Six days before the midterm elections, Jacob Hawk, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, leaped over the vinyl fencing to grab Vivek Ramaswamy’s interest. Hawk held onto Ramaswamy’s hand and started trying to tell him everything he was dealing with, whatever he wanted the Republican candidates gathered there to help him with.
Hawk, 39, informed him that he was a self-employed roofer who was struggling with the large fuel cost. He told him that he was raising three younger boys from two different parents, mainly on his own. He informed him of his concerns for his brother, who was disabled, overweight, and had a two-year brain development delay.
Ramaswamy, a biomedical businessman, nodded and offered some key comfort and moved down the line, toward the area where he would soon be appearing with President Donald Trump and Sen. Jon Husted and the rest of the Democratic stone in a state that Trump had won by 11 percentage points two years ago, and which the party had dominated during the era of Trump. I had attended numerous Democratic rallies in the state during that time, including one held in a huge crowd outside of Dayton in March 2016 where Trump’s flight had rolled into view and where he had declared that he had come to save Ohio. ” Our jobs are being sucked away”, he said next. It’s incredible what’s happening, they say.
This occurrence was unique. The harsh bombast of Trump, the conquering hero, was gone, brimming with promises and retribution, ten years later. This march was populated mostly by the same kind of voters who had been particularly drawn to Trump all along, working-class Midwesterners who had not been engaged in politics before he came on the scene. However, there were fewer of them because the battle had chosen an area with only 2, 000 seats, and their passion had been squelched by uncertainty. They were still with Trump, but they weren’t convinced how to balance their own problems with the notion that he was the leader during this trying occasion.
Acquire gas charges, which, according to Hawk, “are beating the hell out of me.” He was trying his best not to hold them against Trump and his decision to go to war against Iran, rather faulting Congress for limiting private oil cutting. Trump’s party has ruled both houses of Congress during his second term, meaning that the president must travel there because Congress hasn’t let him get it there.
Outside, Debbie Shock, a 57-year-old mail carrier, blamed the higher gasoline prices on” the stock exchange, the industry — they’re the ones that control it”. She said,” We have oil right here in the United States.” ” Why are we buying it from other places to begin with”?
Shock matched the status of an Obama-Trump vote I had gotten to know also in 2016. She was obedient to Trump—” I like the person. No one is best, you get what I mean, right? — and told me she would never go back to Democrats today. Why no? I asked. They are” covering up the child molestation,” she said. What did she mean by that? ” I’ve heard rumors about the sexual trafficking. The Story are involved in it, Disney World, you know, all that”.
It would be simple to mock such dark language, but it was not significantly less clear than what quickly appeared on the industry phase, which was streamed on a big screen for the few hundred of us who were on the lawn outside the arena. Trump has never been known for organised oratory, but it is hard to overstate the extent to which his prolix style has advanced since 2016, and to express how strange it is to encounter first, as the reality of what political communication has come to in 2026.
The rally started with the customary introductory video of late-80s Trump, which is explicitly messianic in its language:” God said, I need someone who will be strong and courageous,” the voice-over intones. ” So God made Trump”.
Trump then introduced him by beginning his remarks with a lengthy investigation into Husted’s body, which had just begun to become a part of his routine. ” I looked at Jon and studied his physique”, he cooed, after referring to his recent comments on Husted’s “ass”. I examined the shoulders, the legs, and the feet. I tapped him on the shoulder, and it was like hitting a piece of steel”.
Trump addressed a protester outside the arena with the words” now he goes home and his boyfriend gets upset with him” and said,” Those of us outside couldn’t hear what.
There were protesters outside, too, and things were starting to heat up between them and the supporters. What are you referring to, “boyfriend?” shouted one protester, a young man. He was merely referring to Jon Husted’s ass! That’s not gay? “”?
A supporter in front of me, a bearded man in his 50s, stewed as he watched the protesters. As he began to move toward them, he growled, “You’re going to see someone dropping like a bad habit,” before being slowed down by the woman who was with him.
