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Fugleberg: Better question - who lost Ohio this week?

Jeremy Fugleberg
jfugleberg@enquirer.com
Who Won Ohio

If presidential campaigns were romantic comedies (and come on, they are), this would be the part of the movie when things get a little difficult. The bloom is off the rose.

Yes, welcome back to Who Won Ohio This Week, our weekly tongue-in-cheek look at the presidential race in Ohio to determine which candidate most deserves to walk the Buckeye red carpet and lift the golden statuette.

This is not a four-star review. There are only 40-ish days left in the campaign, which would indicate things should really be heating up here. We're a swing state long considered a bellwether voting bloc and a must-win state for a Republican candidate.

Jeremy Fugleberg

So who won Ohio this week?

Plot twist! Nobody won Ohio this week. But there was a real loser: us, the audience – Ohio voters.

Hold in that rage and hear me out. We're still being bombarded by advertisements, but neither Republican Donald Trump nor Democrat Hillary Clinton spent any time here in the last week. Heck, even Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein aren't coming out of their trailers (but they are trying to name their favorite foreign leaders with mixed success).

The emerging theme of the movie is this: They're just not into us.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shakes hands during a rally Sept. 14 in Canton.

The reviews, most amplified by a New York Times piece late in the week, aren't great.  Ohio may not be as needed as it was in the past. Both Trump and Clinton have ways to win the White House without wooing Ohioans. Pennsylvania and Florida are all the rage right now.

Ohio may even lose some of its bellwether lustre. The state doesn't reflect the nation as much as it used to, particularly with its lack of Latino voters – something we at The Enquirer noted earlier this year. Ohio is increasingly whiter than the nation as a whole. And, there's a split between Ohio and the national vote. At last check, Trump is maintaining his narrow 1.8-point lead over Clinton in Ohio, according to the latest head-to-head polling average by Real Clear Politics.  Nationally, Clinton is up an average of 2.9 points.

So should Trump be declared the winner of Ohio this week? We can't say that either. The polls in Ohio haven't moved this week, mostly because as of Friday morning, there were no new poll results about Ohio. There's a two-word answer as to why: The Debate. Monday night's debate was billed by both campaigns and most pundits as a big event, with many voters saying they would watch it. It hardly makes any sense to poll just before the debate, because your results would be made meaningless if the debate changed a lot of minds.

It's still too early to say how Ohioans felt about the debate. By early next week, we'll probably have a better idea. The earliest national polling would indicate Clinton won the debate, but again, Ohio may not longer reflect the nation. We have to wait and see.

All this is not to say we're completely ignored. The advertising campaign continues, of course, and Trump vice presidential pick Mike Pence visited earlier in the week. Other surrogates have made the trip as well, including former Clinton primary foe and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, for a get-out-the-vote rally on Friday. Bill, Clinton's husband-you-may-have-heard-of, is making a bus tour of Ohio next week. And after the New York Times' critical piece, the Clinton campaign announced the candidate herself will be in Ohio on Monday . As of Friday, Trump has no Ohio plans at least through next Monday.

So, here's the sad part of the movie. The candidates haven't exactly broken up with us, but we're not feeling very valued either. It's hard to say for sure if that'll change, but we here at Who Won Ohio sure hope so.

After all, who likes a downer ending?