Daily Kos85%
Will Trump make this red state flip blue? - Daily Kos 59%
By Andrew Mangan82%
7/12/2026, 11:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 17 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Confirmation Bias, and Horn Effect, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 39.4% saturation with 631 hits. Analysis detected 2,016 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,602 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 55.9% and a BS Rank of 59% (6,496 of 15,509 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 58.10% of the article peer group.
Will Trump make this red state flip blue?
July 12, 2026 at 4:00 PM
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Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee in Ohio’s governor’s race, shown in 2024.
AP (original)
Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture.
As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.
If that old political adage bears out this year, it would be a hell of a problem for the Republican Party.
Recent polling shows the state’s Senate and gubernatorial races locked in a dead heat—a shocking development for this reddening state.
The Buckeye State, once a bellwether, has been drifting rapidly toward Republicans.
Between 2002 and 2012, the state saw 10 total elections for president, Senate, or governor.
Democrats won exactly half of them.
However, in the 10 elections since, Democrats won just once.
It came during 2018’s blue wave.
But now that red drift may be drifting back.
Democrat Sherrod Brown leads Republican Sen.
Jon Husted by 3 percentage points in an average of the four polls fielded since the state’s May 5 primaries.
That said, those polls show a wide range of results, with one from The New York Times/Siena University showing Husted up 3 points, while another , commissioned by Fox News, shows Brown up by a gobsmacking 8 points.
A populist progressive, Brown is Democrats’ dream candidate, having thrice won a Senate seat in the state.
While he came up short in his 2024 reelection bid, his performance remains impressive.
Losing by less than 4 points , he fared far better than Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who lost by over 11 points .
Democratic Ohio Senate nominee Sherrod Brown, a former three-term U.S. senator, left, talks to his wife, Connie Shultz, on stage at a primary-election campaign even on May 5.
AP
Husted, who was appointed to fill the remainder of Vice President JD Vance’s term, is a rather anonymous rank-and-file Republican.
Twelve percent of Ohio’s likely voters hadn’t heard of him, compared with just 3% who hadn’t heard of Brown, per a recent poll conducted for AARP.
This relative obscurity gives Brown the upside of having more room to define Husted for voters ahead of November.
The Cook Political Report rates the race as a toss-up .
And now, as of Friday, Cook has shifted its rating of the state’s governor’s race toward Democrats, considering it too a toss-up .
In the gubernatorial race, Democrat Amy Acton leads Republican Vivek Ramaswamy by 2 points in an average of four polls fielded since May 5.
These polls have had less variation than those in the Senate race, with neither candidate leading by more than 3 points.
Though Acton volunteered for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign (and hey, he won the state), she cuts something of a nonpartisan image.
In 2019, Republican Gov.
Mike DeWine tapped her to lead the Ohio Department of Health shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, which made her a regular fixture of local news updates and earned her a fan club .
As far as inspiring life stories goes, it’s hard to beat Acton’s.
She spent part of her childhood homeless and living in a tent with her family in the quintessential Rust Belt city of Youngstown.
But she made it out of those hardscrabble circumstances to go to medical school, become a professor at the Ohio State University, and now run for governor.
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy faces unique hurdles.
Born in America to Indian immigrants , he is facing hideous racism from the MAGA movement he considers himself part of.
In May’s Republican primary, his no-name opponent picked up 18% of the vote after directly attacking Ramaswamy’s Indian heritage and espousing “blood and soil” rhetoric popular with neo-Nazis.
Dr.
Amy Acton speaks at a campaign event after she won the party’s nomination for governor in Ohio on May 5.
AP
Ramaswamy is also a conspiracy theorist.
As is unfortunately common among Republicans, he has falsely declared the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S.
Capitol to be “an inside job” and that Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
But his tinfoil-hat thinking goes a step further.
He has promoted 9/11 trutherism as well as the racist “great replacement theory,” which falsely posits there is a secret plot to bring immigrants of color into the U.S. to diminish the power of white people.
A Big Pharma billionaire , Ramaswamy is also a poor fit for an election year in which high prices and healthcare are Americans’ top-two issues .
