He Votes All the Time

On Saturday, October 3, in a high school gym in Vandalia, the President of the United States told about ninety minutes' worth of Ohioans that "Sen. Jon Husted votes to put Ohio first, and he votes all the time." The paper has been covering Ohio all week, first the Governor's race and now this one, and it decided to take the President literally, which is a thing the paper does to him more often than his friends do. It went and got the roll calls. Senator Husted does vote all the time. The paper has read what he voted for, and it would like to walk through it, because the Senator has spent $19 million and his friends have spent about $350 million on top of it to make sure you don't.

Start with the war, because it is the most expensive thing on the list and the one he talks about most. The United States has been at war with Iran since February 28, and the Senate has voted fourteen times since March on measures to end it or to make the President ask permission to continue it, and Senator Husted has voted no fourteen times. Thirteen of those were procedural and the paper will say so, because PolitiFact said so, and because the Senator's spokeswoman insists that "a vote against a War Powers Resolution is not a vote 'to continue the Iran War,'" which is true in the way that declining to turn off a tap is not a vote for the flood. The fourteenth was September 24, on a resolution the House had already passed, and it failed 49 to 50, with four Republicans voting yes, and he was not one of them. Two days before that vote he told Politico, "The war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices." The day after it he told a Columbus station, "I don't know anybody that doesn't want the war to end." The paper knows one, and it is not the Senator; it is the Senator's voting card. The gas is past four dollars in Ohio because of a war he says he wants over and votes to keep, and his explanation for the two is that "if you let Iran win the war, then they'll control the Strait of Hormuz, and gas prices will never go down," which is an argument for the war, and a perfectly respectable one, and the paper only wishes he would make it to Ohioans' faces instead of telling them he agrees with them and voting the other way.

Then the Epstein files, which the paper will take slowly because the Senator has an ad that says he voted to release them and the paper has the roll call that says what he did first. On September 10, 2025, Senator Schumer offered an amendment to the defense bill directing the Attorney General to make the Epstein documents public. The Republican leadership moved to table it, which is how you kill an amendment without voting on what it says, and the motion carried 51 to 49. Every Republican voted to table except Josh Hawley and Rand Paul. Senator Husted voted to table. Two months later, after the House forced the issue and the President reversed himself, the Senate passed the release bill by unanimous consent, meaning nobody objected, meaning Senator Husted, like everyone else, "voted" for it in the sense that he did not stand up. FactCheck.org's summary is that he "essentially voted both to block and to release the files." His ad says he "voted to release the Epstein files" and calls Sherrod Brown a liar for saying otherwise. The paper would add one line from the same FactCheck piece: over his career, Senator Husted has taken $116,892 from Leslie Wexner, whom the FBI's own 2019 email called a "secondary" co-conspirator on limited evidence and who was never charged, including $3,500 to the Senate campaign about two months before the vote to table. The campaign gave about $34,000 of it to charity this year. The paper does not say the check bought the vote. It says the Senator took the check, cast the vote, and then made an ad about his courage.

The tariffs are quicker. The Senate voted three times in the last week of October 2025 to end the President's tariff emergencies, on Brazil, on Canada, and on the whole world, and all three passed, and Senator Husted voted no on all three. The paper could not find a sentence in which he has questioned a tariff. It found one from the Columbus Dispatch, which endorsed Mr. Brown last week and wrote that the Senator "has not clearly broken with Trump on policy," which is the polite form.

Then the big bill. Senator Husted voted for it on July 1, 2025, when it passed 51 to 50 with the Vice President, his predecessor in the seat, breaking the tie, and his press release the next day said that "the One Big Beautiful Bill includes robust funding for rural hospitals" and that "we are proud to have secured $1.3 billion for these facilities across Ohio." The paper would like the reader to sit with that sentence, because it is the whole bill in miniature: the Senator is proud to have secured $1.3 billion for Ohio's rural hospitals from a law whose Medicaid cuts, by the American Hospital Association's count, take $2.5 billion from Ohio's rural hospitals over the same ten years. The Kaiser Family Foundation's range for Ohioans who lose coverage is 350,000 to 580,000; Mr. Brown says 490,000, and PolitiFact calls that Half True because the number depends on which parts of the law you count, and the paper will take the low end, 350,000, and note that it is the population of Cleveland. The Senator's spokeswoman calls the work requirements "modest." They begin in December of next year, after the election, which is also modest.

