3. The state’s anti-anti-union backlash fired up Democrats and strengthened their grass-roots infrastructure. This was what I focused on in my May cover story – the possibility that the reaction against Senate Bill 5, the law gutting public employee collective bargaining rights, might carry over into this election. Unlike in Wisconsin, the backlash in Ohio succeeded: the law was overturned by a huge margin – and in a huge turnout – in a referendum last November. One reason for this was that the law, unlike Wisconsin’s anti-union one, did not exempt police and firefighters, a politically potent and photogenic class of public workers. The national press has consistently overlooked the Ohio referendum while focusing on anti-union setbacks like the failed recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. But I could tell from my reporting last spring that the momentum of overturning SB 5 had mobilized Democrats in Ohio, and that the issue had clearly turned some public employees with Republican leanings toward the Democrats for at least the 2012 cycle, as long as the Democrats could keep drawing the connection between the law and Mitt Romney, no hard task given that he came out for the law and has been bashing unions left and right. And lo, just a week ago, the national Fraternal Order of Police, which has endorsed the Republican nominee for president in the past three elections, announced that it would not be endorsing this year because it could not stomach Romney’s stance on laws like SB 5.

4. The Ohio economy’s doing better than most. For all the talk of Rust Belt woes these days, Ohio is near tops in the country in job creation, and its unemployment has dropped to 7 percent. There are a bunch of reasons for this, which Matt Bai did a nice job of laying out in his recent New York Times Magazinecover story on Ohio – the fracking boom in eastern Ohio, which has helped prop up steel production; the return of the auto industry, which employs more people in Ohio than in any other state except Michigan; and, if you believe Kasich, aggressive employer-recruitment by his administration. Now, one should not take this argument too far, as I think Bai came close to doing (he also ought to have focused more than he did on the SB 5 fallout, which he only glanced at.) Political scientists are pretty sure that voters base decisions in national elections more on their perception of the national economy than of the local one. Still, Ohio’s relative success has undoubtedly complicated Romney’s gloom-and-doom framing of Obama’s first term.

5. Kasich is not the best surrogate. This one’s related to the previous one. Kasich, who is trying to climb back from his drubbing in last fall’s referendum in time for his 2014 reelection, is understandably touting Ohio’s recovery, which is at direct odds with Romney’s message that the economy’s a hopeless mess. Kasich’s value is further diminished by his middling popularity with state voters, which ties back to SB 5. And he’s left behind quite the string of unhelpful quotes, such as dismissing Romney’s 59-point economic plan (in an interview with Bai) and joking about how his own wife, and those of Sen. Rob Portman and Paul Ryan, were back at home "doing the laundry" while their husbands were on the stump.

6. The auto bailout. Also, obviously, related to point #4. One in eight Ohio jobs is linked to the auto industry; without the bailout, who knows what would’ve happened to them. And the Obama campaign and Ohio Democrats aren’t letting voters forget this. Bai curiously suggests that the campaign is not willing to stand up and make the case that its policies have helped the Ohio economy, a judgment that seems based on the fact that Obama would not talk to him for his story. In fact, Obama and his team are talking up their record, and the bailout in particular, to the point where they are arguably over-stating its impact on the state. And it seems to be working. When I was in Toledo last week, I asked Lucas County Treasurer Wade Kapszukiewicz, a Democrat, what he made of Obama’s strong position, and he didn’t hesitate. “It’s the bailout," he said. "It’s not just the Jeep plant in Toledo and that they build the Chevy Cruze in Youngstown. But more than that -- we have 88 counties, and in 82 of them there are supplier plants to the larger ones. When you start talking about 82 of 88 counties that have some sort of direct, literal, positive impact from this rescue, I think that on the margins has the ability to tweak the numbers.”