CLEVELAND — At a morning breakfast celebrating the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in Cleveland, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown was approached by someone he said he didn't know.
"An older woman," Brown said. "she said to me 'oh I'm one of your contributors Senator.'"
That Brown didn't recognize her is forgivable in that he had around 40,000 individual contributors in the final quarter of last year's campaign alone.
"My average contribution for my 2018 race was $43, that's because I talk directly to workers and to middle income people."
It's something the Wall Street Journal pointed out will be used to gauge fundraising success among Democratic presidential hopefuls in 2020 and may even be a metric used in determining qualifications for debates.
The Journal pointing out that Brown in his recent bid for reelection was on a par with Bernie Sanders and trailing only Elizabeth Warren when it came small money donations under $200 to his campaign.
"There are thousands of them, tens of thousands of them and I will continue to speak to them and for them and try to see this job through the eyes of workers," said Brown who next week will launch his Dignity of Work tour in Cleveland before moving on to Iowa and the early primary states of New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. It's a tour he'll use to decide whether he will enter the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Small donors are key because they represent a level of enthusiasm among the base, something that was lacking for Democrats in 2016. Brown believes the message he's used to appeal to them in Ohio will work beyond the state's borders.
"The dignity of work is about a physical therapist in Concord, New Hampshire and a construction worker in Las Vegas and someone working in a diner in Charleston, South Carolina and someone in Cedar Rapids that's working in IT," said Brown. "So it really speaks to the broad numbers of people in this country."
"We should honor and respect work more than this government does and instead we have a president who has betrayed workers instead of fighting for them."
Brown has reportedly hired organizers with ties to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to help with putting together his stops next few weeks in New Hampshire and Iowa. While Brown waits until after the tour to decide whether to run other Democrats like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris have already thrown their hats in the ring.
When asked Monday if he thought that would set him behind when it came to the hiring of key campaign personnel in those early voting states he said he did not.
"Connie and I are not going to let anybody else's schedule dictate what we do," he said. "I mean more power to them. "
