Can Ohio — a Midwestern state dominated by aging, working-class White voters, where Republicans have a supermajority stranglehold on the legislature — really become a political bellwether and battleground again?

The Democrat who can help make that happen, former US Senator Sherrod Brown, doesn’t like to speculate about the horse-race aspects of national politics. “I'm not a pundit,” he groused during a recent campaign stop. But for many political observers — and, yes, pundits like me with Ohio roots — it’s the talk of the state, since it could have national implications.

Last month, Cook Political Report raised eyebrows when it reclassified the US Senate race between Brown, who lost reelection in 2024, and Republican incumbent Jon Husted from “lean Republican” to a “toss-up.”

Equally surprising is recent polling for the governor’s race, which pits Democrat Amy Acton, former director of the Ohio Department of Health, against Republican billionaire businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. Cook Political Report has it classified as “lean Republican.” But the Democracy and Public Policy Network at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University found that Ramaswamy is only leading Acton by 1 percentage point.

“If either of those two win, but especially if both win,” Bowling Green political scientist and pollster David J. Jackson said of the Democrats, “there may be some reconsideration going on nationally that Ohio is a lost-cause, deep-red state.”

Indeed, it would be a remarkable shift for a state that has had a Republican governor for 32 of the past 36 years and backed President Donald Trump by roughly eight percentage points in 2016 and 2020, and by even more in 2024. A politically competitive Ohio could change the Electoral College math in 2028 and complicate a........

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