COLUMBUS, Ohio — Former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown launched a pro-worker organization on Monday to promote the “Dignity of Work,” a creed that he has advanced for years as an officeholder and candidate and that he recently described in a national magazine column as the key to the future of the Democratic Party.

The non-partisan Dignity of Work Institute will be based in the state capital of Columbus, where he and wife Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, moved last week. They previously lived in Cleveland.

The move comes as speculation swirls about Brown's political future and adds a familiar voice to the national conversation among Democrats about how best to respond to their poor showing in the 2024 election, which saw Republicans take control of all three branches of the federal government.

Brown, 72, is weighing a run for Senate in 2026 after losing his bid for a fourth term to Cleveland businessman Bernie Moreno last year. Before that, the Ohio Democrat had spent three decades in Congress and consistently won statewide elections even as the former bellwether state turned reliably Republican in the era of Donald Trump.

The new organization's stated mission is to put American workers back at the center of the national conversation, on issues such as wages, family leave, housing, education and retirement.

Brown recently offered a treatise of sorts in The New Republic magazine for restoring the national Democratic Party and regaining the support of working class voters.

“We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we are,” he wrote. “How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party -- the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class -- no longer matches up with what most voters think.”

The progressive Center for American Progress Action Fund has scheduled Brown as its keynote speaker on Wednesday at an event titled, “Working-Class Voters, the Economy, and the Democratic Party.”