This was not just another politically engaged couple talking about the 2020 race.
“You can’t help but think, ‘I could have done that better,’ ” Brown recalled in an interview.
“This is the first time I really thought, ‘I wish you were up there,’ ” Schultz told her husband. She had watched the debates in June at their home in Cleveland, while Brown, who considered but passed on a 2020 run, was in Washington, where the Senate was in session.
“A number of colleagues came up to me and said that ‘I wish you would have been up there,’ ” Brown said.
He confessed that he was “wistful from time to time” about his choice not to enter the presidential primary, which he had looked at while fresh off his reelection in 2018 in a state President Donald Trump carried. Many people besides senators continue to say they wish he were a candidate as well.
It suggests that despite the enormous field of 24 hopefuls, some Democrats still seek a Goldilocks candidate, someone perhaps like Brown, with a solid progressive record and a proven appeal to the Midwest working class.
Their uneasiness has grown as former Vice President Joe Biden, the candidate Brown most resembles, deflates as the front-runner over scrutiny of his civil rights record. Others running as center-left candidates, like Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana and Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, are stuck in the polling basement.
As other leaders in the race sprint left on ending private health insurance and decriminalizing border crossings, centrist Democrats are deeply anxious the party will pick a nominee unpalatable to the independent voters in battleground states they need to defeat Trump.
“There are unique challenges with the voters in the middle of the country that, frankly, I don’t think the coastal people understand,” said Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, Ohio, a Democrat, who tried to draft Brown into the presidential primary.
He was the only Ohio Democrat to win statewide in the midterms, prevailing by 7 percentage points in a state that was once a presidential battleground but is drifting out of Democrats’ reach. Trump won there by 8 points.
“In Zanesville, Ohio, people who might not like my position on guns or choice or marriage equality or even civil rights will vote for me, some of them, because I fight for them in the workplace,” Brown said.
Despite being a noncandidate, Brown seemed to make a shadow campaign swing this month. He addressed two of his party’s core constituencies — grassroots progressives in Philadelphia and organized labor in Pittsburgh — while also squeezing in a trip to the southwestern border to take on Trump over the most torrid issue of the 2020 race, immigration.
But over the three-day fly-around, for which the senator’s office invited a reporter, Brown gave no indication he was teasing a change of heart and might belatedly enter the race.
A gravelly voiced Clevelander, with a tendril of unruly gray hair grazing his forehead, he said he always believed he had a path to the nomination, but concluded he lacked the ambition to be president.
“We didn’t make the decision not to do it based on can we win,” he said.
The “we” referred to Schultz, 61, with whom Brown, 66, has a close political partnership.
Although there was speculation Brown bailed out of 2020 because he and Biden would have competed for the same voters, both husband and wife denied that was the reason.
“He didn’t keep us out, that’s for sure,” Schultz said, referring to Biden.
“I never thought he’d be the nominee,” Brown added.
In one of her recent columns, Schultz questioned Biden’s nostalgia for working with segregationist Democrats. “If Joe Biden wants to boast about his relationship with a racist, he is not who we need to succeed the racist in the White House,” she wrote.
At the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where 3,000 liberal activists gathered for Netroots Nation on a recent weekend, Brown was the warm-up act for the group he had decided not to join, a forum of 2020 candidates including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand and the former housing secretary Julián Castro.
“Populism is never racist,” Brown told the receptive crowd. “Populism is never anti-Semitic. Populism doesn’t appeal to some by pushing others down.”
Lani Frank, an activist from the Philadelphia suburbs, told Brown in a hallway she wished he were running. Out of his earshot, she wondered if he was having second thoughts. “He had to come to Pennsylvania to be at this for 10 minutes?” she said. “Why would he do that unless he wants to stay involved and engaged?”
Frank’s first choice for the nomination is Warren, the overwhelming favorite of most of the progressive Netroots attendees. The fact that Brown holds an appeal to her and others speaks to the desire for a candidate with credibility in the industrial Midwest, even if he doesn’t tick all the ideological boxes.
Brown, whom Hillary Clinton considered as a vice president, supports building on the Affordable Care Act rather than “Medicare for all.” He was conspicuous in not embracing the Green New Deal floated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
He said that he hoped to influence the race from outside.
“I just didn’t want it enough,” he said of his decision not to run. “In the end you’ve got to really, really, really want it.”
In Ohio, people say Brown was unwilling to “eat the chair,” in the words of former Gov. Dick Celeste, for not having an appetite big enough to consume whatever was necessary.
On the third day of his not-a-campaign trip, Brown gave a stem-winding speech in Pittsburgh at the swearing-in of a new president of the United Steelworkers union. On his lapel was a pin of a canary in a bird cage, used by coal miners in an era when the “worker was on his own” to protect himself, Brown told steelworkers.
Leaning into his message, he said every social benefit Americans enjoy — Medicare, Social Security, minimum wage, civil rights — came out of the labor movement.
Between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Brown and Schultz had flown to El Paso, where on Sunday they visited a 500-bed shelter for migrants run by a charity affiliated with the Catholic Church.
Unlike government-run shelters whose overcrowding and squalor have been in the news, the Casa del Refugiado was clean and airy. “Esperanza,” or hope, was painted on the wall of a large room with Red Cross cots.
The director, Ruben Garcia, told the visitors that the shelter held asylum-seekers released into the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to await hearings in immigration courts, which have a yearslong backlog. The migrants, most from Central America, stay only a few days at the shelter, until relatives from around the country send bus and plane tickets.
As several dozen new arrivals filed in, mostly young mothers with small children, Schultz, who said she was reminded of her grandchildren, grew emotional. “You love your children; can you imagine doing anything to save their lives? Of course you could,” she told a reporter.
Brown said he had been denied access to government detention centers even as a United States senator. “Pretty clearly the attorney general and the president and the president’s Cabinet don’t want the American public to know what they’re doing when they separate children from families,” he said, winding up his visit with a small news conference.
Asked about decriminalizing illegal entry into the country, an issue embraced by some 2020 candidates that exposes Democrats to charges of being for “open borders,” Brown said that he was no expert. “I don’t work on immigration issues every day,” he said. “This is an important part of our country, I wanted to know more about this issue.”
Earlier, he had pitched a squishy baseball to two young boys taking batting practice in the shelter’s nursery. Schultz picked up a 10-month-old baby named Herman in a green onesie. His mother, crayoning in a coloring book, was awaiting a bus ticket to join relatives in Iowa.
“I could just stay here and babysit,” Schultz said happily.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.