As Ohio goes, so goes the nation. If that old political adage bears out this year, it would be a hell of a problem for the Republican Party. Recent polling shows the state’s Senate and gubernatorial races locked in a dead heat—a shocking development for this reddening state.

The Buckeye State, once a bellwether, has been drifting rapidly toward Republicans. Between 2002 and 2012, the state saw 10 total elections for president, Senate, or governor. Democrats won exactly half of them.

However, in the 10 elections since, Democrats won just once. It came during 2018’s blue wave.

Ohio has become reliably red -- will 2026 change that?

DBut now that red drift may be drifting back.

Democrat Sherrod Brown leads Republican Sen. Jon Husted by three percentage points in an average of the four polls fielded since the state’s May 5 primaries. That said, those polls show a wide range of results, with one from The New York Times/Siena University showing Husted up three points, while another, commissioned by Fox News, shows Brown up by a gobsmacking eight points.

A populist progressive, Brown is Democrats’ dream candidate, having thrice won a Senate seat in the state. While he came up short in his 2024 reelection bid, his performance remains impressive. Losing by less than four points, he fared far better than Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who lost by over 11 points.

Husted, who was appointed to fill the remainder of Vice President JD Vance’s term, is a rather anonymous rank-and-file Republican. Twelve percent of Ohio’s likely voters hadn’t heard of him, compared with just three percent who hadn’t heard of Brown, per a recent poll conducted for AARP. This relative obscurity gives Brown the upside of having more room to define Husted for voters ahead of November.

The Cook Political Report rates the race as a toss-up. And now, as of Friday, Cook has shifted its rating of the state’s governor’s race toward Democrats, considering it too a toss-up.

In the gubernatorial race, Democrat Amy Acton leads Republican Vivek Ramaswamy by two points in an average of four polls fielded since May 5. These polls have had less variation than those in the Senate race, with neither candidate leading by more than three points.

Though Acton volunteered for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign (and hey, he won the state), she cuts something of a nonpartisan image. In 2019, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine tapped her to lead the Ohio Department of Health shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, which made her a regular fixture of local news updates and earned her a fan club.

As far as inspiring life stories goes, it’s hard to beat Acton’s. She spent part of her childhood homeless and living in a tent with her family in the quintessential Rust Belt city of Youngstown. But she made it out of those hardscrabble circumstances to go to medical school, become a professor at the Ohio State University, and now run for governor.

Meanwhile, Ramaswamy faces unique hurdles. Born in America to Indian immigrants, he is facing hideous racism from the MAGA movement he considers himself part of. In May’s Republican primary, his no-name opponent picked up 18 percent of the vote after directly attacking Ramaswamy’s Indian heritage and espousing “blood and soil” rhetoric popular with neo-Nazis.

Ramaswamy is also a conspiracy theorist. As is unfortunately common among Republicans, he has falsely declared the Jauary. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to be “an inside job” and that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. But his tinfoil-hat thinking goes a step further. He has promoted 9/11 trutherism as well as the racist “great replacement theory,” which falsely posits there is a secret plot to bring immigrants of color into the U.S. to diminish the power of white people.

A Big Pharma billionaire, Ramaswamy is also a poor fit for an election year in which high prices and healthcare are Americans’ top-two issues. Not to mention that he teamed up with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to conceptualize President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—only to bail, or get kicked out, just before the agency started firing thousands of civil servants and hobbling critical agencies.

And that brings us to the reason Ohio has suddenly become competitive: one Donald J. Trump.

Among adult citizens in Ohio, Trump’s approval rating is 20 points underwater, according to data from The Economist. That’s in line with his dismal national approval rating (-23 points)—but that is very bad news for Republicans in a state as red as Ohio, which Trump won by just over 11 points in 2024.

That 31-point difference between Trump’s approval and his 2024 result means Ohio has been harsher on his job performance than in most states Trump won.

Trump’s policies have hit Ohio especially hard. Due to higher prices for gas, electricity, and consumer goods, the average household in the state has had to pay $2,175 more since he took office, according to a new study from the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Across all 50 states, Ohio has seen the 13th-highest added costs, and across states Trump won in 2024, it’s seen the seventh-highest.

Worse, for a family of four on an Affordable Care Act healthcare plan, that added cost rises by about $1,500, to $3,688 since Trump retook the White House.

This fall, if Brown and/or Acton prevail in their races, it will no doubt be a result of the hard work they’ve put in and the voters they’ve excited. But they will have also gotten a key, if inadvertent, boost from a certain man in Washington.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos