How you know Republicans believe their suck-tacular Ohio polls

Ohio has picked the winner in 18 of the last 20 presidential elections since World War II. It missed twice. 1960, Nixon won the state, but Kennedy won the country. 2020, when Trump won the state but lost everything else. Trump then carried Ohio by 11 points in 2024. The Cook Political Report rates it five points more Republican than the nation as a whole. Swing-state Ohio hasn’t existed since Trump rode that escalator down through the opened gates of hell. This is Ridiculously Red Republican Ohio, where the GOP legislature prides itself on having its maps ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court seven times and drawing the same gerrymander anyway, the kind of place where Senator JD Vance accuses his own constituents of eating pets, where MAGA basically pretends Democrats only exist as trans vegan stress balls until they have to do otherwise.

Well, now they have to.

A Fox News poll of 1,015 registered Ohio voters found Sherrod Brown, the excellent senator Republicans spent tens of millions to retire in 2024, leading appointed Senator Jon Husted by eight points, 53 to 45. The governor’s race is a coin flip: Democrat Amy Acton at 50, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy at 49. The favorability numbers are worse than the head-to-heads. Trump has gone from net +6 in Ohio’s 2024 exit polling to net -15 today. JD Vance, Ohio’s own vice president, has gone from +5 to -7. Mike DeWine, who won reelection two years ago with 62 percent of the vote, has cratered from +12 to dead even.

Charlie Cook, who has covered Republican Ohio for decades, used a phrase that you haven’t heard much since back when Ohio was a swing state: Trump may have “jumped the shark.”

That same Thursday, FBI agents raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group that has spent nearly twenty years registering voters in Black and Latino communities across the Buckeye State. Agents seized laptops. They went to staffers’ homes. The Justice Department says it’s investigating the group’s voter registration work, part of the administration’s ongoing search for the mass voter fraud Trump has spent six years promising and never produced.

“It’s clear that this administration is fishing to try to drum up stories around fraud,” Prentiss Haney, a board member and former director of the organization, told NBC News, adding that the raid carried “mob boss energy.” He said the target wasn’t fraud. It was “civil rights leaders and community leaders and folks who are doing that work, because they don’t see a path for themselves to actually legitimately hold power beyond this year.” Ohio Congresswoman Shontel Brown called it “an unprecedented attack on democracy” and demanded the FBI explain itself.

Compare this with actual election-related fraud committed by employees of Elon Musk, a man who, the very next day, turned an estimated $31.5 billion in net income from Tesla, PayPal, and SpaceX into a trillion—a thousand billion—after purchasing the presidency.

In February, the Georgia State Election Board found that Elon Musk’s America PAC had actually broken the law — sending Georgia voters in five counties partially pre-filled absentee ballot applications, in violation of a statute that restricts who can do that, and without disclosing that the mailers weren’t official government documents. “Despite all his bluster about voter fraud, Elon Musk has been one of the most flagrant flouters of US election law,” The Verge reported.

The board’s response was a formal letter of reprimand. No fines. No charges. America PAC didn’t even send anyone to the hearing.

As Marcy Wheeler noted when the Ohio news broke, Georgia found Musk’s PAC violated the rules on its mail-in ballot operation in 2024, and the FBI has never raided him for it. No one went to his employees’ homes. No one even checked in on all his employees he impregnated.

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative registers voters. Musk’s PAC sent voters ballot applications it wasn’t legally allowed to send, and got a strongly worded letter.

One of those got the FBI barging into their lives. The other got a trillion dollars.

It’s worth remembering, too, that this isn’t the administration’s first swing at this particular pitch. Ohio’s Republican secretary of state referred a batch of noncitizen-registration cases to the Justice Department back in October — and nothing happened with those referrals for eight months. Then a Fox poll showed Ohio Republicans underwater up and down the ballot, and within hours, the FBI was at a voter registration nonprofit’s door.

The referral didn’t get any more urgent. The polling did.

If you want to do something with this today: Movement Voter Project has set up a Democracy Defense Fund for the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and the partners around the country facing the same pressure.

As I’ve said repeatedly, MVP is, dollar for dollar, one of the best places for your money right now. It backs the exact organizations being targeted while building community infrastructure that won’t disappear after November. This is how we build the pro-democracy movement, prepare for 2028, and do all we can to make sure these midterms make a statement so loud for freedom that Trump can hear it in the ballroom bunker already in his head.

We know this, and the seizing of ballots in Georgia is just the beginning. Ari Berman laid out the whole plan to rig November’s elections last fall. It now reads like Trump’s almost complete to-do list.

So what else can we do?

My project, the Trillionaire Kill Chain, which I invite you to back, is about making sure the reward for wrecking our federal government, sentencing millions of the meekest on earth to death, and looting the taxpayers for decades isn’t a trillion dollars. To do that, we must expose what happens when the people running the government also run the information environment, the artificial influence machines, and the Justice Department. Rigging a gap between who the rules apply to and who gets to rule is their entire game.

Thursday in Ohio, you could watch that gap open in real time, in both directions at once. One group raided for registering voters, another let off with a letter for breaking the law to elect the president who now runs the FBI.

Republicans believe the polls.

Husted is down eight, Ramaswamy can’t hit 50, and DeWine just lost twelve points of approval in two years. So on Thursday, the FBI didn’t go after the rigged election. It went after the people trying to hold a real one.

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