And Todd Blanche. In August the Senate confirmed the President's former defense lawyer as Attorney General, 50 to 49, and Senator Husted was a late yes. He had "concerns," the paper is told, about the $1.8 billion fund the President had ordered up to compensate his allies and the January 6 defendants, and he got, in writing, from Mr. Blanche, a statement that the fund "is rescinded and shall have no force or effect," and he voted yes. The President did not sign the statement and has since called the fund "very fair." The paper would not call that a vote so much as a receipt, and it is not sure the Senator kept his copy.

That is the Senate. The paper now goes back to the job he had before, because the biggest money in this race is about it. In 2019, as Lieutenant Governor, Jon Husted helped pass House Bill 6, the billion-dollar bailout of FirstEnergy's two nuclear plants that turned out to be the largest bribery scheme in Ohio history: the Speaker of the House is serving twenty years, the company paid $230 million in a deferred prosecution agreement, and its executives are being retried this fall. The Senator has never been charged with anything and a Case Western law professor says there is no smoking gun, and the paper accepts both. Here is what the record does say. In 2017, when he was running for Governor, FirstEnergy sent $1 million to a dark-money group with internal records marking it for "the Husted campaign," and more than $1 million of it reached a super PAC supporting him; in 2018 the company sent $2.5 million to a group tied to the Republican Governors Association for the DeWine-Husted ticket. About $3.5 million in all. Asked in 2024 whether he knew, he declined to say. In March of this year he testified, remotely, as a defense witness at the executives' trial and did not recall what was discussed at a 2018 dinner. The average Ohio electric bill went from $89 a month in 2019 to $144 in January, and the experts say HB 6 is a factor and the data centers are a bigger one, which brings the paper to the data centers.

As Lieutenant Governor, Senator Husted was the state's salesman for them. He defended the Google exemption in New Albany in 2019; in 2023 he called the $7.8 billion Amazon deal the making of "the tech center of the Midwest"; the state gave one developer a 75 percent abatement for 18 jobs. The Ohio Chamber counts $2.5 billion in incentives from 2017 to 2024, and not all of it is his, and PolitiFact rates Mr. Brown's "led the push" as Mostly True. The reason this matters is in a memo the Senator's own party wrote. In August the National Republican Senatorial Committee's internal assessment of this race leaked, and it said: "More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted's neck," and "Brown is using it because it works," and "If Husted loses because of data centers, the industry will be blamed." The Senator has since introduced a bill to make data centers, not ratepayers, pay for their power, which is the right bill, and which the paper notes arrived in July of an election year, six years after the salesman first went to work.

Here is what the Senator thinks of the people who pay the bills. In March, on a podcast, he explained poverty: "People living in poverty, they're not very experienced at navigating the real world." And: "You literally have to teach people how to budget." In January, on a radio station in Fort Wayne: "Our work ethic is broken." The paper has read a lot of Republicans on the subject of the poor. It has rarely seen one get it so exactly backward. The people the Senator is describing are the ones navigating the $144 electric bill. He is the one who spent the last decade in rooms where the bill was somebody else's.

Now the three things the Senator has not done, which the paper thinks are the real story. He has not debated. The Dispatch wrote last week that "neither has agreed to debate this fall," and the paper notes that Mr. Brown said in August, "I assume we are," and that the Senator's spokesman said he would be "shocked" if Mr. Brown showed up, and that there is now no date, and the paper will split the blame and note which side has the incumbent's name on its ads. Which is the second thing: the Senator's own commercials call his opponent "Senator Sherrod Brown." The Times reported in September that this is deliberate, that about a quarter of Ohio voters think Mr. Brown is the incumbent, and that the Senator's campaign manager's response was, "Name ID is not everything." The paper would put it this way: the man who was appointed to the seat is spending $350 million of other people's money to make sure you do not notice he has it.

