CLEVELAND — Connie Schultz stood at her stove this week and stirred a big pot of thick vegetarian chili. On the long brown table set and waiting for lunch was a copy of that day’s New York Times, folded and opened to a page with a column with a headline I couldn’t help but notice, “The Secret to Winning in 2020,” and on the refrigerator and the walls around her were pictures of her four children and her seven grandchildren and of course her husband, too — the only statewide elected Democrat in Ohio, the potential presidential candidate, Senator Sherrod Brown.
Brown, 66, the curly-haired progressive populist who was preaching fair trade over free trade back when Donald Trump was reintroducing himself as a reality television business boss, last month won a third term in the Senate in part by winning back a sufficient slice of those who had voted for Trump two years before. His six-point victory in a state Trump carried by 8 prompted immediate 2020 chatter. Brown himself labeled it “a blueprint for America.” Hailing from this perennially critical swing spot — and this region of the country that decided the last presidential election and almost certainly will decide the next one as well — he has the unusual and proven ability, according to strategists from both parties, to appeal to black voters and urban liberals and workers in fading factory towns. For these reasons, Trump aides say, Brown is on a short list of possible foes the president fears.
“We’ve heard that, too,” Schultz said, ladling chili into bowls.
“And I would say,” she added, “… good — because he should.”
She readied shredded cheese and sour cream and offered cornbread from a cast-iron skillet.
“Not because Sherrod’s a scary guy or a mean guy,” she continued. “Because Sherrod’s onto him. Sherrod is who these voters thought Trump was.”
If there is a commonly held image of how a political spouse should behave — seen and heard but not too much, not exactly muzzled but certainly measured, ever aware of some nebulous, help-or-hurt calculus — Connie Schultz is not it. And only Sherrod Brown — no other person who might run for president—has a her. She’s not just a spouse who’s a journalist. She’s a spouse who’s a journalist who’s a liberal feminist columnist who’s won a Pulitzer Prize and teaches journalism at her alma mater at Kent State University. She’s a spouse who’s a journalist who’s a liberal feminist columnist who’s won a Pulitzer Prize and who is a Christian who actually practices her faith. She’s a spouse who’s a journalist who’s a liberal feminist columnist who’s won a Pulitzer Prize who is a Christian and who also packs a blue-collar backstory as the Ashtabula-born-and-bred-daughter of a maintenance mechanic and a nurse’s aide. She has working-class cred, a powerful platform and opinions she is utterly unafraid to express. And she’s all these things at a moment when the current president is unceasing with his anti-press invective.
“I am the woman he hates,” Schultz said, getting water from the fridge.
She stopped and smiled.
“Can I tell you just how proud I am to be that woman?” she said. “I never measure myself against what Donald Trump would think of me. But if I am exactly what he hates, and I think I am, it makes me feel all the more necessary.”
“My generation of women was raised to be making other people comfortable” — Connie Schultz
In the last three and a half years, since Trump descended on his escalator and announced he was running, her criticism of him has been withering and unremitting. On Twitter (where she has more than 54,000 followers), on Facebook (183,000 and counting), and in her columns, she has accused him of “spewing racism and xenophobia to cheering crowds of white people.” She has called him “the most dangerous man running for president in our lifetimes.” She has ripped him as “a chronic and unapologetic liar.” She has called his anti-democratic media-denigrating “venom” “toxic” and “contagious.” Earlier this month, when Trump said the closing of a GM plant in eastern Ohio “doesn’t really matter,” Schultz seethed. “Come to Lordstown and say that,” she tweeted at the president. “Tell all those Ohio families now facing potential ruin that what they’re going through ‘doesn’t really matter.’”
If Brown runs, and he and Schultz are obsessively weighing the idea — “It’s all we talk about right now,” she told me — she is not going to stop. “If he runs, I’m in,” she said. And if they’re in, she’s going to keep speaking her truth about Trump.
“I don’t have any expectation, nor does my husband, that if he were to run for president, I would stop doing that,” she said.
Connie Schultz is not going to shut up.
“No,” she said.
“No. No. No. Have I been emphatic enough? No.”
“She wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t want her to,” Brown told me when he called from Washington.
“You won’t see a candidate’s spouse like her — we never have, and you won’t see for a long time — that’s as accomplished as she is, that is as outspoken as she is, that has a reach like she does,” he said. “You will not see that in any other candidate team, if you will.”
