Former President Obama rallies with Ohio Democratic ticket in Cleveland

Several thousand Ohioans packed the Cleveland Public Auditorium Saturday for a rally featuring former President Barack Obama. Several Ohio Democratic officials and allies warmed up the crowd and the party’s entire down ballot slate appeared on stage briefly to wave at the crowd.

But the main focus of the event was Democratic nominee for governor Dr. Amy Acton and the party’s pick for U.S. Senate, Sherrod Brown.

Both candidates are offering a working class, populist message, aiming to win back voters who have strayed closer to the Republican party in recent elections. They’re also painting their opponents as out of touch and more aligned with wealthy Americans and special interests.

Entering the final days of the race, both candidates hold a narrow advantage in public polling and have significantly out-raised their Republican counterparts. As in many other states around the country, a flood of Republican Super PAC money has doused that advantage.

Former President Obama

Obama made a pitch for basic decency in the face of leadership he dismissed as “unserious.” Between building a White House ballroom, paving the rose garden and installing a helipad, Obama quipped that Trump ought to be on HGTV.

“What’s up with the gold?” Obama asked. “Everything more gold. He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

The former president acknowledged the economy isn’t working for a lot of people, and that, speaking for experience, there are limits to a what a leader can accomplish from the White House. But between the Iran war and Trump’s tariffs against allies like Canada, “That is not the case here.”

“In this case, he said, “this administration’s actions are directly responsible for rising costs.”

Still, Obama reached for something deeper than just affordability. He pointed to examples of the president’s family or inner circle leveraging their positions for profit and insisted you can’t “unrig” an economy when its leaders “think it’s OK to lie and cheat and bully.”

“Yes, we need to lower costs. We need to put money in people’s pockets,” he said. “Yes, we need to end this war and the corruption in Washington. But we don’t do any of those things if we don’t fix our moral compass as a nation.”

Obama also spoke about the controversial ad Republican candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy has begun running against Acton. The ad features Acton’s mother Donna Arthur claiming Acton “has a serious problem: she is a liar. She lies about her past.”

That past includes Arthur’s husband, Cledith Arthur, raping Acton when she was a child. Mahoning County officials brought charges in 1978, but Donna sided with her husband and fled the state once he was out on bail.

Arthur doesn’t bring that history up in the ad, but does claim that she worked on sexual abuse programs to attempt to establish her credibility, and says Acton’s claim of living in a tent at one point isn’t true. The 1978 arrest warrant for Cledith Arthur lists his residence as a campground called Terrace Lake Park with no specific address.

“There’s a decency that we should expect out of our public officials,” Obama said of the ad. “And I don’t know what’s happened where the standards of behavior have gotten so low that somebody can run and ad like that.”

“There’s got to be something inside you where you just say, you know, no office is worth stooping that low,” he said.

Dr. Amy Acton

On stage, Acton told the crowd she wished they could see what she was seeing. Growing up as a “a scrappy kid from Youngstown,” she said, neighbors knew more about a person’s union or church than their political party. She credited that community for supporting her when she needed it.

Acton acknowledged the abuse she and her brother suffered and criticized her opponent for attempting to “exploit” her childhood to “save his struggling campaign.”

“But it’s not going to work,” she said. “It’s not going to work, because compassion and decency still matter.”

Acton told the crowd those experiences drove her to become a doctor. And, taking a page from the former president’s book, they have a lot to say about hope.

“Hope is what got me through sexual abuse,” she said, “living through cold nights where all I could think about was how to keep my brother safe and warm.”

It drove her to work three jobs to get through medical school, Acton said, and to keep going when she was juggling a young child and working the night shift during her residency.

Acton promised a “working families tax cut”— pairing a child tax credit and an earned income credit — and committed to bringing down the cost of childcare and utility bills, as well as introducing a program to alleviate medical debt.

“All of this, Ohio, is my promise,” she said, “I’m going to make it all cost less.”