The third thing is this week. On Monday night a video appeared in Ohio in which Amy Acton's estranged mother, the widow of the man indicted in 1978 for raping Dr. Acton when she was twelve, calls her daughter a liar, and on Tuesday night Vivek Ramaswamy, the Senator's running mate on every Republican mailer in the state, admitted his campaign made it and said he would spend $4 million airing it. Mr. Brown's statement came Tuesday afternoon: "The ad released by Vivek Ramaswamy is disgusting. Everyone, including Jon Husted, should be willing to condemn this ad." Tuesday the Senator said nothing. Wednesday morning he stood on a stage in Sharonville with the Vice President and Mr. Ramaswamy and said nothing about it there either, and then, afterward, in a statement to the Associated Press, he produced five words: he "would not have run" the ad. That is not a condemnation. It is a man explaining that he would have made a different purchasing decision. The paper will set it next to what two other Ohio Republicans managed, the Governor's development director, who said "there are lines we shouldn't cross, and this is one of them," and the Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, who said he "probably wouldn't run an ad like that," and next to the Vice President, who at the same Cincinnati stop told Republicans to "stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days," said he was "a little bit disgusted" that some of them were more upset about the ad than about Democrats, and praised Mr. Ramaswamy's "audacity." The Senator heard that, standing next to him, and found five words for the AP on the way out. He and Mr. Ramaswamy endorsed each other last September. The paper will add the thing he did say, a week earlier, when he was asked about the woman in the "Release the Epstein Files" shirt who was pulled by the hair and struck in the face at the Youngstown rally where he spoke: "I don't know any of the details about it," and, "I wouldn't expect one of my supporters to go interrupt a rally that the Democrats are having," and that "there are consequences for doing that." The paper has met this man before. He is the one who, when something ugly happens next to him, explains that it is a matter for the police and that the person it happened to should have known better.

The paper will deal honestly with Mr. Brown, who lost this seat two years ago by three and a half points while the President carried the state by eleven, and who is 72, and who is being asked by Ohio to do a thing Ohio just told him not to. The ads against him are about immigrants. One, run by the Senator's party committee in August, used a photograph of a family of three killed on I-71 in April, and the family wrote to ask that it be taken down, saying nobody had asked them and "We, of course, would have refused." The Senator's campaign answered that "It is an NRSC ad," and the Senator told reporters his campaign had "nothing to do" with it and that he had asked the committee to pull it. The ad's own disclaimer says it was paid for by the committee and authorized by Husted for Senate. A month later it was still on the committee's YouTube page. Another has the Senator saying Mr. Brown "supported Social Security payments for illegals," which PolitiFact rates False. The paper could not find a genuine gaffe from Mr. Brown this year, and it looked. What it found was a man who raised $23 million in the last quarter from about 200,000 people giving an average of forty dollars, against the Senator's $4.8 million, and who has been outraised by nobody for five straight quarters; the Dispatch and the Beacon Journal and every union in the state have endorsed him; and his pitch is the one it has always been: "Ohio workers know that Jon Husted will always put large corporations and special interests before them." The paper has just spent two thousand words establishing that this is not an attack. It is a summary.