Back in 2005, when Brown first decided to run for the Senate, he ultimately made the decision — they made the decision — partly because they worried they were about to get too comfortable. He had a safe seat in the House. She had just won the Pulitzer. They had been married for going on a year and a half and were by all accounts giggle-level happy that they had found each other after their divorces and had another chance at marriage in middle age. But comfort wasn’t the goal. Wasn’t then — sure isn’t now.
“My generation of women was raised to be making other people comfortable,” said Schultz, 61. “If you’re in my house, we’re going to eat. What can I bring you? If the conversation got, you know, ugly in any way — if Uncle Frank starts making a racist comment — you bring out the carrot cake.” This, she suggested, is not the time for carrot cake. “A lot of us have broken with that. But not enough. Not enough women.”
Approaching 30 years, though, after another outspoken politician’s spouse, the eminently accomplished-in-her-own-right Hillary Clinton, toggled unevenly between asserting her independence and standing by her man, a political wife’s role remains undeniably fraught. Schultz frames it this way: To pundit, you’re either a problem or a prop. Words like “surrogate,” “secret weapon” and “asset” have become hoary clichés. She doesn’t want to be described as any of those things. And her husband doesn’t want her described as any of those things, either. “We’re partners,” she told me — making her a fully unleashed half of a unique and formidable one-two punch heading into the already ratcheting-up 2020 cycle, a spouse with not only a license but a charge to amplify the putative Brown campaign’s animating themes. On her terms. In her voice.
Ohio Democratic Senator-elect Sherrod Brown (L) gives his victory speech with his wife Connie Schultz (R) and his family, friends and staff at the Public Auditorium in the Convention Center on November 7, 2006 in Cleveland, Ohio | Jamie Rose/Getty Images
There’s no real precedent for this. No playbook. But the way Schultz sees it, it’s more than simply overdue. Because of Trump, and given the stakes, it is a must.
“The women who are used to being ignored, it’s my generation of women,” she said, “and they need to speak out more.”
We finished our bowls of chili.
“You start drawing lines,” Schultz said. “Because we’re in that place now — that place and time.”
* * *
Her path to this point has not been a straight line. Schultz was a freelance writer until she was 36. She was on the staff at Cleveland’s Plain Dealer as a features writer when she was a single mother. When she became a columnist for the newspaper, in 2002, first she called her kids and then she called her father. “Finally,” Chuck Schultz joked. “You’re going to get paid for what you’ve been throwing around for free …” But he was proud, and she could hear it. He went to the Crow’s Nest, his regular bar where he drank his Stroh’s and his Schlitz, and he told all his pals. “Imagine that,” he often said. “Getting a paycheck to give everyone a piece of her mind.” Her first column was about the lunch pail he took to the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company for 36 years — as a member of the Utilities Workers of America, Local 270.
“When people want to accuse me of having an agenda,” she told me, “I say, ‘How could I not have an agenda?’ I’m a working-class kid who grew up with union wages and benefits, which saved my life when I had such bad asthma that they rushed me by ambulance to the Cleveland Clinic. I am a woman writing a column in op-ed pages around the country, and not the women’s section, because of the feminist movement. And I went to a state university with grants and scholarships and graduated with, like, $2,500 in debt. How could I not be a liberal? How could I not be a feminist? How could I not be writing about the people who work so hard to make this country work? What kind of person would I be if I turned my back on all that?”
U.S. President Donald Trump | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
These thoughts she had, and the words she wrote, and the way she wrote them — they’re literally why she started dating Brown.
In late 2002, he had been a congressman for nearly a decade. He sent her an email.
Ms. Schultz,
Where did The Plain Dealer find you? You are a breath of fresh air; your writing reminds me of that of Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite living writers.
Best wishes,
Sherrod Brown
Lorain, Ohio
They met for a date on January 1, 2003, at a chain restaurant called Cooker. She had to be pep-talked into getting out of her car in a last-minute phone call with a friend. He wore a Lorain County Community College sweatshirt even though he went to Yale. He proposed 10 months and 26 days later. “He’s us, in a tie,” Schultz’s father had decided.
