Two weeks ago, Ohio looked to be Donald Trump’s best big-state bet. The Republican rank and file appeared to be getting on board, and the state seemed to be fading out of reach for Hillary Clinton.

All that’s changed.


After several disastrous weeks for Trump, Ohio is suddenly back in play. Clinton has taken a lead in four of the last five public polls there, and the Trump campaign has returned to a war footing with the state’s GOP establishment. For Republicans, it’s a disturbing turn of events in a state that is essential to Trump’s hopes of winning the White House.

“I think Ohio was leaning Trump, but this last week may have started to slow that trend of Ohio going to Trump,” said Ohio Republican operative Mark Weaver. “I wouldn’t suggest Hillary Clinton is winning Ohio; it might just go from leaning Trump back to tossup.”

On Saturday, the GOP effort to capture the state’s 18 electoral votes suffered another blow. The Trump campaign cut ties with state Republican Party chairman Matt Borges after Borges publicly criticized the GOP presidential nominee following revelations that Trump had once bragged about sexually assaulting women.

The Clinton campaign has moved aggressively to capitalize on the moment.

In the past week alone, A-list Clinton surrogates descending on Ohio included President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton, musician John Legend, former Virginia Education Secretary Anne Holton (the wife of vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine), activist Gloria Steinem and actress Mary Steenburgen. Clinton herself held a rally in Columbus on Monday that drew more than 18,000 people, the biggest event of her campaign.

The heavy Clinton presence on the ground was designed to coincide with the start of early voting in Ohio, which kicked off as Trump grappled with his worst week of the campaign.

She had been gaining in the polls even before the tape of Trump bragging about sexual assault surfaced on Oct. 7, a trend that began in fits and starts after Trump’s stumbles in the first presidential debate. The tape and steady stream of subsequent allegations of sexual assault have only made the state more competitive, Democrats say and Republicans concede.

“I’ve been frustrated because I think the national media started pooh-poohing Ohio; I actually felt good in Ohio before this, we had started to see some movement,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper, pointing to the endorsement of Clinton earlier this month from basketball star LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Bill Clinton’s Ohio bus tour. He went on to add that the controversy over Trump’s indiscretions now “certainly helps her.”

Operatives and officials on the ground in both parties say that Trump’s controversies involving women further intensified his already-steep challenge with white suburban college-educated voters, long a Republican stronghold (in fact, one of Trump’s accusers is from Ohio and has generated local coverage of her allegations). Moderate Republicans — particularly women — who had been moving grudgingly toward accepting the nominee have stopped in their tracks.

One of them is Traci Saliba, a Republican activist from Delaware County, in suburban Columbus.

A die-hard supporter of Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the GOP presidential primary, she had spent most of her general election efforts focused on organizing for Sen. Rob Portman, who is up for reelection. But she had decided to vote for Trump for president.

“Trump’s not my favorite, but Hillary is totally not my favorite,” she told POLITICO last month. “I’ve been a Republican my entire adult life; I’ve supported Republican candidates; the people and the party have nominated him, so I’ll be supporting the Republican nominee.”

But in an interview last week, she said she was no longer committed.

“I am not happy at all with that man right now, Donald Trump, at all,” she said Monday. “He’s got the next 29 days to prove to America and Ohio that he’s fit for that job. I have 29 days to decide what I’m going to do.”

Other Republican officials have drawn a sharper line.

Portman, who is consistently polling well ahead of Trump in his reelection bid, had been quietly supporting the nominee, but he yanked his support last weekend following the tape's publication by The Washington Post. Auditor Dave Yost, a longtime Trump critic, had earlier this month said he would still vote for the party’s nominee. But last weekend, Yost announced he, too, was out. Kasich, the state’s two-term governor, has never supported Trump.

Borges, the GOP chair and a close Kasich ally, had his own complicated relationship with Trump even before the campaign severed ties with him. The two had multiple conversations over the past week surrounding the scandals exploding around the campaign and Trump’s declaration of war on Republicans who have pulled their endorsement — a practice Borges had urged Trump to stop, to no avail.

With Republicans reeling from the fallout from mounting allegations of sexual assault against Trump, and the nominee himself attacking those who declined to stand by him, Democrats have sought to make inroads with the suburban women voters who helped George W. Bush win Ohio and like Kasich but find Trump difficult to accept.

The Clinton campaign made a direct play for those women on Friday.

“In the wake of the Republican nominee, and despite my core Republican beliefs, I started looking into Hillary,” said Steph Perkins, the woman who introduced Bill Clinton at a Friday morning rally in Delaware County, which hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president in a century. Perkins said she grew up “surrounded by a staunchly Republican family. The core values of fiscal conservatism, small government and strength abroad were instilled in me from a very young age,” yet she is still voting for Clinton.

Doug Preisse, chairman of the Franklin County GOP, anchored in Columbus, said the Trump tape was damaging enough among Republican-leaning suburban swing voters, but then Trump compounded the problem by making little effort to clean up the debacle in the presidential debate several days afterward.

The recent revelations “haven’t changed the narrative, they’ve just put an exclamation point on it,” said Preisse, a Kasich ally who says Ohio looks highly competitive. “If there have been suburban women who were already offended — and not just women — if there have been people offended by Mr. Trump’s approach to any number of issues, then they probably are even more so now. He just seems to be doubling down on these affairs, which probably both is attractive to some of his supporters and offensive to many detractors.”

Almost no one expects Trump will lose his core supporters in the state, which this year includes working-class voters in places like Youngstown, who have traditionally voted Democratic but appreciate his message on trade and his promises to shake up the system. And some Republicans say there’s still time for damaging stories to emerge about Clinton.

"The latest Marist Poll by the Wall Street Journal/NBC has Mr. Trump ahead in Ohio, even following an unprecedented Clinton campaign coordinated media attack on Mr. Trump over the last two weeks,” said Bob Paduchik, Trump’s Ohio state director, in a statement. Referencing the Clinton camp’s correspondence that has been revealed by WikiLeaks document dumps, he continued, “Ohioans are finally getting a look inside the Clinton campaign’s emails attacking Roman Catholics, demeaning Latinos and colluding with the mainstream media."

That’s why the widespread prediction is a very tight, perhaps historically tight, contest in this perennial swing state — the poll Paduchik referenced had Trump up by only 1 percentage point.

“There’s no way I’m voting for Hillary Clinton, that will never happen, but this is very challenging for me,” Saliba said. “I’ve been involved in Republican politics my entire adult life. This is physically excruciating.”

She went on to add, “Whether or not there’s more garbage that’s headed our way just diminishes every opportunity we have to get voters to even vote. That is a very sad state. That’s what hurts my heart.”