was absent from Husted’s remarks. Instead, the freshman senator spent much of his speech slamming Brown and other Democrats.
“Sherrod Brown’s been in office for 52 years, the last 32 in Congress,” Husted said. “He hasn’t done a single thing to make your life better.”
Midterm elections tend to go poorly for the party in power, and, if historical trends hold, Husted could be one of the victims of the blue wave threatening to crash upon the country this fall. It doesn’t help him that voters disapprove of the job Trump is doing by a margin of 17 points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. So instead of cleaving to an unpopular president, Husted, who has been in the Senate for less than two years since his appointment in January 2025 to fill JD Vance’s seat, is attempting to position his opponent as the incumbent.
“Can you name a single thing that he’s done to make your life better in 52 years in public office? No, you can’t,” Husted said of Brown. “And it’s kind of pathetic that you would spend 52 years in office and have nothing to show for it that you’ve actually done to make anyone’s life better, and I think the voters of Ohio figured him out.”
Brown was elected to the state legislature in 1974 and spent a few years there before becoming Ohio’s secretary of state; he later won election to the House of Representatives. In 2006, he defeated now-Governor Mike DeWine to become a senator and served three terms before losing to Republican Bernie Moreno in 2024.
In his short time in the Senate, Husted — who, despite a recent outlier released this month favoring his opponent, is polling neck-and-neck with Brown — has generally been supportive of Trump, having voted for the president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, which he touted during his speech.
But he is beginning to put some daylight between himself and the president. In June, Husted voted for a Democratic amendment to the GOP’s bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies that would have killed the administration’s controversial anti-weaponization fund, which lawmakers on both sides of the aisle feared would send payouts to January 6 rioters.
Asked about the vote, Husted noted that by the time he cast it, Attorney General Todd Blanche had already testified before Congress that the fund was dead. “I don’t know why we just didn’t kill it,” he told National Review.
Husted is not quite coming out swinging against unpopular policies from the administration, but he is not bending over backward to defend them, either. As affordability becomes a defining issue in this fall’s elections, Trump has engaged in a trade war with Canada, having recently announced a 50 percent tariff on certain Canadian products, a move to which Canada responded in kind.
The senator praised the goal of making products in the United States and bringing jobs to his state, but he also issued a tepid criticism of the president’s trade policy.
“What people don’t like are the uncertainties,” he told NR. “I think they would like to understand the strategy behind what the president’s trying to do, as it relates to targeting the things that are essential for our economic and national security, versus the things that really don’t have an impact.”
Husted’s campaign strategy stands in contrast to the one Moreno employed just two years ago. Last cycle, Moreno channeled Trump’s energy, virtually impersonating the president at one campaign event. If he defeated Brown, Moreno said in the October 2024 speech, he would get to fly to Washington, D.C., “get an Uber, drive to the Capitol, open the door to Chuck Schumer’s office and say, ‘You’re fired.’”
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