Last June, Sarah Bloom Anderson brought her 14-year-old daughter Audrey to Sen. Jon Husted’s Washington, D.C., office to plead for Medicaid. Audrey, who has a chromosomal disorder, relies on the program to receive care at home rather than in an institution.

Husted hugged her, posed for a photo his office later shared online and then, not long after, voted for President Donald Trump’s spending bill, which included Medicaid cuts.

Four months later, Bloom Anderson pointedly recounted the meeting at a campaign event for Democrat Sherrod Brown, who’s running against Husted for U.S. Senate.

“You can’t hug my daughter, look her in the eyes and tell her Medicaid won’t be cut,” she said with a subtle, quiet anger, “and then sign that bill.”

The campaign commercial-worthy soundbite came during one of the many small roundtable discussions Brown has held across Ohio in recent months as he seeks a return to the U.S. Senate.

Brown’s campaign is betting that these curated events can nonetheless surface authentic stories that connect with voters while showing how federal policy is hitting Ohio families.

The approach is a sharp contrast to the more modern way of communicating with voters typified by Republican governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has sought to produce viral moments through more freewheeling — and occasionally outright hostile — appearances at town hall events and political rallies.

The playbook Brown is following is familiar to him. After one roundtable talk in Columbus, he estimated he’d held roughly 600 similar events over the course of his political career, stretching back to the 1970s.

“I did a few early big town halls, but people yell at each other,” Brown said. “This way, I get to sit and listen.”

He described his roundtables as a way to get the pulse of the electorate and to help set his campaign’s priorities.

“I care about this stuff. I listen, I come back and I take these ideas and try to get them paid attention to,” Brown said. 

As Brown said, he held similar town halls frequently when he was a U.S. Senator from 2007 through 2024, rubbing elbows with community leaders and workers in hospitals, community centers and union halls across the state. 

At one recent campaign event in Cleveland, Brown even used a Senate folder to store his written notes, making it seem like he’d never even left office.

But he did. Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno narrowly defeated Brown in the November 2024 election in a year President Donald Trump won Ohio handily. Brown, like other Democrats, is hoping a more favorable political climate in 2026 will help reverse his fortunes.

Republicans have noticed how Brown is re-running his past campaigns. They’ve started suggesting he’s doing so to avoid interacting with less supportive voters due to his age. (Brown is 73.) 

“Sherrod Brown is no spring chicken, and like his longtime pal Joe Biden, Brown’s running a basement campaign to deny Ohioans the opportunities they deserve to hold him accountable for selling out to the far-left for over half a century,” said Nick Puglia, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. 

Brown’s campaign says the Democrat has held more than 100 events since launching his campaign last August, including the roundtables as well as visits to picket lines and meet and greets with local voters.

The anatomy of a roundtable

Brown’s roundtables generally go like this: They feature five or so participants gathered to discuss a particular topic that accentuates the main themes of his campaign, like the rising cost of health care or the effects of tariffs on small businesses. Brown describes how a Husted vote, like his support for President Donald Trump’s tariffs, or his support for the Big Beautiful Bill, makes him responsible for the issue. 

A few local reporters may show up and cover the event. Even if they don’t, Brown has a film crew on hand that works to turn the sessions into social media content. The participants are screened, and in interviews described going through what they planned to say with Brown and his team before the event. Brown hangs around afterwards and takes a few questions from any media present.

Oh, and the roundtables are never round.

Asked if he thinks he’s getting the real story, given how carefully his campaign selects event participants, Brown said he doesn’t just think he’s hearing from a bunch of ringers. 

“Yeah, we select them, and we’re not selecting right-wing Republicans,” Brown said. But, he said he hears similar stories from people who stop him in the grocery store, and has encountered common themes from events across the state.

“I hear from young people that say, “I’m 30. My parents bought their first house when they were 32. I may never own a house. I mean, you hear those stories repeated. I don’t think it matters where you go.”

‘I’m in so much debt’

Despite the stage managing, some individual stories still cut through and offer vivid snapshots of how some Ohioans have fallen on hard times. They don’t necessarily correlate to the current political campaign or even Trump’s time in office. 

At one event in Columbus, a woman described how she’d opened a community space to meet the rising demand for commercial kitchens available to those who can’t afford a restaurant. The “ghost kitchen” space since has come to cater to chefs who’d lost their businesses.

