“Can this thing just end — please? My God, what a nightmare.”
The words of Matt Borges, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. He admitted after the second presidential debate that he’s still not sure if he’ll vote for his nominee Donald Trump.
“If we’re going to advance the party forward, we need a forward-thinking vision,” Borges told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “And a lot of this ugliness and divisiveness, from the worst presidential campaign that I’ve ever seen, that’s not going to help us grow the party.”
Borges says he would never vote for Hillary Clinton, but his wife has prohibited a Trump sign from being placed in their front yard, and has made it clear she’s not voting for the billionaire.
Let me repeat: That’s the story in the home of the chairman of Ohio Republican Party. You can only imagine that same conversation is happening in Republican homes all across America.
Ohio is a must-win state for Donald Trump. No Republican nominee in the history of our nation has ever won the White House without first winning Ohio’s electoral votes. If Trump can’t carry Ohio, he will never be president.
Trump had an edge in all the major polling in the Buckeye State for months. The general consensus was that white working class voters in traditionally Democratic areas had abandoned Hillary Clinton leaving the old Obama coalition short of the votes needed to carry the state.
President Obama helps spell “OHIO” during a Columbus campaign stop in 2012. He won the state with 52% of the vote.
In order to lock Ohio away, Trump needs to outperform Mitt Romney among women. Romney lost Ohio in 2012 by four points, 52 percent to 48 percent, but among women the gap was much larger — 11 points — 55 percent to 44 percent. The Obama campaign said after the election that college educated women in Ohio’s suburbs were critical.
The Trump campaign was convinced it was making progress, based on the size of its rallies, until last Friday when a tape surfaced of Trump making lewd and vulgar comments about women.
In Ohio, perhaps more than any other battleground, you could hear the momentum quickly begin to shift.
Almost immediately Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rob Portman condemned Trump’s comments and announced they were not voting for him. Kasich had skipped the GOP convention in Cleveland, and Portman rescinded his previous endorsement.
Then the conservative editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch, for the first time in 100 years, endorsed the Democratic nominee, saying Trump “has proved himself a liar of epic proportion, he is a bigot, a braggart and an admirer of foreign thugs.”
The Cincinnati Enquirer, in the southwest corner of Ohio where Republicans must win big to carry the state, had previously endorsed Clinton calling Trump “a clear and present danger to our country.”
By the time Clinton campaigned in Columbus on Monday, with a crowd estimated over 18,000 at The Ohio State University, there was a sense that millennials, African Americans and women are more energized about the Clinton candidacy.
The ground war in critical Ohio has shifted so quickly that Dr. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and noted expert on the electoral college, has moved the state from “leans Republican” to “leans Democrat.”
“Polling in the state is showing that Donald Trump’s lead from a few weeks ago has evaporated, and the most recent surveys actually have had Clinton ahead,” said Sabato. “We’ve also caught wind of some unreleased polling that mirrors these results. If Clinton has a national lead of around four or five points, there’s good reason to think that Ohio will end up voting for her, even if it has a redder tint than usual.”
The Clinton campaign, which had considered diverting its Ohio resources to Florida and North Carolina, has now decided to redouble its efforts in the Buckeye State.
“If Clinton wins Ohio, Trump has no path to victory,” said Sabato. “So we now have Trump as the underdog in Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio, three electoral vote-rich states that he absolutely needs to have any chance to win.”
If Trump can’t convince the chairman of the Ohio GOP to vote for him, the Buckeye State could very well make him a dreaded “loser” on election day.
Pick up a copy of Jim’s book Front Row Seat at the Circus to learn more about why Ohio is such a critical battleground state in presidential elections.