No state has a longer winning streak of picking the presidential winner than Ohio, and it appears 2020 will be competitive again.
President Trump’s campaign is spending money to defend the Buckeye State, an unexpected development that underscores the president’s polling weakness amid the coronavirus pandemic and civil unrest wracking the country.
Trump won Ohio by 8 points in 2016, and Democrats failed to flip any House seats there in 2018, which was an otherwise big year for Democrats nationwide.
Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, however, did win statewide reelection two years ago.
Democrats had all but written off the state heading into the 2020 cycle, believing the rightward drift had taken the former presidential bellwether off the board as a battleground state.
But a Fox News poll released this week found Democratic nominee Joe Biden leading Trump by 2 points in Ohio, one of several recent polls to find a close race there.
It’s part of the latest round of polls showing Trump trailing or running neck and neck with Biden in what was once believed to be safe GOP territory.
The Trump campaign is also spending money in Iowa, which Trump won by 9 points in 2016.
Polls show a tight race in Arizona, Texas and Georgia, while recent surveys of Wisconsin show Biden opening up a healthy lead.
“As of today, when the election and entire campaign is entirely a referendum on the president, it doesn’t look good for him anywhere, including states he won big in 2016 like Ohio,” said a Republican operative who has worked on campaigns in the state.
The last time Ohio voted against the presidential victor was 1960, when it titled toward Richard Nixon instead of John F. Kennedy.
More importantly for Trump, no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio’s electoral votes.
Democrats are eyeing an expanded map with five months to go before Election Day.
The Trump campaign has spent more than $650,000 on advertising in Ohio over the past two weeks, according to data from Advertising Analytics.
Josh Schwerin, a strategist for the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, said it does not intend to spend in Ohio this cycle but added, “That doesn’t mean Democrats can’t win it.”
“It’s an absolute must-win for Trump, and the fact that his campaign is already having to spend there shows that he is very much on defense and losing some of the financial advantage he’s been counting on,” Schwerin said.
The Biden campaign did not respond to questions about whether it intends to compete in Ohio, although it has previously identified the state as one of seven former President Obama carried that it intends to win back from Trump.
Ohio has nine counties that voted for Obama in 2012 and then flipped to Trump in 2016, making it the state with the seventh-most “pivot counties” in the country.
The Trump campaign has enough money to compete everywhere and said it is spending in Ohio only so it won’t be caught off guard, as Hillary Clinton was in 2016, when she dispatched operatives at the last minute to the former “blue wall” states that broke for Trump in shocking fashion on Election Day.
“President Trump will win Ohio, but we will not make Hillary Clinton’s 2016 mistake and take states for granted,” said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh.
Some Democrats are encouraging the Biden campaign to invest in Ohio, saying the narrative that Ohio has moved too far away from Democrats has been overblown.
They note that the Obama-Biden ticket won the state in 2008 and 2012 and that Brown in 2018 triumphed by 7 points over former Rep. James Renacci (R), a multimillionaire who dug deep into his own pockets.
“Ohio is totally within reach,” said Aaron Pickrell, a Democratic strategist in Ohio. “Sherrod won by 7 points, and I think Biden fits that mold of candidate. People look at 2016 and they think that somehow Ohio became a totally red state … but I think the Biden campaign should spend here. We’re surrounded by two other battlegrounds in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and the same messaging applies.”
Most analysts agree, if Trump loses the Buckeye State, he’ll be a one-term president.