“Your country needs you.”

That was the message delivered to Sherrod Brown, the three-term senator from Ohio until he was bounced out of office by the Trump surge in 2024. Brown was thinking of running for governor or, at 73, retiring from public life altogether, not least because the state where he had made his mark as a rumpled avatar of Rust Belt populism had rapidly shifted red over the last decade.

Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats, in a series of lunches in Brown’s hometown of Cleveland, told him that he understood how appealing retirement sounded. That, sure, the governor’s mansion would be a shorter commute.

But, he said, if Brown didn’t run for the Senate, and the Democrats fell one seat short in their quest for the majority, Brown would never be able to enjoy his retirement. And Schumer made the same pitch to others — like Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman from Alaska who also lost her seat in 2024 but outperformed Kamala Harris by ten points. And Roy Cooper, the popular two-term governor of North Carolina, who Schumer called the day his term ended.

These conversations were in the summer of 2025, back when Democrats were still flattened, run over by the Trump electoral steamroller in 2024 and then overwhelmed by his administration’s assault on Washington in the first few months of his second term. The map for a Democratic takeover of the Senate ran almost entirely through states Trump won in 2024, and the party’s donors were dispirited after spending nearly $2 billion in Harris’s loss.

A year and a half later, Cooper flipped a state that hadn’t elected a Democratic senator since 2008, winning it with enough ease that the party........

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