Is Ohio becoming the next Missouri?

[BuckeyeNut]

Maybe.

Reagan won Ohio by a larger margin than Trump in 1980 but Clinton came back to win it, '43 barely carried it in 2004, and Obama won it twice.

The difference now is gerrymandering. When Reagan was President, Ohio elected a Democratic governor twice. Democrats have only won the gubernatorial election once since the '80's. Gerrymandering with a surgical precision paired with forced term limits in the legislature -- which was a retaliation to a long-term Democratic speaker, Vern Riffe -- devastated the bench.

That weak bench, paired with national trends (loss of WWC voters, increasing reliance on the minority vote, and coastal elitism) hasn't helped. We may well finally lose our streak of voting for the winner come 2020, but we should remain a swing state in the future. Especially if TD's predicted alignment comes to bare.