By EVAN SIEGEL

One of the Democratic parties’ biggest names in the U.S. Senate announced that he will not be running for president this week, despite overtures from all wings of the party. The senator from Ohio had formed an exploratory committee and had been pondering a run for months, as far back as immediately after the 2018 midterms.

Brown won his reelection bid in what has become a Republican-leaning state in recent years. Brown was the only Democrat to win a statewide election in the state after Donald Trump comfortably carried the state by nearly 10 percentage points in the 2016 election. In the governor’s race in the 2018 midterms, Mike DeWine won by a surprisingly big margin after a contentious few weeks of debates.

Brown won reelection with 53 percent of the vote in 2018, and immediately began considering a presidential run. The Democratic field already got a little bit more crowded last week, after conservative democrat John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, joined the race.

The state of Ohio has experienced a dramatic economic downfall in recent years. Columbus and Cleveland still remain comfortably employed and populated, whereas Cincinnati, Toledo, and Dayton have all declined in recent years. Brown has vowed to attempt to turn this around in the senate.