MAGA’s theory of the electorate on the line in Ohio

Vice President Vance went back to his native Ohio last week to hold a rally and cast his early ballot in what have been — at least to many in the national political press — surprisingly difficult Senate and gubernatorial races for his party.

The big-ticket item is the Senate seat Vance gave up to become President Trump’s number two.

Republican Jon Husted, then serving as Ohio’s lieutenant governor, was appointed to the seat last year. Husted was a sturdy choice: a political workhorse who had served as the Speaker of the Ohio House and won statewide elections in 2010 and 2014 as secretary of state before running for governor in 2018. He lost the primary but joined the ticket of the winner, Mike DeWine, for two very successful outings as his running mate.

Husted is in many ways the opposite of the man he replaced in the Senate. Husted is seen in both Columbus and Washington as a party loyalist, a dogged campaigner, a political professional and something of a dealmaker. He’s sort of the archetypal Ohio Republican, with a team peppered with John Boehner alums to prove it. If this were a good year to be a generic Republican in Ohio, Husted would be the man for the job.

But it isn’t a good year to be a Republican in Ohio — or pretty much any place that President Trump won by less than 15 points in 2024. That was the year that Husted’s Democratic challenger, Sherrod Brown, lost the Buckeye State’s other Senate seat to Republican Bernie Moreno, who, like Vance, ran as a mega-MAGA outsider and then rode Trump’s coattails to beat Brown by a little less than 4 points.

Brown, who has long emphasized his shirt-sleeved, everyman persona, is actually a lot like a Democratic version of Husted: lengthy statehouse tenure, two terms as Ohio secretary of state and lots of party dues paying. And in the Clinton and Obama eras when times were better for Ohio Democrats, Brown was ideally situated to become what seemed to be a permanent incumbent. His first three Senate runs — 2006, 2012 and 2018 — were all good years for Ohio Democrats. But in 2024, when Trump won Ohio by the widest margin of any presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan, Brown couldn’t hold on.

Like this year, we didn’t get much high-quality polling out of Ohio in 2024. But the surveys we did see showed Brown starting with a lead that faded in the fall. He was up 4 points at the end of September, tied in October and, finally, falling behind in the days just before the election. Brown still outperformed then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, but only by a measly 3 points.

The Republicans’ theory of Ohio politics is that the 2024 election and, even more so, the 2022 midterm in which Vance won the seat Husted is now trying to defend, prove that Ohio is no longer a red-tinted swing state but rather a bright red one. In 2022, Vance was a controversial, polarizing figure who had never held elective office and still managed to beat longtime Democratic congressman Tim Ryan by 6 points.

The Democratic theory is that Ohio remains very politically elastic and that the large number of white, working-class voters in the state have been in a marriage of convenience with the Republican Party. Democratic strategists believe that with lots of older voters, a large number of Roman Catholic voters in the north and a big swath of Appalachia in the south, Ohio has been voting its values more than its pocketbook. (It’s not by accident that Husted’s campaign and its allies have focused so much on transgender issues.)

Democrats like Brown hold that the reason candidates like Trump and Vance have succeeded in Ohio is that they fuse economic and cultural populism in a way that progressive Democrats haven’t been able to match. The incumbent Republican Brown beat to get into the Senate in 2006, DeWine, is of the old down-the-line conservative model. DeWine, now the term-limited governor, has been a stellar vote-getter for state office, running 10 points ahead of Vance in 2022. DeWine’s success pokes holes in both the MAGA and Democratic views, but there’s certainly something to the idea of Ohio as a state that wants to be Democratic at work and Republican at home.

Under that view, Brown is ideally situated for a comeback this year since the overwhelming focus of voters in 2026 is economic, just like 20 years ago when he unseated DeWine amid a period of high energy prices and an unpopular Middle Eastern war.

And unlike in his 2024 loss, this time it’s been Brown who has been gaining ground. Picking from the sadly sparse selection of high-quality polls, we can see Brown trailing this summer before moving into the lead. Since June, no legitimate poll has shown Husted leading. And two recent high-quality surveys have put Brown at 49 percent of the vote, suggesting that there isn’t some trove of undecided voters that is going to sweep in and propel Husted to a big win.

That’s not to say that this is a done deal. Hardly. We don’t have enough good polls to do a useful average for this race, but Husted will almost certainly outperform his recent polls. The floor for a statewide Republican in Ohio these days seems to be something like 47 percent of the vote, which is certainly close enough to be well positioned for any late-cycle momentum shifts.

Of course, Vance isn’t the only one casting an early ballot. Ohio has set new records for preelection voting in both of its past two midterms. It was about 35 percent of the vote in 2022, and while most early voters are long-determined in their preferences, the late deciders are rapidly entering the chat.

The premise of Ohio as the Vance-ian heartland of the new working-class Republican Party is on the line, so MAGA had better hurry.