Connie Schultz, wife of Ohio Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, watches her husband campaign at the Ford Engine Plant November 6, 2006 in Brook Park, Ohio | Jamie Rose/Getty Images
The tension, though, of what Schultz still could say, and where, and how, flared soon after Brown started running for the Senate. “Their marriage presents us with an ongoing set of challenges,” another columnist at her newspaper wrote. “By any definition, she’s a liberal. Her husband is one of the House’s most liberal Democrats and fights for the same kinds of issues Connie frequently takes on in her column. Some critics are bothered by that and believe either that Connie promoting Sherrod Brown’s agenda or Sherrod is influencing hers …”
A few months later, she took a campaign-long leave of absence. “I want to write about what’s on my mind, but that is becoming increasingly difficult,” she admitted in her bye-for-now column. She pulled out of the parking garage at the office and affixed a bumper sticker to the back of her gray Pontiac Vibe: “Sherrod Brown for U.S. Senate.” But she wrote in her journal, “WHAT IS TO BECOME OF ME?” Later, she told a reporter from the Washington Post, “I’m having to rein myself in. I’m less myself.”
The night Brown won, Hillary Clinton called. “Tell Connie not to let anyone tell her she can’t have her career,” she told Brown, who relayed the message to his wife, according to her memoir. Schultz went back to writing her column for the Plain Dealer, but it was never the same. That tension never totally subsided. In 2011, she resigned. On her way out, she boxed up the placard that had been on her desk for years: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”
But writing for a national audience was different than writing for the largest paper in the state her husband represented. She cultivated her Creators Syndicate following. She did it, too, on social media. She started working on a novel set to be published by Random House — about a blue-collar family living on the shores of Lake Erie. She got her voice back. It carried as always.
And a few weeks before the election in 2016, in a TEDx Talk at Cleveland State, Schultz recounted a moment she shared with her mother right before her death. She was driving her to the doctor’s office. She was emotionally wrought. “I said, ‘Ma, you know what? I’m so sorry. I’m so full of opinions all the time. I’m constantly expressing ‘em. Everybody’s getting upset with me,’” Schultz said. “And she grabbed my hand, and she said, ‘Honey, you’re who I wanted to be.’”
“Anybody who attempts to go after our family, it is going to be double-barrel. I mean, you don’t go after children, you don’t go after our kids” — Connie Schultz
In the run-up to November 8, 2016, when it looked like Clinton was going to be the first woman to be elected president, Schultz actually began to mull pulling back a bit.
“I don’t think I’ve acknowledged this publicly — Sherrod knew it, sort of, but he was trying to talk me out of it — but I thought Hillary was going to win, and I was probably going to at least suspend my column for a while, so I could finish my book, and maybe just stop doing the column,” she told me. She would keep teaching. She could do some freelance pieces. “It wasn’t a definite, but it was where my head was shifting, which was a significant shift for me,” she said.
“Then Trump won.”
Everything was different.
And now, for Schultz, the prospect of a race for the right to take him down couldn’t be more personal. Because to become president, Trump conned men like her father. Sitting at her table, she told me a story about Chuck Schultz. In 1974, the year before she, the oldest of four, went to college, the first in her family to do so, her parents decided her mother needed to get a job. They had just bought a house after years of renting. There were bills. There were three more kids. They were going to go to college, too. His union benefits and his union salary were not enough. “That was a failure, he felt, on his part,” she said. “He never got over it.”
Since then, of course, it’s only gotten harder to be someone like Chuck Schultz, somewhere like Ashtabula, a town whose name means “always enough fish to be shared” and is bleeding population due to a loss of industrial jobs. He died in 2006, and his daughter doesn’t think he would have voted for Trump, but he was a part of the portion of the electorate that did so in droves. “I am not going to mock Trump voters,” she told me. “Because so many of them — they are desperate right now. For many reasons that are not their fault. Companies leaving. Companies abandoning them. And moving out of the country, right? Bottom line: I’m not going to mock them because I’m related to some of them.”
Ohio Democratic candidate for United States Senate Sherrod Brown (C), his wife Connie Schultz (L) and his daughter, Liz Brown (R), watch the elections results from their suite in the Crowne Plaza Hotel on November 7, 2006 in Cleveland, Ohio | Jamie Rose/Getty Images
She called it “an issue of betrayal.”
“I come from the people he’s exploited and misled and lied to,” she said of Trump. “He made them think he cared about them. They were pawns on a board for him. But they believed him. And I understand. … I’ve known men like my dad all of my life. I know these voters, a lot of them.” And they have gone from “important” and “mighty” and “strong” … to “forgotten.”
