As Ohio goes, so goes the nation. If we win Ohio, this race is over. Ohio is checkmate. At least, it used to. The Buckeye state has been a longtime focus of politicians, pundits, and political scientists alike for a simple but peculiar reason. In each presidential election between 1964 and 2016, the candidate who won Ohio also won the presidency. Political observers dubbed it a bellwether state — one that tends to predict how the country will vote as a whole. The term is often used interchangeably with swing state or battleground state, but they have slightly different definitions. A swing state is one where election results swing back and forth between the two political parties, whereas a battleground state has the Democratic and Republican candidates locked in close competition. For the past several decades, Ohio has been a bellwether, swing, and battleground state at the same time. But not anymore. In 2020,

president Donald Trump won Ohio by 8 percentage points but lost his re-election bid to Joe Biden, ending Ohio's streak of picking the president. So why did Ohio track so close to the national average for so long? What factors led Ohio to serve as the perfect political encapsulation of the nation? And why is that identity now breaking down? Ohio is a prototypical American state. It is majority white and contains three major cities with large Black populations surrounded by middle-class suburbs, farming and mining towns, as well as smaller cities with economies based around manufacturing. Ohio also fits within the Midwest's overall swing status. The Midwest was a reliably Democratic area in the 1930s, a swing region in the 1940s, Republican-leaning in the 1950s and a

swing region again ever since. From 1992 to 2012, the Midwest was home to a set of states termed the Blue Wall that consistently voted Democrat. In 2016, however, the Blue Wall began to crumble, with Trump becoming the first Republican since 1988 to win Michigan and Wisconsin and the first since 2004 to win Ohio and Iowa. So how did Ohio's rightward swing vary across the state? The movement was fueled by rural areas and small towns and cities, especially in the eastern parts of the state near the Appalachian Mountains. In Ashtabula, Trumbull, and Mahoning counties, the swing from 2012 to 2020 was over 30 points rightward in each — double the statewide swing. While several larger urban counties did move towards Democrats during this time frame, some metropolitan areas shifted rightward, too. In Cuyahoga County, the Democratic margin shrank

from 40 points to only 34. In all, 82 of Ohio's 88 counties moved toward Republicans between 2012 and 2020. When comparing how Ohio voted relative to the nation from 1964 to 2016, Ohio never diverged more than 5 percentage points from the national result until it swung hard to the right in 2016, voting over 10 points to the right of the nation as a whole. Ohio's position relative to the nation — its partisan lean — was more out of sync with national dynamics in 2016 than in any election since 1932. The days of Ohio as a battleground may have come to an end, but the Midwest remains a crucial region for prospective presidents hoping to secure the keys to the Oval Office. To learn more about the state's changing political landscape, visit www.midstory.org.

How America's Quintessential Battleground Broke Down

How America's Quintessential Battleground Broke Down