A moment later, Trump had moved on to Jeffrey Epstein, saying that the Democrats had protected him for years. Jeffrey Epstein was declared,” I threw the hell out of Mar-a-Lago.” ” I was the one who was totally exonerated from him. But because of that, they use it. They’re sick, weak people”.
As cries of “pedophiles,” this sparked a new round of outside screaming! flew back and forth.
One Trump supporter standing next to me suddenly slammed hard at a protester, landing his head so badly on the blacktop that I initially assumed it might have been a shotgun. Dozens of officers swarmed to the spot. Cameras flashed.
A few moments later, a couple other protesters, also young men, began railing against the war against Iran. One person yelled,” We’re going to be the ones who are sent off to die for Israel.” America First,’ and you want me to die in the Middle East”?
Trump touched on the war, noting that” they’re getting beaten very badly,” but he spent much more time on the renovations of his home. ” The White House has to be beautiful outside, it needs that exterior plaster. The beautiful windows were cracked, the stone was broken, the monuments were coming off, and it looked terrible, and I quickly fixed it, and it is now more beautiful than ever, he said. ” And President Obama, who doesn’t understand cleanliness, who doesn’t understand broken cracked stone and sidewalks, who doesn’t understand that having asphalt going to your main entrance is not the right thing, we’d like to have granite and marble we’d like to have it look nice, you don’t use asphalt, you use asphalt for your streets. “”
On the ramble went. To the Haitians in Springfield, Springfield says,” The town went from zero to high crime,” but they are being moved out. To a riff on Ramaswamy’s ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s mother calling her a liar, in apparent reference to Acton’s having accused her stepfather of raping her when she was 12, as he was subsequently charged with doing. Trump defended Ramaswamy despite the ad’s widespread approbation. ” The mother said that Amy Acton, the daughter, is a liar, that she is no good. How come that is his issue, really? To” O Canada, which has been ripping us off for years”, and Somalia,” which isn’t even a country”, and” transgender mutilization”, and his plan to rename the Strait of Hormuz for himself.
In the end, Trump gave the stage to Ramaswamy and Husted. But by then, the lawn had emptied out as people drifted home, Jacob Hawk among them. A vendor was offering discounts on his MAGA products. “$ 10 special on hats! $ 10 for each hat! These are normally$ 25 hats. That’s a good hat for$ 10.
The next day, the full Republican slate of statewide candidates appeared, sans Trump, at a small pep rally inside a former Delphi auto-parts factory in Vandalia, outside Dayton. It is a massive building with more than 100 employees before closing in 2009 and is currently being used as a warehouse by a company that sells air conditioners. With only about 10 employees, Delphi announcements have remained on the bulletin boards, giving it a ghostly vibe.
The setting was an unintentional reminder of what Ohio has been through. The state lost 300, 000 manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2025, a devastation that had made it especially susceptible to Trump’s message in 2016. But Republicans have been in charge of the state since 2010, and so it was the task of the candidates gathered there, with an audience of just a few dozen, to cast the state as being on an upswing. The fact that Columbus has a lot of recent growth is compounded by numerous data centers, defense contractor Anduril, and a sizable Intel plant that is being built complicates this issue.
The bigger challenge, though, was the nationwide pall that hung over the event: the reality of stubbornly high inflation and high gas prices, the latter a direct consequence of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. He carried the same banner in 2024 as he did when he ran in 2016 against expensive foreign embezzlements in opposition to his party’s recent performance. But another aspect of his political persona had prevailed: a heedless swagger that, in this case, had been fanned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He had been sucked into this drawn-out conflict that has already cost taxpayers more than$ 47 billion.
And it had left a long row of Republican candidates standing in this giant building stacked high with made-in-China air conditioners all but pleading the small assemblage to save them from the political climate. Husted once said,” You can’t give up.” ” This is a Republican state, and the only way Democrats can win is if Republicans don’t vote”.