“And he made them think that he saw them,” she said. “And he was looking right past them. He just thought, ‘I need you, you, you, you’ — he doesn’t want to shake their hands, he doesn’t want to go out and mingle with them, he’s not inviting them to the White House. … They wore their bodies out so we didn’t have to. They wore their bodies out. My dad had heart bypass surgery at age 48 — 48. And he already felt like an old man. What does Donald Trump know about that?”
* * *
Here in their house with clusters of stacks of books (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership: In Turbulent Times, Michelle Obama’s Becoming …), a framed letter from Barack Obama (“A love like yours is something to treasure, and your extraordinary support for one another …”) and a First Amendment throw pillow on a chair by where she writes (“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”), Schultz woke up around 5 this past Monday morning from fitful sleep.
“Are you awake?” she whispered to her husband.
“This will be a presidential race like no other” — Connie Schultz
He was. This happens a lot these days.
In the dark, she called up on her Kindle the memoir she wrote in the aftermath of his initial Senate election. Scanning the beginning of … And His Lovely Wife, she reminded him about some of the early missteps and difficulties during that campaign, a nod to the reality that it was hard but that it worked out in the end. And then she got to the part about the role the show “West Wing” had played in their decision to run. She read it out loud.
I pulled out Season Two, slid the first disc into the DVD player, and asked Sherrod to watch the first two episodes with me.
The first scene opens on mayhem as several in the presidential party are shot. It’s dramatic, but it’s not why I wanted Sherrod to watch. The first two episodes are full of flashbacks that explain how Jed Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, finally decides to work up the nerve to run for president. And he decides to run for all the right reasons, none of which have to do with his comfort level or whether he can win.
It takes him a while to get there, and at one point his wife, played by Stockard Channing, lectures a campaign staffer that the reason her husband is so irritable with everyone is because he’s scared.
“He’s not ready yet,” she tells him. “He’ll get there, but he’s not ready yet.”
It’s where he is again, Schultz said now.
“He’s getting there.”
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) (L) participates in a reenacted swearing-in with his wife Connie Schultz and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in the Old Senate Chamber at the U.S. Capitol January 3, 2013 in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
He’s called people in early states. He’s met with officeholders and friends. He’s had conference calls with staff. “The patriotic thing to do,” Brown said from Washington, “is to consider running for president — because I may be the candidate that people rally around because I know how to win a state in the heartland. And my message is a message that’s national but is especially effective in the heartland — my message of dignity of work.”
Consultants concur.
“Republicans do worry about a Democratic nominee with white, working-class voter appeal,” GOP strategist Alex Conant told me. “Trump needs those voters to win again in the upper Midwest.” Conant mentioned Joe Biden, but Brown “fits that mold, too,” he said.
“He should be a candidate they fear,” added Bob Shrum, the veteran Democratic hand and a longtime advocate of unabashed economic populism as a political strategy. And Schultz, he said, is part of the reason. “She would be a tremendous asset, I think. If she persists, if I may borrow a word, I think that would be a positive, especially against Trump — who will not be able to resist saying something that will really anger women.”
“This will be a presidential race like no other,” Schultz tweeted last month, and she has no illusions about the coarseness of what is to come. These next two years are going to be noxious. “I don’t think there’s anything they won’t stoop to,” she said. “So what does that mean? What is fair to ask of your family?”
Schultz and Brown both have been divorced. They each brought children to their marriage. They have young Latino grandchildren. Maybe members of their family will be subject to harassment from supporters of Trump and maybe they won’t. She can’t help but contemplate the worst.
“I don’t know how they look at Donald Trump — I guess they figure, well, he’s straight, he’s not gay, so that’s not a problem. He’s fooling around like crazy, he hates women, but he’s not gay. I don’t know how they justify it” — Connie Schultz
“I just want to be clear on this,” Schultz said. “Anybody who attempts to go after our family, it is going to be double-barrel. I mean, you don’t go after children, you don’t go after our kids. There’s no such thing as the ‘acceptable’ family — especially after we’ve put up with the Trump family. Nobody’s going to tell us what it means to be our family. I’m sorry — I just feel so strongly about that.”
The Apple Watch on her wrist ding-dinged with an alert. Her heart was racing. She looked down at the screen. More than 120 beats per minute.
They worry about more than personal attacks. They worry about the loss of personal space as well.
