http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/us/politics/donald-trump-ohio.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0Donald Trump Finds Himself Playing Catch-Up in All-Important OhioBy TRIP GABRIEL
JULY 4, 2016
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Since the Republican Party’s 19th-century founding, not one of its nominees has won the White House without carrying Ohio, a most diverse and perennially hard-fought state.
But as Republicans head to Cleveland to nominate Donald J. Trump in two weeks, a convention city chosen with Battleground Ohio much in mind, a vortex of headwinds are rising against Mr. Trump in the state.
The barely concealed disdain of Gov. John R. Kasich, a former rival who has not endorsed the presumptive nominee, echoes through the state’s Republican leadership, whose full engagement in the fall campaign will be needed to turn out voters.
Images of disunity in Cleveland, where delegates are gathering July 18-21 in the shadow of local polls showing a majority of Republicans prefer a different nominee, could make it harder for the party to attract grass-roots activists for the fall campaign.
Mr. Trump ignored Ohio for six weeks after clinching the nomination, until a visit last week to coal country, where he spoke to an audience of largely white working-class voters, including some Democrats. It was the group he has performed best with in primaries and polls.
But in describing a trade deal during the same visit as a “rape of our country,” his oratory and protectionist policies are turning off other Republican-leaning voters, including suburban women and business interests, in a state whose economy depends on global exports.
“If you look at the primary and extrapolate, Trump could get two-thirds of the white working class,” said John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron. That would improve on Mitt Romney’s share of these voters in Ohio in 2012, when the state slipped from his grasp by only 103,000 votes.
“The flip side is Trump’s appeal to white working-class men very well may cost him other kinds of Republican voters,” Mr. Green said.
Public polling of Ohio, which has been scant, shows Hillary Clinton with an average lead of 2.5 percentage points.
Mrs. Clinton and her supporters are already spending heavily in the state on ads to define Mr. Trump negatively, and last week Mrs. Clinton visited Cincinnati with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who electrified the crowd by mocking Mr. Trump for running a campaign no deeper than the slogans on his “goofy” hats.
A recent Quinnipiac Poll of Ohio, showing the race deadlocked, indicated women were moving toward Mrs. Clinton while Mr. Trump’s strength among men was unchanged.
Bob Seszko, a school bus mechanic from rural Blair, Ohio, said he voted for Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary but planned to vote for Mr. Trump in November. In the 1980s, he had made good money at a steel plant in the Ohio River Valley — until it closed.
“Overseas was selling it cheaper than we could make it, so I lost my job,” he said. “I think Trump’s more sincere than Hillary is. She’s riding on the coattails of her husband.”
Mr. Trump’s appeal to such voters is likely to be strong, especially in the industrial region around Youngstown and Akron.
That he has kept the race tight even after weeks of negative news — about his visit to Scotland, his firing of his campaign manager and his congratulating himself after the nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla. — is a testament to the strength of Mr. Trump’s appeal with his base, as well as the polarization of the electorate.
To counter the threat, Mrs. Clinton and her supporters began a barrage of general-election television ads in Ohio and other swing states in May, and for the Fourth of July weekend, they planned a $13 million blitz mostly in Ohio and Florida.
Mr. Trump, who is skeptical of TV ads and short on campaign cash, has not bought any general election ads in the state. The first ad supporting him from an outside group, the National Rifle Association, featuring a survivor of the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, was just rolled out.
“I’ve gotten to the point where I feel so much of this is on the Trump campaign,” said Matt Borges, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party..
He said Mr. Trump recently called him after reading that Mrs. Clinton was far ahead in hiring field staff members in Ohio.
In March, Mr. Borges and other Republican leaders in the state bluntly warned that if Mr. Trump were the nominee, he could not carry their perennially close-fought state.
“We want to distance ourselves from the kind of rhetoric that Donald Trump is using to divide Americans,” Mr. Borges said at the time. “If Donald Trump is unfortunately our choice and our nominee, it could imperil not only the race for the White House but many other candidates down-ticket.”
The state’s Republican leaders, who supported their native son Mr. Kasich before his withdrawal from the race, no longer openly scorn Mr. Trump. But they pick their words carefully, withholding full support.
“A great many people in Ohio are watching Mr. Trump closely to see if over the weeks and months he will emerge as an individual of presidential stature,” said Brad Sinnott, chairman of the Republican Central Committee of Franklin County, which includes Columbus, the capital. “There is some work to be done.”
Mr. Trump, who has signaled a strategy of outsourcing grass-roots organizing to the national party, hired a state director only late last month. The Republican National Committee, which promised last year to hire more than 200 field staff members in the state, has about 50 now, and has yet to open its first Ohio office.
The Clinton campaign, which declined to say how many staff members it has in Ohio, is also coordinating with state and national Democrats, who collectively have more than 100 people in the field, said Kirstin Alvanitakis, a state party spokeswoman. The Clinton campaign plans to open offices across the state in the coming weeks.
Mr. Trump’s appeal helped drive record turnout in the primary in March. “I told him we had a million new Republicans,” Mr. Borges recalled of a conversation he had with Mr. Trump. “He asked, ‘Is that because of me?’”
“I told him yes,” he said.
What he did not tell the presumptive nominee is that many Republican primary voters came out to vote against the New York businessman, who received nearly 36 percent of the vote in the contest, which Mr. Kasich won.
“You don’t have a stop-Trump movement without Trump,” Mr. Borges said.