Then there is Greg Levy. Mr. Levy is on the ballot for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, has raised about $80,000, takes no PAC money, and wants a $30 minimum wage and the abolition of billionaires. In the second week of October, Ohio mailboxes began filling with flyers in a typeface much like his campaign's, "Join the Revolution," "Send a Worker to the Senate," and his campaign had not sent them. The Associated Press traced them. They were paid for by a super PAC called Enough Promises Ohio, founded September 29, donors not yet disclosed, which paid a brand-new vendor called Seven Farms that shares a South Carolina address with a Republican mail house run by Big Dog Strategies, whose senior vice president managed Bernie Moreno's campaign against Mr. Brown two years ago and whose founder advises the President's super PAC. The same mail house billed a different super PAC more than $280,000 in August for mail supporting Senator Husted. By October 19 Enough Promises had reported nearly $1.8 million, mail and online video, and the video says "Sherrod Brown sold us out" and calls Mr. Levy the "real progressive." Mr. Levy, who did not ask for any of this, called it "a cheap, cowardly attack" and "attempted deception of voters" and is considering suing. The Senator's campaign says it had no involvement. The paper believes that, in the narrow sense. It also notes that the people spending $1.8 million to elect a socialist in Ohio are the people who ran the last campaign against Sherrod Brown and the people who are mailing for this one, and that the only candidate the money helps is the one who says he had nothing to do with it, which is becoming the Senator's signature phrase.

And then the thing the paper would honestly rather not write about, but the President has made it the closing argument. In Youngstown on October 12 he said he had looked the Senator "up and down." In Kentucky last Saturday he elaborated: "He came up, and he was talking very nicely, and I stood right over here, and I examined his ass. I never did that with a man before." He went on to the shoulders, the feet, the jawline, and reported that the Senator had "picked up like nine or 10 points since I talked about that." Senator Bernie Moreno, asked about it on CNN, said, "Unlike the president of the United States, I will not comment on his anatomy." The Senator himself, on Sunday in Darke County: "I know the president's been talking about me as a football player and a few other things these days." On Tuesday, in Greenville, North Carolina, at a rally for somebody else's Senate race, the President did it a third time: "I'm studying his body. I've never studied the body of a man before. It's not my thing," and "it's like a pile of muscle," and "He's like a piece of steel," and the claim that the Senator "went from being ten points down to being two points up." On Wednesday in Sharonville the Vice President, with the Senator in the room, opened his part with, as the Daily Beast reported it, "What could I possibly say about Jon Husted that Donald J. Trump has not already said?" and then, "Don't worry, I'm not talking about Jon Husted's," the President's noun, "I'm not talking about it." The Senator spoke for nine minutes at the same rally, about Sherrod Brown's taxes, "Can you name one thing that he's done to make your life better?", and said nothing on the subject of himself. The paper does not care about the Senator's anatomy either. It cares that the President's case for Jon Husted, in the final fortnight, is that he looks like a man who votes all the time, and that the Senator's response to being described that way, in public, by the most powerful man on earth, was a chuckle and a change of subject, three times now. That is the whole relationship. It is what he will do with the seat.

The Daily Buffoon endorses Sherrod Brown for the United States Senate from Ohio. Fox News's poll, out Wednesday, has him up five, 52 to 47, with the Senator's favorability thirteen points underwater; Marist has him up four among likely voters and nine among registered. Democrats were 41 percent of the first 230,000 early ballots, against 28 percent Republican, which is the reverse of two years ago. The President is at 43 percent in the state. The paper endorses Mr. Brown because he has never once voted to keep a war going that he told Ohio he wanted over, never tabled a file and then bragged about releasing it, never called the people who pay the electric bill inexperienced at the real world, and because when Amy Acton's mother was put on television to call her a liar, he said "disgusting" the same afternoon, and the Senator needed a day, a rally and a wire reporter to get to "would not have run." It endorses him knowing he lost. It would rather be represented by a man who lost honestly than by one who was handed the seat and is spending $350 million to pretend he earned it.

Four clowns. The Senator is not a fool; he is the opposite, a career man who has never cast a vote he could not explain to the people who paid for it, and that is the problem. The fifth clown is for men who don't know what they're doing. Jon Husted has known exactly what he was doing since 2017, when the first million arrived with his name on the memo line. He votes all the time. The paper counted, and it would like Ohio to count too, before the second of November.