When Schultz read Becoming, for instance — she wrote a column about it (“This is the Michelle we were waiting for, the one who used to keep her opinion to herself …”), and she reviewed it for the Post — she couldn’t help but linger on some of the smaller details about what it means to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “One of the things Michelle talks about,” Schultz told me, “is how wonderful it is now to have her windows open” — a no-go at the White House — “and how her dogs are getting used to hearing neighborhood dogs bark because they never heard another dog bark.”
Recently here in Ohio, Schultz and Brown went to the movies, where they saw “Green Book” — a film about a celebrated black pianist who was driven through the Deep South in the early ‘60s by a white man with whom he forges an unlikely bond. They talked to people at the theater afterward. They walked to their car. “I said, ‘You know, all this is over if you run. And if you’re elected, it’s over for eight years,’” she said. “And he said, ‘Honey, if I win, it’s over for the rest of our lives.’ And we just kind of stopped and stood there for a minute.”
Her ringtone on her phone is set to the beginning bars of that familiar song by Queen.
“Under Pressure.”
Nonetheless, she returned to the concern they had had before that first Senate campaign — about getting too comfortable. “Now, we’re older, right?” she said. “A lot of people our age are thinking about that, but that’s not how we’re built, obviously. We’re not doing that. But it’s something we’re thinking about more and more: Have we become too comfortable? I mean, he just won re-election to a six-year term, I’ve got my novel coming out — we’re in a good place. We’re worried if we don’t run, we’ve surrendered to that. Because if the argument is, this is going to be really hard …” For her, that’s not a good enough argument. Not now. Not with Trump as the president.
Ohio Democratic Senator-elect Sherrod Brown (L) gives his victory speech as his wife Connie Schultz (R) watches at the Public Auditorium in the Convention Center on November 7, 2006 in Cleveland, Ohio | Jamie Rose/Getty Images
As a journalist, she’s alarmed. “I worry about my fellow journalists,” she said. “I worry that they’re going to die.”
As a Christian, she’s appalled. “I don’t know how they look at Donald Trump — I guess they figure, well, he’s straight, he’s not gay, so that’s not a problem. He’s fooling around like crazy, he hates women, but he’s not gay. I don’t know how they justify it.”
As a mother, she’s repulsed. “This is the guy we warned our daughters not to date. Our straight daughters. Stay away from that guy.”
As a citizen, she’s dismayed. “Any of us who came from any history of domestic violence — we know the signs of that. We get fearful. You’re edgy. Now the entire country knows what it’s like to go through abuse.”
I asked her if she wanted Brown to run. “I don’t know,” she said. She wasn’t trying to be evasive or coy, she said, and I believed her.
“I know this,” she said. “If he survives the primary, he will beat Trump. And that’s certainly what fuels my thinking on this right now — but I don’t know yet.”
Connie Schultz speaks to reporters on election night in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio on November 7, 2006 | Jamie Rose/Getty Images
The decision, when they make it, will be a joint one.
“If I wanted him to run and started saying, ‘You need to do this,’ I understand that would get him there faster,” she said. “I don’t mean he would do what I tell him to do. I just mean that that part of the equation would be resolved.”
And if the decision ends up as a yes, they are both quite certain about what their roles will be.
“I’m his partner,” she said. “We are always partners. He wouldn’t have been elected to the Senate without me. He wouldn’t have been able to run without me. And I would not have won the Pulitzer without him. Because we are each other’s strength.”
Brown sounds eager to have her with him and for him on the biggest stages.
“She really can talk to anyone, particularly to labor audiences and women’s groups and African-American groups,” Brown said. “If she were campaigning for me in Iowa or New Hampshire, she would talk less about what I stand for, and she would talk more about the country and why this is important. She would use her words, and she would be captivating with people. I think when they look at her it’s not … well, what does her husband stand for? It’s … we’re glad to see this candidate who is married to a woman like this and that makes us trust him more. And I think that’s what you’ll see. But she’s always going to be outspoken. And she is most effective when she says what she thinks.”
Problem or prop? Asset or liability?
“I’m sure some who care about him” — about her husband — “would probably like me to be less outspoken or not to have this career,” Schultz allowed. “But they never say it to me — not anymore. What would you like me to do with my life if I’m not going to be a columnist anymore? Would you like to also tell me what I’m going to be then? And they get uncomfortable pretty fast. And I’m fine with that. See? I’m fine with making everybody uncomfortable, if you’re going to tell me what I should be.”
That old standby conciliatory carrot cake?
“The carrot cake is staying in the fridge.”
Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for POLITICO.