I stand up in defense of old white people.
No, not the last president whose selfish insistence on running for re-election after turning 82 gave rise to the current White House incumbent, whose daily decline of office will surely get worse as he turns 80 this summer.
No, I have in mind two baby boomers who are the most underrated and undercovered candidates in this midterms: Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Roy Cooper of North Carolina.
In what is shaping up to be a strong Democratic year, Brown and Cooper are mainstays becoming increasingly realistic about their party’s potential chances of retaking the Senate.
Each comes from a state that has been a no-no for Democrats in federal races. And it would be no exaggeration to say that each person could be the only person who can flip the seat they are running for.
Brown, 73, previously won three Senate races, the last in President Donald Trump’s first midterm, and Cooper, 68, stepped down last year after serving two terms as governor. Both are as famous in their respective states as is possible in the age of media fragmentation.
If you doubt me, maybe the Republicans will convince you. Check out the top two television ad reservations set by the Senate GOP super PAC this week. Where do they plan to spend the most, whether on offense or defense? You guessed it, it’ll be in Ohio ($79 million) and North Carolina ($71 million). Yes, of course, the scale of that investment is partly due to the number and cost of media markets in both states. But it also highlights real GOP concerns in both states.
While these spending priorities will not surprise anyone who works in electoral politics, they may stun, or at least confuse, the hobbyist class of activists.
Understanding that disconnection matters.
My dear reader, you’ve probably heard more about one Senate race that’s a far cry for Democrats (Texas) and another that’s likely to flip (Maine) than the two I presented above.
The recent bias is in the case of Texas and the campaign of James Tallarico, who won a high-profile primary just last month. Moreover, he was loaded with primary race issues – black, white and Hispanic – that are often at the center of Democrats’ intra-party contests.
Similarly, the Maine primary reflects another enduring – and divisive – conflict within the Democratic coalition, that between male progressives and female establishmentarians. More than 10 years after Bernie vs. Hillary began, the proxy war continues, this time with Graham Platner playing Bernie and Gov. Janet Mills playing Hillary.
Now, I don’t mean to minimize how important Maine is to the Democrats’ electoral calculus. It’s hard to see how they win the Senate without defeating Senator Susan Collins, the only true-blue Republican-held state on the map. Your Timely Pointer Fact: Collins is the last senator, Democrat or Republican, to represent a state won by the opposite party’s presidential candidate in the last three elections.
Yet the point is this: If Maine is the Democrats’ 48th seat, North Carolina and Ohio are 49 and 50 (Collins enthusiasts, save your emails: She’s clearly the better Republican running in the three races, but she comes from the toughest state on the map and will suffer all the downsides of Trump without any of Trump’s benefits without Trump at the top of the ticket).
I know what you’re thinking: OK, I get it, North Carolina and Ohio are important, but what’s even more crucial for Democrats, the 51st seat that creates the majority? That’s a column for another day (probably one with a Wasilla dateline).
Why are Brown and Cooper discussed so rarely? Yes, the fact that no one faced a primary while there were stories in Texas and Maine is alarming to Democrats and the press. And Texas is a perennial white whale for Democrats, while Collins falls into that category of Republicans-they-like-to-beat, which also explains why the party’s small-dollar donors showered millions on opponents of Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and, well, Susan Collins in 2020.
However, let’s be honest about other reasons.
It’s also because both are old, male, and pale (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Neither of them will run for president and both can serve only one term, a maximum of two terms. In a party that often favors the new, the next, and the fresh – especially when craving an escape from the disappointing present – Brown and Cooper are none of those things.
Now, I don’t think Cooper and Brown are such delicate flowers that they will suffer from lack of attention. Given the political leanings of their states, they are certainly fine with not nationalizing their races.
But do you know what they are? Candidates who could help ensure that Democrats control both houses of Congress for Trump’s final two years in office are potentially more reckless.
What is considered an election issue, to win so you can control or at least have your say on the agenda.
“Neither Sherrod Brown nor Roy Cooper are designed to appeal to the Democratic activist base. They’re not sitting around planning how to shoot a viral video,” said longtime Ohio-based Democratic strategist Aaron Pickrell. “But they connect with regular voters in tough states.”
For nearly two decades, only one Ohio Democrat has won a Senate seat or the governor’s race: Brown.
Over the same period, North Carolina Democrats have won a Senate race only once – the only year they carried the state in a presidential campaign this century (2008). Although nearly every GOP candidate for the White House carried Carolina, there was one Democrat who won statewide election every four years between 2000 and 2020: Cooper.
Yet both of them are barely present in the online political world. And I’m willing to bet that even very few hobbyists can name their Republican opponents: Senator Jon Husted, the man appointed to fill J.D. Vance’s old seat, and former RNC Chairman Michael Whatley.
Senate appointees in competitive states can struggle to hold seats they haven’t won in their own right — see Martha McSally and Kelly Loeffler — and Whateley is squarely a Trump proxy, having been decided by DJT decree when the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump took the lead in the race.
Again, this is not a trivial matter, let alone a trivial one. Indeed, folks: These are the two central races on the ballot in a crucial year for American democracy.
What they are not is extremely attractive.
Which attracts interest and coverage in an era when social media are increasingly becoming the main source of information for voters and the de facto assignment editor for traditional media.
So now you have a situation in which Tallarico — running as a known vegan supporter in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988 — raised more than $14 million on the fundraising platform ActBlue alone during the first two months of the year. As Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times saysThat’s more than any other Senate hopeful raised in an entire quarter last year.
We don’t have full Q1 figures yet, but for comparison, in the final quarter of last year, Brown raised $8.8 million and Cooper raised $9.5 million. So it’s not that they’re being ignored – they’re raising significant cash. But that’s only about a third of the amount Talarico ultimately raised this quarter.
I understood. Sherrod Brown is not a 30-year-old seminarian refusing to hand over the gospel to Republicans and Roy Cooper is not a military veteran who has become an oyster with tattoos and taboos.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t interesting in their own way.
Brown is the son of a doctor and a teacher, a baseball nut with a penchant for union populism – and matching satin jackets – who loves Bob Evans more than any other living Yalie.
Cooper’s mother was also a teacher and his father was a small-town lawyer and political player associated with the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina. Young Roy, who claims he blocked one of Phil Ford’s shots when the two played for rival Nash County high schools, was a Morehead Scholar at Chapel Hill, where he certainly did not block any of Phil Ford’s shots.
Haven’t moved in yet?
Well, too bad, it’s not about your feelings.
Maybe (old) white guys can’t jump, but they can help save the Senate.
