Donald Trump is claiming his comments about Sen. Jon Husted’s backside boosted the Republican 12 points in the Ohio Senate race, but most polls released in the final week still show Democrat Sherrod Brown ahead.
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Trump made the claim in a TikTok video posted Wednesday before his rally in Chillicothe, Ohio, praising Husted’s rear end once again and pointing to his college football career at the University of Dayton. It is a bit Trump has been running at rallies for weeks, and the number keeps changing. On Oct. 20, he said his remarks had pushed Husted into a two point lead. In a Fox News interview days later, he put the jump at “14 points or something.” At a Texas rally this week, he said Husted “went from being down to being up.”
Trump has not pointed to any poll that shows that. A Fox News poll of likely voters has Brown up 52% to 47%. A Bowling Green State University poll with YouGov has him ahead 48% to 42%, double the three point lead the same poll found in September. CNN and the Cook Political Report each found Brown up six. Not every survey leans Brown. Echelon Insights has the two tied at 47%, and an ActiVote poll put Husted ahead by less than half a point. Decision Desk HQ, a nonpartisan election forecaster, gives Brown about a 53% chance of winning. Brown has the edge, but nothing is locked.
Husted is playing along with the attention anyway. He told Fox News he joked with his wife that he needs to “get down to the gym and keep up my reputation.”
A close race is already a problem for Republicans. Trump carried Ohio by 11 points in 2024, and Brown lost his Senate seat that same year to Republican Bernie Moreno by about three and a half points. Husted, Ohio’s former lieutenant governor, was appointed to the Senate in 2025 to fill the seat JD Vance left when he became vice president. This special election decides who serves the last two years of that term. Republicans expected to hold it easily. Instead, the Ohio Senate race has become one of the contests that could decide which party controls the Senate, and Democrats likely cannot win a majority without flipping it.
That is why Trump keeps coming back. The Chillicothe rally was his third trip to Ohio this month and the fifth Ohio stop by Trump or Vance in October. On stage, Trump told the crowd he would “consider” putting the new Space Force academy in Ohio, but only if Husted wins. He also credited Husted and Moreno with landing a Navy facility in the state to service submarines.
The real fight in the Ohio Senate race is over the money in Ohioans’ pockets. Inflation and the cost of living sit at the top of voters’ concerns, and Brown has built his campaign around both. At a rally in Athens last week, he said his first move in the Senate would be ending the war with Iran, followed by lowering costs and going after corruption, including members of Congress who trade individual stocks. Brown has also run ads calling Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio,” tying him to the giant computer facilities that draw enormous amounts of electricity as utility bills climb. Husted fired back that Brown celebrated data centers coming to Ohio when he was a senator. Husted also sponsored the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill that would push utility regulators to charge large power users like data centers more. Senate Democrats blocked it earlier this month, and Trump has used that against Brown on the trail.
Husted’s closing argument is that Ohio already tried Brown. He points to Brown’s three Senate terms and his votes during the Biden years, including the American Rescue Plan. In Chillicothe, Husted promised he would “drive down prices” and “fix things, unlike what Sherrod Brown has done over the last 50 years.”
Trump himself may be the biggest factor in the Ohio Senate race. In a state he won comfortably two years ago, his approval among likely voters sits at 43% in the Fox News poll, with 57% disapproving. Other surveys have it lower. Husted is underwater too, with 42% of voters viewing him favorably and 55% unfavorably in the same poll, while Brown’s ratings are slightly positive.
The money is lopsided. Brown’s campaign says Republican spending in Ohio has reached about $317 million. The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC tied to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, had put $93 million into the state for Husted as of early October. Brown has leaned on small donors, and his campaign says it has received more than one million contributions through ActBlue.
Two groups could decide the Ohio Senate race. The first is women. Women favor Brown by 14 points in the Fox poll, while men lean toward Husted by four, an 18 point gender gap. The second is the roughly 7% of voters backing independent Greg Levy or Libertarian Bill Redpath. Brown needs only a small slice of them to get past 50%. Husted would need nearly all of them.
The same polls show Democrat Amy Acton ahead of Republican Vivek Ramaswamy in the race for governor, and some Ohioans are splitting their tickets in both directions, backing Brown for Senate and Ramaswamy for governor, or Husted and Acton.
Early voting is underway in Ohio, and Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3.
