AKRON, Ohio — Richard Cordray never seems quite sure how to stand.

He tilts to the left like a Leaning Tower of Bureaucrat, arms sagging, as he waits for his turn at the microphone. When it comes, he speaks as if his internal keyboard lacks an exclamation point.

“I can feel — I can feel the blue wave coming,” Mr. Cordray, Ohio’s Democratic nominee for governor, said flatly here recently, greeting supporters inside a plumbers and pipe fitters union hall. He allowed that many had probably come to see someone else: Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, whose charisma had been imported for the morning rally.

“We’ve been telling the campaign, ‘Take the gloves off with this guy,’” said Jack Hefner, a local steelworkers union leader standing in the back, who has feared that Mr. Cordray would be a difficult sell with some members, many of whom unexpectedly supported President Trump in 2016. “But Ohio’s a funny state. Right when you think you’ve got it figured out, it flips.”

For two years now, Democrats have had both goals in mind: figuring out Ohio, again, and flipping it. Few statewide results were more alarming to the party than Mr. Trump’s eight-point victory here — one point shy of his margin in Texas — reinforcing concerns that what was once a consummate purple state had shaded solidly red, taken with the president’s fiery zero-sum populism.