This Leading Democrat Senate Candidate Wants Jefferson’s Memorial Gutted

July 3, 2026 Cat2, The Media
Orhan Cam via shutterstock

Sherrod Brown wants back in the Senate after Ohio voters fired him in 2024.

Now leading Jon Husted in the polls, Brown just revealed what he'd do to Jefferson.

He wants the Jefferson Memorial gutted and replaced right before America turns 250.

Brown Reveals His Plan For America's 250th Birthday

Sherrod Brown spent 18 years in the Senate.

Ohio sent him packing in 2024.

Now he's running again, this time for the seat JD Vance left behind when he became vice president.

And with the country gearing up to celebrate 250 years of independence, Brown decided to share his real feelings about one of its most sacred monuments.

During a radio interview, Brown said he wouldn't tear down the Jefferson Memorial outright.

But he wants to gut what it stands for.

"I would put an equally sized, or maybe a larger, statue of Harriet Tubman," Brown said, describing his plan to fill the memorial's rotunda with a monument that overshadows Jefferson himself.

He didn't stop there.

Brown went on to compare Jefferson unfavorably to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who led troops against the United States.

This Isn't A New Idea, It's A Recycled One

Brown isn't even original.

In 2020, Jefferson's own descendant, Lucian K. Truscott IV, wrote an op-ed demanding the exact same swap.

He wanted Jefferson's memorial replaced with a Tubman monument too.

That same summer, mobs across the country tore down statues of Washington, Grant, and Lincoln.

None of those men owned slaves at the time they freed millions of them.

Mobs didn't care.

The pattern is always the same.

Find a Founding Father, strip away 250 years of context, declare him unworthy of the bronze he's stood in for two centuries.

Brown is just doing it with a Senate campaign attached, which makes it worse, not better — he's not protesting on a sidewalk, he's auditioning for a six-year term with the power to fund it.

A Race That's Suddenly Competitive Again

Here's why this matters right now.

Brown isn't some fringe activist shouting into a podcast nobody hears.

He's the Democrat nominee for a United States Senate seat in a state Trump carried by 11 points in 2024.

Recent polling has shown him running ahead of Husted, with some surveys putting his lead in the high single digits.

That should terrify Republicans more than anything Brown says about Jefferson.

When pollsters asked Ohio voters what's driving their vote this year, the cost of living topped the list by a wide margin.

Healthcare, immigration, and jobs trailed well behind.

Statues weren't on the list at all.

Brown didn't get that memo.

While Ohioans worry about grocery bills, Brown is on the radio drawing up blueprints to gut a national memorial.

That gap between what Ohioans care about and what their would-be senator is obsessing over should worry every Husted volunteer knocking doors this summer.

It should also remind Ohio voters exactly who they're being asked to send back to Washington for a fourth decade.

Jefferson Wrote The Words. Brown Wants To Erase The Man Who Wrote Them.

Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" while owning people himself.

That contradiction is real, and it's been taught in American classrooms for generations.

Brown's solution isn't to teach that contradiction.

It's to bury Jefferson under a bigger statue of someone else.

That's not history.

That's a man who needs a Senate seat trying to win a culture war he can't lose in front of an audience that already agrees with him.

Harriet Tubman doesn't need Jefferson's memorial diminished to be honored.

She already has her own monuments in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and the Adirondacks.

Brown knows that.

He wants the optics of erasing a Founding Father more than he wants an honest monument to Tubman, because the optics poll better with the base he needs to turn out in November.

This is the same instinct that toppled statues nationwide in 2020 – the instinct to demand total victory over the past instead of teaching it, dressed up this time in a campaign mailer instead of a mob.

Sherrod Brown spent three decades in Washington building nothing Ohio can point to.

Now he wants to spend his comeback campaign tearing down what's already standing tall.

Ohio already showed Brown the door once, and he spent the time off plotting what he'd erase next.

Voters in November get to decide if Jefferson's memorial survives Sherrod Brown a second time.

Sources:

  • Matt Vespa, "Dem Senate Candidate: Jefferson's Memorial Should Be Ripped Down," Townhall, June 30, 2026.
  • Andrew Stanton, "Sherrod Brown Chances of Ousting GOP's Jon Husted in Ohio Senate Race," Newsweek, June 2026.
  • WCMH-TV NBC4, "Poll finds Sherrod Brown 8 points ahead of Jon Husted in Ohio's U.S. Senate race," NBC4 Columbus, June 2026.
  • Christopher Harress, "Jefferson's Descendant Wants Founder's Memorial Replaced By Monument To Harriet Tubman," International Business Times, 2020.