Not to mention that he teamed up with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to conceptualize President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—only to bail, or get kicked out , just before the agency started firing thousands of civil servants and hobbling critical agencies.
And that brings us to the reason Ohio has suddenly become competitive: one Donald J.
Trump.
Among adult citizens in Ohio, Trump’s approval rating is 20 points underwater, according to data from The Economist .
That’s in line with his dismal national approval rating (-23 points)—but that is very bad news for Republicans in a state as red as Ohio, which Trump won by just over 11 points in 2024.
That 31-point difference between Trump’s approval and his 2024 result means Ohio has been harsher on his job performance than in most states Trump won.
Trump’s policies have hit Ohio especially hard.
Due to higher prices for gas, electricity, and consumer goods, the average household in the state has had to pay $2,175 more since he took office, according to a new study from the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
Across all 50 states, Ohio has seen the 13th-highest added costs, and across states Trump won in 2024, it’s seen the seventh-highest.
Worse, for a family of four on an Affordable Care Act healthcare plan, that added cost rises by about $1,500, to $3,688 since Trump retook the White House.
This fall, if Brown and/or Acton prevail in their races, it will no doubt be a result of the hard work they’ve put in and the voters they’ve excited.
But they will have also gotten a key, if inadvertent, boost from a certain man in Washington.
Democrats successfully pushed Graham Platner to end his Senate bid in Maine after he was credibly accused of rape , but Republicans’ view of how they’d handle the situation is far removed from how they actually have in the past.
A plurality of Republicans (49%) say that if a candidate they like were accused of sexual misconduct, they would want the candidate to drop out, per a new YouGov poll .
Of course, Trump has bragged about groping women, and at least 18 women have accused him of sexual misconduct.
But they must have not heard about all that, right?
A Democratic House majority likely runs through Republican Mike Lawler’s seat in New York, and a new poll finds him in jeopardy.
Democratic nominee Cait Conley leads Lawler by 5 percentage points, according to a survey conducted by FM3 Research for the pro-Democratic House Majority PAC.
The poll also shows Lawler’s favorability rating 16 points underwater.
In addition to everything else wrong with the country, his poor favorables might be tied to the measles outbreak in his district .
Even before Platner was accused of rape, his campaign had been plagued by controversy , and at the core was a question of morality.
How bad of a person has he been?
Has he changed?
What qualifies as “bad” behavior in the first place?
Americans may be incredibly polarized in their politics, but their sense of morality is surprisingly uniform—with a few big exceptions.
YouGov asked Americans to rate the morality of 64 actions, ranging from “eating meat” and “swearing” to “having an abortion.”
A majority of Americans agreed on the morality of 27 actions, whether it be acceptable, unacceptable, or sometimes permissible.
Over 80% agree that four actions—“driving while intoxicated,” “shoplifting from a small business,” “not hiring someone because of their race,” and “cheating in a relationship”—are never acceptable.
More than that, though, only 11 actions scored a polarization rating of more than 50 on the Daily Kos Morality Polarization Index.
™ ️This means that on the other 53 actions, Americans either broadly agree on its morality or think that the issue is too complicated to “always” or “never” be acceptable.
(As with our previous indexes on movie genres , food , and what’s cool , the methodology for this can be found in the chart’s footnote.)
The most polarizing issues are generally related to sex and gender, such as “having sex while not married” and “undergoing sex reassignment surgery” (also known as gender-affirmation surgery).
The most polarizing is “Being in a same-sex relationship,” which is seen as always acceptable by 36% of Americans and never acceptable by 37%.
That tracks with how Republicans are becoming less accepting of same-sex relationships .
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We continue to be paywall-free.
We continue to be supported by our readers, not billionaires or corporations.
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We are leaning on our community more than ever to help make ends meet.
#Democrats #JonHusted #Midterms #Ohio #SherrodBrown
Speakers
5speakers8.9%attributed speech1,459writer words
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Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageCenter for American Progress
38 attributed words27% of attributed speech70% writer coverage
Biased Writer Voice+59.4 pts
Writer 41%Center for American Progress 100%
Attempt to Sell a Product or Service-3.9 pts
Writer 3.9%Center for American Progress 0%
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