The Battleground Project Trump confronts Rust Belt rejection In a region that once seemed primed for his message, Ohio is Trump's last, best hope.

Donald Trump once looked capable of turning the Rust Belt red.

Now, two weeks before Election Day, his best hope is to turn it a lighter shade of blue. His prospects have dwindled to just one industrial swing state — Ohio — and even that is no longer the comfortable bet for Trump it appeared to be as recently as a month ago.


“It is a toss-up,” said Mark Weaver, a veteran Ohio Republican operative, saying that the GOP nominee’s momentum in September was halted after the release of a tape on which Trump could be heard bragging about sexual assault. “It was trending toward Trump. The tape stopped that; it did not reverse it.”

That’s at least a more promising scenario for Trump than the predicament he faces elsewhere in a region that once seemed primed for his message. In Michigan, the Hillary Clinton campaign never felt threatened enough to go up on the air with ads. Trump trails in polls there by roughly 9 points, according to POLITICO’s Battleground States polling average. In Pennsylvania, the story is much the same: Clinton has been ahead in the past 26 public polls conducted in the state. In Wisconsin, where Clinton has also never bothered to air ads, she’s ahead by an average of 5 points — she’s led in the dozen polls released since July.

It’s a sharp rebuke of the belief, long cherished by Trump allies, that the GOP nominee could remake the electoral map with his populist appeals on trade and immigration.

Ohio, however, still remains in play. And it’s for the reason many thought Trump would resonate in the largest industrial states: working-class white voters. Of the four states, Ohio has both the lowest household median income and, according to the 2012 exit polls, the highest share of non-college-educated voters at 60 percent.

While Trump appears to be running well in industrial areas ranging from western and northeastern Pennsylvania to northern Wisconsin, he’s falling short in the populous, affluent suburbs in those states that are vital to GOP chances of winning statewide. (Trump is poised to carry Indiana, a more reliably Republican Rust Belt locale that wasn’t considered competitive this year).

But in Ohio, Republicans report that Trump is overperforming in places like Toledo’s Lucas County — the sixth-biggest county in the state — as well as in Lorain and Mahoning counties, two traditional Democratic strongholds that are the ninth- and 10th-largest counties in the state and that have significant populations of non-college-educated white voters.

“The question is, how much does each state have of the Rust Belt?” said Weaver, who has worked on races in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. “In Pennsylvania, the western part gets outweighed by the Philly suburbs. Though he will win the Rust Belt part of it, it’s not a big enough portion of the Pennsylvania electorate to make a difference. In Ohio, we have, arguably, a larger swath of Ohio that relied on heavy industry," and those areas "are either going to go heavily for Trump or they’re going to split by much closer than we’re used to.”

Robert Blizzard, a GOP pollster working on a number of congressional races, said the parts of Ohio where Trump is faring poorly — like Franklin County, home to Columbus — are smaller shares of the state compared to the counties where he’s falling short in Michigan, like heavily African-American Wayne County, where Detroit is based, and the more affluent Oakland County.

“In Michigan, Wayne County and Oakland County make up about one-third of the vote in the state, whereas in Ohio, the entire Columbus media market makes up about 20 percent of the state, with Franklin County responsible for just 12 percent of the vote statewide,” he said. “So, there are smaller pockets of bad spots for Trump in Ohio than in Michigan.”

It’s a similar story in Wisconsin, where Trump has connected with some blue-collar voters but is getting blown out in Milwaukee, the state’s biggest city, and its suburbs — which typically lean Republican.

Of the four states, Ohio is also traditionally the most competitive in presidential years, electing George W. Bush twice before swinging for Barack Obama. To the extent that Trump is able to peel off traditionally Democratic voters, he’ll have a bigger Republican pool to which to add them. That’s in contrast to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all of which have smaller base-line GOP numbers in a presidential year. That’s one reason those three states haven’t backed a Republican presidential candidate since the 1980s.

Supporters of Donald Trump listen to him during a campaign rally on Oct. 22 in Cleveland. | AP Photo

“Ohio is just more Republican to begin with, and therefore Trump has a smaller distance to go in Ohio than he does in those other states,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll.

There are also plenty of Ohio Republicans motivated to vote for Sen. Rob Portman, who continues to poll well ahead of Trump — and pollsters expect that many of those same voters will back the rest of the GOP ballot, even if some do so grudgingly. After all, neither Portman nor GOP Gov. John Kasich is supporting Trump.

“In Ohio, you’ve … got Rob Portman, who may be driving some support toward the top of the ticket,” emailed Blizzard. “You could make [the] same case in Iowa with [Sen. Chuck] Grassley as well. In Michigan, there’s nobody else on the statewide ballot. Along those lines, there’s simply more historical precedence for Ohio to be ‘swingier’ than a state like Michigan." Mitt Romney, the GOP nominee in 2012, "lost Ohio by just 3 points, while he lost Michigan by nine. That’s a huge difference.”

Pollsters point to other distinctions.

“Each of these things contribute a point or two to get this cumulative effect,” said Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth University polling. In Ohio, “There’s the southern culture along the Kentucky border, a concentration of white working class at the center of the state, the African-American proportion of the electorate is not as high as in Michigan …different cultural things all add up a point or two.”

With Trump’s map shrinking, Ohio has become even more central to his campaign: Without its 18 electoral votes, he has almost no path to victory. He’s clinging to a slight 1-point edge over Clinton, according to POLITICO’s Battleground States polling average — and his team stresses that it is running an intensified get-out-the-vote effort. However, the Clinton campaign has also ramped up its Ohio activity in the final weeks before Election Day, sending Clinton herself to the state on Friday and Vice President Joe Biden to Cleveland for an appearance on Monday.

On Tuesday, Clinton's campaign announced that musician Jay Z will host a concert in Ohio on Nov. 4 — a move widely seen as an effort to energize young African-American voters.

Weaver, the Ohio Republican operative, acknowledged, “we’ll get another round of polls here, but as of the data through last Friday, I’d still call it a toss-up.”