For half a century Ohio sat with the country. From Lyndon Johnson’s 25.9-point win in 1964 through Donald Trump’s in 2016, the state went with the national winner every cycle — fourteen elections in a row. The streak broke in 2020, when Ohio backed Trump by eight points as Joe Biden won nationally, and the distance widened in 2024: Trump carried the state by 11.2 points, a clearer Republican margin than the eight-point results of 2016 and 2020. The sitting vice president, J.D. Vance, grew up in Middletown, in Butler County, and his memoir of the region framed a national conversation about the white working class.
What Democratic vote remains sits in the cities. Of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties, seven went Democratic in 2024, and the weight is in the three Cs — Cuyahoga, which holds Cleveland, at 31.4 points, the bluest county in the state; Franklin, around Columbus, at 28.4; and Hamilton, around Cincinnati, at 14.9. Lucas, which holds Toledo, added 12.6 points and Summit, around Akron, 7.0. Franklin is the one large county still moving toward the Democrats and the largest by turnout, casting 598,225 votes in 2024 — more than any other county in the state, narrowly ahead of Cuyahoga’s 576,520.
The southeastern counties completed a long arc. Monroe County, on the Ohio River, voted Democratic for president as recently as 2008, when it backed Barack Obama by 9.2 points; in 2024 it went Republican by 59.7 — a shift of nearly seventy points across four cycles, repeated up and down coal-and-steel Appalachia. The reddest county now is Holmes, in the Amish country, at 69.2 points Republican. In 2026 Ohio fills two open offices: Mike DeWine is term-limited, leaving the governorship to Vivek Ramaswamy against Amy Acton, and the seat Vance left for the vice presidency, now held by appointee Jon Husted, draws former senator Sherrod Brown.