Arthur Eversman is the kind of voter Donald Trump and the Republicans are worried about. The Ohioan has voted for Trump in the past, but at this midterm election, he’s not going to vote at all.
“I believe that votes are a way to keep us at bay,” he says. “We have no say in the world – it’s already predetermined. Anyone that says otherwise is just ignorant to the things, the structuring of everything.”
The 31-year-old is sitting at the bar of the Mason Jar Steakhouse in Wapakoneta, a small town in west-central Ohio, drinking a Coors Light and pulling tabs – a cardboard lottery game popular in this region. He wins $US4 ($5.70).
In many ways, Eversman is a typical Trump Republican – male, white, rural area of the Midwest, labourer (he makes laundry detergent at a nearby factory), and inclined towards a conspiratorial view of politics.
But he doesn’t like the “magical war with Iran”, especially the impact it’s having on the price of fuel. Eversman owns a car, a utility, a dump truck and a motorhome, most of which run on diesel.
“We had nothing to do with [Iran] prior,” he says. “Now we have everything to do with it. The cost of everything has gone up. The relief on everything is non-existent. We’re just continuing these proxy wars and paying for them, yet the ramifications are on us directly.”
These are the voters – past supporters who have drifted or may not bother voting this year – whom Trump wants to reach with his whistle-stop campaign tour. It has taken him to Ohio twice in nine days, along with other red states including Texas, Alabama, Montana, Oklahoma and Alaska.
The US president will soon visit Georgia, Kentucky and Wichita in Kansas and is leaving Washington almost every day for rallies where he begs conservatives to “pretend I’m on the ballot” and show up to vote.
Democrats love it – Trump’s approval ratings are at record lows, so they are happy for Republicans to turn the midterms into a referendum on him. But that doesn’t make it a foolish strategy: in a country where voting is optional, and most people can’t stand the other side, turning out to vote is the biggest hurdle.
Tens of millions more Americans voted in the 2024 presidential election than in the 2022 midterms. Finding them and getting them to vote again is the key, says Republican strategist Matt Terrill. “[Trump] has got that deep following within the MAGA movement, the Republican base, and among many independent, undecided voters who perhaps voted for him in 2024,” he says.
Ohio is crucial. One of its Senate seats is up for re-election: the spot occupied by Jon Husted, who replaced JD Vance when Trump tapped him to be vice president. The Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up against Democrat Sherrod Brown, who was a senator for Ohio from 2007 to 2025.
It is one of several toss-up seats that could lead to the Republicans losing control of the Senate to the Democrats. That includes Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine and even Texas, which has not sent a Democrat to the US Senate since 1988. Democrats need a net gain of four to win control.
Staggering amounts of money are being spent on the Ohio Senate race alone – more than $US400 million ($577 million) so far. Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist from North Carolina, says it could be the closest of all the Senate races and will be up there with Texas for the most expensive.
Rust-belt Ohio used to be a battleground state, but has moved to the right with the advent of Trump, who won it three times – with a higher margin each time (11 percentage points over Kamala Harris in 2024). But it is one of the states Republicans are most worried about this time.
“It’s safe to say Ohio is generally a centre-right state,” says Greg Lawson, senior research fellow at the Buckeye Institute, a conservative Ohio think tank. “When you get outside a lot of urban and suburban areas, what you’ll find is that it’s pretty culturally conservative, but it’s a little more fiscally moderate – very blue collar, very pro labour union. It’s an interesting mix.”
Lawson acknowledges a shift to the Democrats is coming, not only because the midterms almost always shift against the party in the White House, but due to pervasive economic headwinds: inflation and high petrol prices caused by the war in Iran. Ohio’s outgoing Republican governor, Mike DeWine, this month suspended the state’s motor fuel tax for 90 days.
“Gas is a big deal,” Lawson says. “People are having a hard time dealing with the cost of groceries, dealing with property tax spikes. Some of that is maybe not as bad today as it was last year and the year before that, but it is the cumulative effect that’s really hurting people.”
Lawson is speaking to this masthead after a Columbus Metropolitan Club event with the Republican candidate for Ohio governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, who previously ran for president.
Ramaswamy tells the crowd the cost of living is a major concern across the state – “there’s no denying it” – and is promising to roll back property taxes to pre-COVID levels.
But it is notable that on key issues – affordability and the proliferation of AI data centres – the message coming from Trump and his administration is often at odds with what Republicans are saying on the ground.
Trump is telling voters that the economy has never been better and that prices of everyday goods are coming down, which is untrue. At rallies this week, he said inflation was 1.7 per cent for the past three months when actually it was about 3.5 per cent.
And the president says communities that reject data centres will end up “backwards and poor”. Ramaswamy is pledging a more nuanced policy that would compel developers to show that a facility would benefit the community.
Try telling that to Brandyn Bernard. The 37-year-old from Pataskala, east of Columbus, voted for Trump three times and used to fly a MAGA flag outside his home. Now, owing to his staunch opposition to data centres, Bernard is campaigning for the Democrats.
