Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter and writes from Ohio University.
Donald Trump’s name should be spelled out on every gas and diesel pump in Ohio. Come to think of it, his name, in a way, already is spelled out – in dollars and cents.
Accordingly, the president had a planned trip to the Miami Valley this weekend, to Montgomery County’s Vandalia, keen to tell voters in western and southwestern Ohio that, thanks to him, they’ve never had it so good, like Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said in talking to British Tories in the 1950s. (Seven years later, the British Labour – socialist – Party ran Britain.)
Trouble is, that’s a very hard sell these days in America, that we’ve never had it so good, thanks to Donald Trump – and not just in southwestern
and western Ohio, but statewide.
Gas and groceries aren’t the only goods whose prices are exploding. So are the costs of fuel for tractors and harvesters, rocketing upward, while Trump’s monkeying with tariffs has made ag-country budgeting tougher for rural families. Politically, they’re among the most conservative of Ohioans, but nobody’s fools in the bookkeeping department. (Oh, and the remaining stock of Canadian Club in lobbyists’ Columbus bars may soon be gone.)
As one insightful Republican pointed out, the president’s task isn’t to wow Dayton and Montgomery County. In 2024, Montgomery had voted to make California Democrat Kamala Harris president (giving her 1,201 votes more in the county than Trump).
And then-Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat seeking a fourth term in 2024, comfortably carried Montgomery County, though Westlake Republican Bernie Moreno bested Brown statewide. (This year, Democrat Brown, of Bexley, may be well on his way back to the Senate; in statewide polls, he’s leading appointed Sen. Jon Husted, an Upper Arlington Republican.)
No, what’s in Trump’s crosshairs is the layer of rock-ribbed Republican counties sandwiched between I-75 in Ohio and Indiana border, counties such as Mercer (Celina), which cast 83% of its vote for Trump in 2024, and Putnam (Ottawa), which cast 84% of its vote for the White House’s home remodeler.
If those true-blue Ohio Republican voters don’t turn out on Election Day, appointed GOP Sen. Husted and the Republican nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, of Upper Arlington, a billionaire, could lose.
And Democrats will have fair winds in Ohio sailing into 2027 because, through gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, of Bexley, they originated the gas-tax moratorium the General Assembly is expected to pass by the time this appears. (Nothing like playing to the crowd, when the best idea would be to pass tax credits so that people would buy cars and trucks that get better mileage than the behemoths now trundling across Ohio.)
On the other hand, ironclad as the General Assembly’s promise will be to make gas-tax bondholders whole by drawing money from state surpluses to pay for the gas-tax moratorium, you must wonder if that isn’t impairing a contract (the bonds). And the Ohio Constitution forbids impairing contracts. Where are Ohio’s “strict constructionists” now? If only the late House Speaker William G. Batchelder, a Medina Republican, and brilliant Statehouse conservative, were here to speak out (although on a matter of party consensus, such as the gas-tax break, he might just have developed laryngitis).
Nervous onlooker: Vice President J.D. (James David) Vance, a Cincinnati Republican, who wants to succeed Trump, and Vance needs Ohio to make that happen.
And that means an Ohio Republican organization that doesn’t suffer too many stay-at-home voters, and which hasn’t been mauled – not too badly, anyway – by Ohio Democrats in November. The key thing will be for Democrats not to do one of the things they do best – bicker – and instead present a constructive program to a General Assembly Republicans will almost certainly control.
That’s why Trump has a tough role to play in western and southwestern Ohio: Be obnoxious enough to pry any Republican voters to go to the polls, yet not so obnoxious as to further enrage Ohioans whose wallets he’s squeezing – and whose daughters and sons he’s sending to war in Asia.
But if those are good deals for western and southwestern Ohio, someone is delusional – and not just Donald Trump.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter and writes from Ohio University.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohioans have never had it as good as we have it with Donald Trump. Wink, wink | Opinion
