08/14/2023

Don’t Look Now, But Ohio Might Be a Swing State Again

Ohioans' response to Issue 1 may have put the state back in play

In early 2019, one of the Democrats' white-shoe super PACs huddled with its deep-pocketed donors to talk strategy and dropped something of a bombshell. Priorities USA’s leaders had prepared a $100 million spending plan for must-win presidential states that included Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida. They were also looking to spend an undetermined sum in states on the cusp like Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and New Hampshire. The path to 270 electoral votes and the White House would go through those states, the strategists argued.

Ohio did not make the cut, a major shift from four years earlier. In fact, Ohio was ranked between Texas and Iowa in terms of competitiveness in 2020. In other words: not terribly.

The thinking around Washington on Ohio as an out-of-reach luxury for Democrats hasn't changed. The only Democratic candidate for statewide Ohio office to win since 2012 is Sen. Sherrod Brown. The state party seems to churn in lurches. Thomas Suddes, the state’s leading political columnist, rightly dubbed Ohio Democrats “endangered species” in his post-mortem of 2022. The state twice went for Trump by 8 points. Latent sexism played a big role in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loss there, and it certainly didn't help Democrats' 2022 nominee for Governor, Nan Whaley, in her campaign that lost 85 of Ohio's 88 counties. Trumpian politics of grievance, grudge and victimhood made him a more appealing choice to more Ohioans than "Middle Class Joe" Biden, even if Biden did manage to become the first Democrat to get to the White House without Ohio since John F. Kennedy (No Republican in the two-party era has ever done so.)

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.