“I would rather be broke and the town be trashed than allow a data centre into the community,” he says. “If they’re so good, why don’t they put one next to Mar-a-Lago [Trump’s luxury resort] or the White House?”
But in Wapakoneta outside the early voting centre, it’s a different story. Retirees Bruce and Susan Rinehart (no relation to Gina) are big fans of data centres – “It’s just a big warehouse that’s got items in it,” says Bruce – and even bigger fans of Trump.
“He inherited a big freakin’ mess. It takes a while to undo the mess that was there,” says Bruce, 70. “If [the Democrats] get elected, they’ll do the same thing again. They’ll open up the borders and flood the country just like before, and it’ll be another mess, probably worse.”
Susan, 72, agrees. “The 9.1 inflation rate that Biden left us all with, and no eggs – very unhappy with Democrat policies.” Inflation peaked at 9.1 per cent under Joe Biden, but was down to 3 per cent when he left office.
The couple have different explanations for polls showing Democrats on track to win. Bruce notes that polls are often wrong and says journalists are “basically Democrat operatives”, while Susan contends that the country’s children are being indoctrinated and don’t understand the true dangers of communism and socialism.
“One thing I can assure you,” Bruce says. “If the Republicans don’t win, there won’t be rioting in the street like if the Democrats don’t win. There won’t be burning down cities, breaking glass. You lick your wounds and you do better the next time. You don’t go and create a fight.”
Auglaize County, like its neighbours, is heavily Republican – Trump won more than 80 per cent of the vote in 2024. For those who are battling higher prices or any other malady, the inclination is to blame the other side (Biden).
Sean Dodds arrives to vote in a golf buggy. “It’s a lot cheaper on the gas,” the 52-year-old professional driver says. But asked if he is affected by the war in Iran, Dodds says: “Not that I know of, no.” He knows people are complaining about price rises, but “to me, that stuff all happened three or four years ago, and now we’re just coming back to the ramifications of it, I guess”.
It’s a similar message down the road at the Pratt Paper Mill, owned by Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt. The Wapakoneta factory was opened by Trump and then-Australian prime minister Scott Morrison in 2019. A plaque with their names on it sits just outside the front office.
Ted Zwiebel, 31, has worked at the plant for three years and calls himself a conservative independent who will vote Republican. He voted for Trump, and his admiration for the president is undimmed.
“He doesn’t do everything I like, but he gets the majority of it right,” Zwiebel says. “I think he’s doing exactly what he said he was gonna do. Nothing is going to be easy when you’ve got to start from the bottom.”
Still, there are diehard MAGA supporters in Zwiebel’s family who are starting to have doubts about Trump and whether he is acting on his promises.
“It’s mainly financial,” he says. “It has to do with the groceries, the gases … I get 11 miles for the gallon in my truck. It costs me $US120 a week to get to work here, and I only live 11 miles away. So I know why they’re upset. But at the same time, we all knew what he was going to do when we voted him in.”
But didn’t he say no more foreign wars? “He did. He did say no more foreign wars, and that’s what gets a lot of people, is when we’re over in Iran. But that’s something that probably I don’t understand; he [Trump] probably don’t even really understand. I don’t think a lot of people really understand what’s going on in Iran.”
Zwiebel estimates just one in 10 people in this area are Democrats. One of them is Christopher Gibbs, a 68-year-old cattle, corn and soybean farmer on 560 acres. He used to be the local Republican Party chairman, but quit in protest of Trump in 2019 and now chairs the Shelby County Democrats.
When this masthead meets him at his farm in Maplewood, he is in the shed with a massive John Deere combine harvester. It costs $US1000 to fill up with diesel, he says – nearly double – and he has to refuel every two or three days.
Gibbs says ranchers and rural communities are tiring of the Trump administration. Tariffs, the see-sawing trade wars with China and Canada and soaring energy costs have all contributed.
“He promised the golden age of agriculture – we’re still in a cashflow and working capital crisis. We’re in our third year of that, losing money,” Gibbs says.
“As a Democrat in a ruby red area like this, you never want to expect folks to say they were wrong. That’s not the way to grow a bigger tent.
“But these folks understand now that they were lied to, and they’re starting to clear their throat. They’re starting to say: ‘Hey, this isn’t quite what we signed up for’.”
In Columbus, the state capital that is also home to Ohio State University, political strategist Greg Lawson is expecting a nail-biting finish on election night. It will be a test of how much goodwill Trump and the GOP have built up in this increasingly conservative state, and whether voters are ready to try out the Democrats again. A similar test awaits in key states across the country.
“If there is the proverbial blue wave, I would say that there are higher sandbags in Ohio than there would be in a lot of other states,” Lawson says. “There’s nothing you can do if it’s a complete and utter tsunami … [but] I think these are all going to be fairly close races at the end of the day. Has Ohio built up enough of those sandbags? That’s the big question.”
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.