Two years ago, Sherrod Brown lost the U.S. Senate seat he had held for three terms in Ohio when President Trump and the Republicans routed Democrats across the country. Now he is back, and deep-red Ohio may be back as a swing state.
“We made Ohio competitive after decades of Republican control,” Kathleen Clyde, the Ohio Democratic Committee Chair, shouted at a victory party in Columbus on Tuesday night. The Democrats had two big wins to celebrate: Mr. Brown beat the Republican incumbent, Senator Jon Husted, and Dr. Amy Acton defeated Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaire former biotech executive, in the governor’s race.
Ohio was officially in play as a potential bellwether in the 2028 presidential campaign.
“If we’re still talking about the affordability of life, if we’re still talking about the affordability of housing, that does put Ohio back into the conversation,” David Niven, a professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, said on Tuesday in anticipation of Democratic wins.
Ohio was once so representative of the national mood that it voted for the winning presidential candidate regardless of party in every election from 1964 to 2016. (And the state inspired the old political saw “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”)
John Kerry would have been elected president in 2004 had he won Ohio and its electoral votes, despite losing the popular vote to George W. Bush. Barack Obama won Ohio comfortably against John McCain in 2008. His margin was tighter against Mitt Romney in 2012, but Ohio carried Mr. Obama over the top in the Electoral College, sealing his re-election.
Mr. Trump’s victories in Ohio in 2016, 2020 and 2024 — particularly his 11-point win against Kamala Harris — made the state seem out of reach for Democrats. But there had been signs, even before the midterms, that things were changing, chiefly because of the economy.
“I’ve seen a shift in mind-set,” said Patrick Moran, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a union that represents 1.4 million workers nationwide, including 100,000 in Ohio, who hold jobs like school bus driver, sanitation worker and janitor. “People are angry, and they have a right to be angry. Because they can’t afford anything anymore.”
Mr. Moran was at a rally on Sunday for Dr. Acton and Mr. Brown outside Cleveland at a United Auto Workers’ union hall, Local 1250, which represents members who build engines for the Ford Expedition and the Ford Explorer. “We have Republican members who are stepping up and saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore, this is out of control.’” The president, he added, “made $1.4 billion while in office.”
Mr. Trump won Ohio three times by making inroads with unions and other blue collar workers, once the foundation of Mr. Brown’s — and Democrats’ — base. In Mr. Brown’s first campaign for Senate in 2006, he won Mahoning County, which includes the industrial city of Youngstown, by nearly 47 points over the Republican incumbent, Mike DeWine. In 2024, Mr. Brown lost the county by 0.2 percentage points to Bernie Moreno, showing how much defections of blue collar voters to Mr. Trump had hurt Democrats.
On Tuesday, Mr. Brown was winning Mahoning County by seven points, with 95 percent of the county’s results in. He also took his first victory in Delaware County, a longtime suburban Republican stronghold outside Columbus, winning by four points.
On Tuesday at a Skyline Chili restaurant in Delaware County, Amanda Volenick, a 39-year-old Democrat who had voted for Mr. Brown and Dr. Acton, said she thought the county was changing. She was having lunch with her brother, Jared Acker.
“Our parents are still huge Trump supporters,” Ms. Volenick, a nurse, said. “A lot of our family in that generation just voted a straight Republican ticket.” She was raised in an evangelical home, she said, and her parents thought Republicans were uniquely religious.
At another table, Matt Morris, a 50-year-old Republican, said he had voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but not in 2020 or 2024. “I think he’s an idiot,” he said. In 2016, he said he “agreed with some of the stuff he was trying to do.”
He continued: “But he runs his mouth. Now he’s just serving his ego.’’
A friend Mr. Morris was having lunch with, a Republican who had voted for Mr. Trump three times, said he voted this year for Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Husted. He did not want to talk or give his name and got up quickly to pay his bill.
In another closely watched race in Ohio, Representative Max Miller, a Republican from the Cleveland area, lost his seat to Brian Poindexter, a Democrat. Mr. Miller had been accused of physically abusing his ex-wife, who is Senator Moreno’s daughter; he denied the accusation.
The one slightly positive sign, if it could be called that, for Ohio Republicans is that their losses were narrower compared with those in some other battleground states. Mr. Brown was winning overall by three points, with 91 percent of votes counted. Dr. Acton was winning by six points.
Robin Brilla, of Parma, a large Cleveland suburb, said she voted straight Republican on Tuesday, hoping to stave off any possible third impeachment of Mr. Trump. Ms. Brilla, 68, said she saw Mr. Trump as a defender of her values and way of life. She cited the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade as a key promise kept by the president.
“I’m a Christian, that’s my worldview,” she said. “And that’s something I agree with morally.”
In Brecksville, an affluent Cleveland suburb, Jane Molina, 53, said she was also a reliable Republican voter — once. But in the 2024 presidential election and in Tuesday’s midterms, she cast her ballot entirely for Democrats.
“Up until about 10 years ago I voted pretty much straight Republican,” Ms. Molina said after voting on Tuesday. “I hated politics. I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t understand it. I just knew that was what my mom was doing.”
From 2016 onward, Ms. Molina said, she started following the political news cycle and disliked what she saw from conservatives, particularly Mr. Trump.
“Now I vote straight Democrat,” she said.
For his part, Mr. Brown was not yet willing to declare Ohio a swing state. “I’m not a pundit,” he said soon after polls had opened on Tuesday. “But I do know that Amy Acton and I are going to win.”
He was at home in Columbus and had answered his wife’s cellphone while she was out of the room. While his campaign did not want him gabbing with the national media on Election Day — local media interviews would potentially bring in more last-minute votes — he seemed eager to talk.
His wife, Connie Schultz, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, soon arrived and took her phone back. “He just wants to talk to everybody right now,” she said. “He’s bouncing off the walls. We told him to go down and work out on his bike for a little bit.”
She, for one, thought that Mr. Trump’s unpopularity and the wins for her husband and Dr. Acton could make Ohio competitive again.
As Dr. Acton said at the victory party on Tuesday, “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”
Jessica Contrera contributed reporting from Columbus, Ohio, and Patrick Cooley from Brecksville and Parma, Ohio.
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