Not so long ago, Ohio seemed like a lost cause to Democrats, after Donald J. Trump won a convincing victory there and humiliated the party that had brought the state twice under Barack Obama.
Now, unexpectedly, Ohio is shaping up to be a tantalizing opportunity for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Two prominent state polls last month showed the presidential race in a statistical tie. Turnout in Ohio’s primary election in April was higher for Democrats than for Republicans for the first time in a dozen years, evidence of enthusiasm at the Democratic base. And the Trump campaign recently set aside $ 18.4 million in fall television commercials in Ohio, more than in any state other than Florida, a sign that Trump is on the defensive in a state that until recently seemed blocked for Republicans.
With Democratic leaders urging Biden, the alleged nominee, to expand his ambitions to states previously considered out of reach, Ohio offers Democrats the chance to take advantage of the suburban gains they have made in the Trump era, while restoring parts of the old Obama coalition.
“The definition that Trump is in trouble is that he is forced to spend $ 18 million on television in Ohio and is mired in a battle for his life here,” said David Pepper, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party.
Mr. Biden’s argument to Democrats has always been that he can energize black voters and reverse the defections of the white working class. If he kept that promise and brought Ohio, he would restore the national political map. Not only would Ohio become a presidential benchmark again, but the long-term trend for northern white voters leaving Democrats, at least for the time being, would stop under a highly divisive acting president.
In a state where decades of de-industrialization have created long-term anxiety about jobs, the reality behind Trump’s broken promises to restore steel, coal and other industrial sectors through trade wars is also being tested, a dynamic that could extend to other midwestern states.
“People were looking for someone other than an establishment,” said Tina Comstock, 56, a court clerk in the Cleveland suburbs, explaining Trump’s victory four years ago. “They thought that as a wealthy businessman in quotes, he could do great things for Ohio.”
Comstock, who is married to a factory worker who, like her, is supporting Biden, said the pandemic had exposed the vacuum in Trump’s economy. “If the economy is so good under it, why is everyone so screwed up after just a couple of months of this from Covid?” she asked. “People did not have enough money in their savings accounts.”
However, despite the optimism of the Democrats, the Buckeye State could be an illusion in the mists. Not only did Trump win easily in 2016, by eight percentage points, but Democrats also fell short in the 2018 Ohio midterm elections, compared to his gains in the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Corry Bliss, a prominent Republican strategist who has worked in Ohio, said that regardless of the problems Trump appears to be having now, the election will depend on how voters feel about jobs and the economy in October. The president, he said, still has the advantage. “At the end of the day, President Trump will win Ohio,” he said. “It will be closer than it was in 2016. The question is, how does that translate in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?”
Trump earned those states by less than one percentage point each in 2016.
Bob Paduchik, Trump’s top adviser to Ohio, said the campaign was spending generously there because it had a lot of money to distribute, even in states like Minnesota and New Mexico that are leaning toward blue. “One way to look at it is: ‘They are spending money in Ohio, they are in trouble,'” he said. “When you have the kind of resources we have, you can play everywhere.”
It is also unclear how aggressively Biden’s campaign aims to compete in Ohio. He has not booked any television commercials there, according to Advertising Analytics. Biden also did not name an Ohio director of state, frustrating local Democratic officials. The Ohio Democratic Party is so financially strained that it sought more than $ 333,000 from the federal coronavirus relief package to help meet its payroll.
Mr. Biden’s advisers say they are currently focusing on reaching 270 electoral votes, the minimum necessary to become president, and are directing resources to the Northern battlefields as well as opportunities in the Sun Belt. Tuesday The campaign announced a television ad focused on the rise in coronavirus cases that will run in Arizona, Florida and, for the first time, in Texas.
Ohio’s early success in flattening the virus infection curve has been reversed, with a further increase in hospitalized patients. The state “is sliding down a very dangerous path,” Republican Governor Mike DeWine warned Wednesday. While the governor enjoys strong bipartisan support for his response to the outbreak, only four in 10 Ohio voters approved of Trump’s handling of the virus, according to a Quinnipiac University poll last month.
In the pre-Trump era, when Ohio was a perennial rocking state, Democrats’ formula for state victory was to get black voters in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati to trust blue-collar voters in medium-sized industrial cities. Republican victories ran through the suburbs.
Trump reversed the formulas on both sides. Republicans now win large groups of white-collar voters, as they fight to limit the defections of suburbanites, especially women.
In the 2018 midterms, Democrats overturned six suburban districts in the Statehouse that had been drawn to favor Republicans.
The Trump campaign seeks to dabble in suburbs, particularly women, with a television ad aimed at raising fears about calls by racial justice protesters to “strip the police.”
The ad, which aired more than 1,000 times this month in Ohio, portrays police as unable to respond to rapes and home invasions and warns: “You will not be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
But compliance with law and order may not move many suburban voters toward Trump; Recent polls suggest there is a broad understanding that calls to remove the police often mean changing the way they operate, not getting rid of departments entirely.
“I don’t think Trump is a credible messenger,” said Elizabeth Brown, a Democrat at the Columbus City Hall. “Voters who may be focused on law and order in our suburbs know how to know when someone is lying. If you are not a trustworthy messenger, even though you are bragging in fear, I don’t think you can fool the voters. ”
Fred Holbein, 63, who is retired from the Navy, is a Trump supporter who supports some of the president’s racially divisive comments, such as his criticism of NASCAR’s ban on the Confederate flag. “I’m not a NASCAR fan anymore,” he said.
“I think Joe Biden had a 50-year chance to do something and most recently he was eight years old when he was a second away from the president and did nothing,” added Holbein, who lives outside of Columbus. “I have always argued that government must be run as a business, and Donald Trump is trying to do that.”
In the end, Trump’s chances in the state are likely to come down to if voters again embrace his anti-China, pro-employment message from four years ago, ignoring not only today’s record unemployment due to the coronavirus outbreak, but also the unfulfilled promises of the president even before the virus.
In Trump’s first three years before the pandemic, 14,000 new manufacturing jobs were created in Ohio. The earnings represent a leveling off of growth in the Obama administration’s last three years, when Ohio manufacturing jobs expanded by 20,000.
The President’s tariffs on imported steel did not produce a promised boom in American steelmaking in places like Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, and Trump’s Twitter threats to automakers did not stop General Motors from closing a large factory. near Youngstown, at a cost of 4,400 jobs.
In this week’s national and battlefield state polls, most voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy, a change in the issue that had been his greatest strength.
Paduchik, an Akron native who led the Trump campaign in Ohio in 2016, said Ohio residents would forgive the deficits between the president’s promises and what he has been able to deliver on. “Voters don’t expect it to change overnight,” he said. “But here is a guy who said he would fight for them and he has, and it’s more than enough to give him another four years.”
Ohio’s working-class white voters, who according to 2016 exit polls were 56 percent of the electorate, don’t appear to be abandoning Trump. The state’s Quinnipiac University poll last month showed the president with a 21-point lead over Mr. Biden among white voters without a four-year college degree. The margin was only slightly smaller than Trump’s 24-point lead with the same voters in a Quinnipiac poll in Ohio on the eve of the 2016 election.
“They still think he walks on water,” said David Betras, a former Democratic chairman of Mahoning County, in the blue collar epicenter of northeast Ohio. “You try to explain how their policies have hurt the worker, they say it is fake news.”
His advice to Democrats: Add four or five points to Trump’s voting support.