Five days later, I was in York County, Pennsylvania, where Democrats targeted one of four Republican-held House districts and which Trump had won by 25 points in 2024. I chose to go to a precinct on the outskirts of York, thinking it would offer a diverse cross-section, in between more Democratic York proper and more Republican rural areas. However, after 90 minutes of conversations, I didn’t actually meet a Republican voter until just before I canceled my appointment.
The first person I spoke with, Bill, a 52-year-old state government employee who asked that I not use his last name for fear of losing his job, had voted for Trump three times. He hardly ever considered himself MAGA, but he was drawn to Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric and his opposition to the Iraq war in 2016 as a whole. He voted for him again in 2020 and 2024 because he didn’t think much of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
However, Bill was coming to the vote against Scott Perry, his Republican representative, because he was too” Trump adjacent” to him on this occasion. Bill had finally had enough of Trump, especially when it came to all the revelations of self-dealing involving his family and cronies. He declared,” I will not be falling for him once more.” ” Drain the swamp, no wars. … Everything was a lie.
He said he couldn’t understand how Trump had gone from America First to seemingly letting the country’s foreign policy be dictated by Israel. He claimed that he was voting for the Democrats primarily for “gridlock” as a deliberate blockade. ” Someone’s got to stop this”, he said. It’s “gets out of control,” it says.
Each Democratic voter I spoke with after that was coming with their own motivation for voting against the Republican slate, like the cast of” Murder on the Orient Express”.
For Annie, it was for Trump’s social-welfare cuts, which had cost her and her disabled husband$ 300 per month in SNAP benefits and nearly cost them their Medicaid coverage.
For Desiree Edmonds, an elementary school teacher, it was high inflation, which was translating into anxiety among the working-class children in her classroom.
The sky-high cost of diesel was the subject of Mark Castillo, a 19-year-old ironworker.
For Jacqueline Jimenez, a native Puerto Rican who worked as a home-health aide, it was for the excessive harshness of ICE arrests.
Shiri Kramer, a warehouse worker, was moved by the administration’s general disregard for the victims of World War II. ” My grandfather would be writhing right now”, she said. Nothing in our nation is in order, the statement goes.
By night’s end, Republicans had lost this Pennsylvania district by 10 points, as well as the other three in the state and more than 40 nationwide. They had lost at least seven Senate seats, including in Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina, which Democrats hadn’t won in decades. Incredibly, even Mississippi was on the verge. Republicans lost the race for governor and senator in Ohio, only one of the seven statewide candidates on stage at the warehouse to win, as well as two Republican-held House seats, a stark turnaround in a state that had appeared to be trending away from Democrats for the long run. In all, Democrats flipped five governorships and up to 12 state legislative chambers. The Democratic popular-vote margin in congressional races across the country was 13 percentage points, which is nearly twice the Republican margin in their own wave years of 2010 and 1994 and comparable to the historic Democratic rout in the post-Watergate election of 1974.
The particularly stunning loss of the South Carolina seat brought to mind a warning issued in May 2016 by Lindsey Graham, whose death this July left the seat vacant. ” We will be destroyed if we nominate Trump,” the saying goes. and we will deserve it”, Graham tweeted in 2016. The Republican Party had for years avoided the catastrophic reckoning he warned of, through Biden’s fateful insistence on running for reelection at the age of 81 in 2024, and Trump’s win in 2016 through the Capitol assault on January 6, 2021. Along the way, much of the party, including Graham himself, had accommodated itself to Trump. The warning had finally come true, according to one interpretation of the results from 2026. The reckoning had been delayed by a decade, but it had gathered more force over time, like a boulder rolling downhill.
The words that Bill, the three-time Trump voter, left me with in York lent a hint of such a reckoning. After he returned from voting, he bade me farewell with a parting regret.
He said,” You see what’s going on,” and you’re like,” What the hell did I do?”
The post On the Ground in the Final Days Before Trump’s Midterm Debacle appeared first on ProPublica.
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