At another event in Cleveland, a pair of women participated who described uneasily planning to buy ownership shares of a local coffee shop where they’d worked for years. One said the premiums for her personal health insurance plan, which she bought through the Obamacare marketplace, were set to double from $200 a month to $400. 

The other described how the company remains unable to provide health insurance to its employees. Meanwhile, U.S. tariffs on Brazil made the shop’s base coffee completely unavailable, forcing it to switch suppliers. Tariffs on Canada increased the cost of its packaging and labels, prompting the company to get those supplies from a Chinese manufacturer instead.

One particularly harrowing story came from Pamala Chabek, a stay-at-home mother from Brook Park, a Cleveland suburb, with extensive experience fostering children. She described being crushed by medical costs for herself and her children. 

She said she dropped her 18-year-old son from her insurance plan this year, which she also bought on the Obamacare marketplace, after learning her monthly premiums would have gone up from $557 last year to $890. 

She said the payments she receives from the county government to assist with her two foster children don’t cover their expenses, and she’s now having trouble making ends meet.

“I had a savings account, all my credit cards paid off,” Chabek said. “Now I’m in so much debt to be a foster parent because of health insurance. It’s unreal.”

In an interview, Chabek told Signal she ended up at the event after cold emailing Brown’s campaign. After corresponding a bit with Brown and his staff, going over what she planned to talk about, she was chosen for the event.

“They said it was perfect,” said Chabek, whose testimonial has made its way into the Brown campaign’s social media channels.

Another story was from Chris Crader, who owns a small chain of high-end pizza restaurants in Columbus and hosted one of Brown’s events. In line with the theme of the roundtable where he appeared, Crader said rising costs have made it harder for his businesses to remain open and profitable.

But the most interesting details came from his experiences catering for the construction workers hired to help build the stalled massive Intel project outside Columbus – which was subsidized through a bill Brown helped pass in Congress.

Crader said he signed a contract to help stage a cafeteria to provide workers with pastries and coffee. He expected to serve around 2,000 to 3,000 people. But during the first year, the numbers were far less than projected, as the company delayed the project amid financial issues.

Initially, Crader agreed to take less money, accepting a reduced price for coffee, hoping it would pay off in the long term. 

“We were essentially operating at no profit, because we were like, ‘When they eventually get to this number, we’ll see a profit,’” Crader said. “But by the time we got to that number, their stock was in the tank. And they were like, ‘We can’t pay for coffee anymore.”

Things deteriorated from there, Crader said. After he was asked to coordinate a site of food trucks instead, Crader said he eventually decided to walk away last summer. What he’d hoped would be a lucrative business deal resulted in him losing tens of thousands of dollars.

“I don’t think companies like that give a damn anymore,” Crader said of his experiences catering for the Intel project. “And I certainly don’t think the politicians don’t. At least the administration that’s in power right now.”

Medicaid a ‘lifeline’ for some families 

Several participants for Brown’s forums are moms of kids with complex medical disabilities. This includes Bloom Anderson, the woman who traveled with her 14-year-old daughter to meet with Husted in Washington, D.C.

In an interview, Bloom Anderson, a lawyer, said Medicaid helps pay for a full-time caregiver for Audrey, allowing her and her husband to work, as well as for medical equipment and medications. Audrey has PURA Syndrome, a chromosomal disorder she described as resembling a mix of autism and cerebral palsy. 

Paying for Audrey’s care out of pocket would cost millions of dollars over the course of her life, she estimated.

“It’s a lifeline. It’s life or death,” Bloom Anderson said.

Bloom Anderson traveled to Washington through Little Lobbyists, an advocacy organization for children with disabilities. The group is concerned that federal Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – particularly one that targets a common budgeting trick Ohio and other states use to attract federal funding – will cause states to eventually cut back on services.

This could have downstream effects for kids like Audrey, whose coverage through Medicaid is technically optional. The federal government requires states to offer Medicaid coverage to disabled children, but Audrey gets coverage through what’s called a waiver, which allows her to get treatment at home even though it’s more expensive than if she were to live in a group-home type setting. Major cuts could force the state to revoke the waiver.

At the Brown campaign event she participated in, Bloom Anderson met another mom with a similar experience. After riffing off each other during the event, the two talked later, and since have become friends, she said. Bloom Anderson called the experience “cathartic.”

“I appreciate that they asked us to tell our stories,” she said.