By THOMAS BEAUMONT and JULIE CARR SMYTH Associated Press
COLUMBUS (AP) — Peggy Lehner, a Republican state senator in Ohio, doesn’t sugarcoat what she has seen happen to support for President Donald Trump in her suburban Dayton district.
“It hasn’t ebbed. It’s crashed,” said Lehner, who is not seeking reelection in the district of working-class and white-collar communities the president won comfortably four years ago. “He is really doing poorly among independents.”
Trump’s chances for a second term rest heavily on being able to maintain the margins he won by in 2016, particularly in suburban areas. Trump campaigned outside Dayton and Toledo Monday, as liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death stoked questions of whether the sudden court vacancy would energize more suburban voters who support abortion rights or social conservatives in small-town and rural areas who oppose them.
During his Ohio visit, Trump credited himself with boosting manufacturing in the state prior to the pandemic and warned of economic devastation if Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden beats him in six weeks. “Put simply, if Biden wins, China wins,” Trump said. “If we win, Ohio wins and most importantly, in all fairness, America wins.”
But Republican lawmakers and strategists in Ohio say they are seeing research that shows a near-uniform drop in support from his 2016 totals across every suburban region of the state.
They say that Trump, who won Ohio by 8 percentage points in 2016, maintains a yawning advantage in more rural areas and small towns. Still, Republicans are concerned that if he is losing badly in suburban areas in Ohio, it is a signal that Trump’s hold on other states in the industrial heartland that delivered him the presidency may be in peril.
“The million-dollar question becomes, how does that translate in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist who managed Ohio Sen. Rob Portman’s 2016 reelection campaign. “It translates into probably not a very good night.”
Ohio has long been a bellwether. No Republican has won the White House without carrying the state since the advent of the modern two-party system, and no Democrat has since 1960.
Trump is faring worse than four years ago in communities in essentially all suburban areas around Ohio, from its major cities to its several mid-size metro areas, more than a half-dozen Republican operatives tracking races across Ohio say.
In affluent suburbs, such as Dublin, 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney won by almost 20 percentage points. Four years later, Trump narrowly lost to Clinton. Less than two months before the 2020 election, Republicans were concerned about signs the trend in Dublin has continued, according to several GOP operatives following legislative and congressional races.
Trump has slipped in suburbs to the east and west of Cleveland, where he narrowly edged Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, they say. In the blue-collar suburbs of Youngstown, where Trump won by double digits, the same appears to be true.
There is debate among state Republican strategists about how many new voters there are left to lift Trump in rural and small town Ohio.
Former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine, a second-cousin to Gov. Mike DeWine, said, “I just don’t see him getting more votes.”
But veteran Ohio GOP strategist Doug Preisse countered, saying, “I perceive a commensurate intensification in the support for Trump in small towns.”
There is less debate in other states. Pennsylvania Republicans say across the longtime GOP stronghold of Chester County west of Philadelphia, for instance, Trump has slipped as far as he has in Ohio’s suburbs, though in more populous towns and in a state he carried by fewer than 45,000 votes.
A central question is whether Trump can, as his campaign predicts, spur even more support than in 2016 from rural voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
“Trump is leading in these areas but nowhere near by the percentage he won them by in 2016,” said Madonna, who has conducted polls in the state for more than three decades.
Republicans have similar concerns about suburbs in Michigan, notably in Oakland County, Detroit’s more upscale northwestern neighbor and Michigan’s second-most populous county. Democrats have consistently carried it, though Republican George W. Bush came very close in 2000 and 2004, while Mitt Romney was competitive in 2012.
Trump did worse there than any Republican in the past 20 years, with the exception of John McCain in 2008.
But Trump appears less concerned about shoring up those losses, and is instead mining rural, small-town and working-class regions in all three states for more of the white conservative base that propelled him to office.
Likewise, Trump has lost support in the populous suburbs of southeast Wisconsin since 2016, according to the Marquette University Law School poll. And instead, he has been campaigning in blue-collar Oshkosh and the Wausau area, far north of the Republican epicenter encircling Milwaukee.
“It’s a combination of blunting the departures in the suburbs and juicing the rural areas,” said John Selleck, who ran Romney’s 2012 Michigan campaign. “But can he make up the lost suburban votes elsewhere?”
That was his formula for winning Ohio four years ago. He received the highest or second-highest percent of Republican votes of any candidate since 1980 in 60 of Ohio’s 88 counties, according to state voting data compiled by Mike Dawson, a public policy consultant and creator of ohioelectionresults.com.