In a statement ahead of Saturday’s rally, Ramaswamy campaign spokesperson Connie Luck criticized Acton for campaigning with Obama and went all the way back to the earliest days of the Affordable Care Act.

“Obamacare was a broken promise from day one,” she said. “The website crashed, people lost the plans they were told they could keep, premiums skyrocketed, and Ohio’s own Obamacare co-op collapsed and left families scrambling.”

“Ohioans can’t afford a liberal governor who shows up for Obama but never shows up for them,” Luck added.

The ACA reduced the overall U.S. uninsured rate by half, from around 16.3%, or about 49.9 million uninsured people before the ACA was passed, down to around 8.8%, with an estimated 21.8 million adults newly gaining health insurance directly because of the law, according to a 2020 study in Health Affairs.

More recently, the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, which led to nearly 114,000 Ohioans going without health insurance under the ACA.

Sherrod Brown

Obama praised Sherrod Brown’s record of “looking out for folks who are doing an honest day’s work.”

“And by the way, you can tell by how he’s dressed,” Obama teased Ohio’s famously rumpled former senator. “I mean, this is not a guy who enriched himself cozying up to corporations.”

In a white dress shirt under a blue quarter zip sweater, Brown’s appearance didn’t quite match his reputation, but his message was the same as it ever was. Corporate profits are soaring and workers are more productive than ever, he said, but CEOs earn 300 times what the average worker does.

“You work harder than ever, but no matter how hard you work, your pay doesn’t keep up,” Brown said. “Too often you simply can’t get ahead. Families see more money going out the door, not enough money coming in to pay for utilities and healthcare and groceries — everything.”

Instead of lowering costs, Brown said, Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted has cozied up to utility executives and big tech. Brown pointed to the more than $300 million Super PACs funded by Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and others have poured into the race to defeat him.

“They know that John Husted’s their boy,” he said. “They know he will do whatever they want. They know I will stand up to them and make them accountable.”

“The billionaires, the trillionaires, and shady corporations all know John Husted is for sale,” Brown added.

And he took Husted to task for saying Americans who are struggling to make ends meet don’t know how to budget and that the country’s “work ethic is broken.” Brown encouraged him to get out of Washington and visit any public school in Ohio.

“Talk to the teacher who dips into her own pocket and look that teacher in the eye and say your work ethic is broken,” Brown said. “Or talk to the custodian cleaning the hallways long after everyone has gone home and tell them your work ethic is broken. Or go to Dominion Middle School in Columbus, Ohio and talk to a cafeteria worker who serves hundreds of kids a day. Look her in the eye and tell her your work ethic is broken.”

Brown also hammered Husted on two of the most radioactive issues in American politics: the Epstein files and data centers. Husted voted against a Senate motion in 2025 that would have ordered the release of files; legislation directing the Department of Justice to release its files later passed the U.S. Senate by unanimous consent, so there was no roll call vote.

Even Republican leaders have acknowledged data centers are a millstone around Husted’s neck. Husted even introduced legislation. His Ratepayer Protection Act encourages states to come up with plans to ensure data centers pay their own way. Brown dismissed it as “toothless,” and insisted Husted is “the face of data centers.”

“He led the charge to bring 226 data centers to our state, to our community — 226.” Brown said of Husted. “Then he gave these corporations $2.5 billion of our tax dollars. And now we pay thousands of dollars more on our utility bills.”

Following the event, Donovan O’Neil, from the Koch-backed nonprofit Americans for Progress, said Brown is “relying on Ohioans to forget the economic hardship that his shared record with Barack Obama imposed on them.”

Like Ramaswamy’s campaign he pointed to Obamacare — deriding it as the “Unaffordable Care Act” — and he criticized Brown for votes he took during the Biden administration as well.

“He also consistently cast votes for the reckless spending that set off record inflation, and Ohio families are still feeling it every time they fill a grocery cart or pay a medical bill,” O’Neil said. “Now he’s sharing a stage with Obama to prove he would do it all again.”

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