Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

It's the 24-hour "news" channels.

I'm visiting my dad and his wife and if it was up to her, FN would be blaring on the TV, 24/7.  No matter how repetitive it is.  FN HAS to villainize Biden and MSNBC HAS to villainize Trump, etc.  If they don't, no one watches. 

People can remain civil if they get propaganda here and there.  Just the 30 min nightly news.  Just a magazine article.  Just a website.
But many expose themselves to it every waking minute and THAT radicalizes you.  It can't not. 

100% this. The cable news stations became freaking cash cows for big conglomerates corporations whose goal is not to inform the public but rather to get clicks and views in order to charge higher cable carry fees and charge advertisers higher ad rates. And they serve the interests of the almighty dollar and their big advertisers than they do the American people. Raytheon and Boeing for example don't spend gazillions of dollars on ads on those cable news channels to try and sell missiles and jets to Americans watching those channels. Just like Bill Gates doesn't donate hundreds of millions of dollars to media organizations out of the goodness of his heart. They do that sh*t for favorable narrative/coverage.

And the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter just push all that crazy sh*t from 24/7 cable news into an echo chamber and amplify it up even further.

With the internet it's easier than ever to ensure "the media" tells you exactly what you want to hear

I would say social media, and Facebook in particular, not the internet. The internet has changed the world. For the better. And there have been monumental world changing information/stories broken by the internet that would've never made it past the word go had the internet not existed. The best journalism out there today is from independent investigative reporters....on the internet.

The fact that mega corporations can't gate-keep information from the public anymore is only a great thing.

I think those other states you mention are all sorta the opposite. Isn't much of the "rust belt" hollowing out? Populations stagnant to declining? Potentially de-urbanizing as people in cities are leaving for better economic opportunities in the South / West, while the rural population, especially farming, remains right where they are?

When I think of Ohio, I think of a state where everyone who lives there loves it because there's no such thing as a "big city". There are a lot of medium-sized cities, all large enough to give people a wide range of experiences but none so large that they're anything like an NYC or LA or Chicago or Atlanta. You get all the advantages of cities without their worst excesses. But even then it's discussed upthread that Cinci and Cleveland are sort of hurting, while someplace with a major university / knowledge hub like Columbus is the one growing.

I get a similar sense with Wisconsin, where it's a more heavily rural state with Milwaukee which is a minor city. Detroit used to be a major city, but it's dead. Pittsburgh seems to be declining, but I'm sure Philly is still more healthy being close to the power centers of the East. I can't really tell re: MSP, it seems like a city that punches above its weight class but I'm not sure how much it dominates the state overall like Chicago or Atlanta or Phoenix or Denver does.

I dunno... You guys are the ones that live there. If you can offer more color, let me know.

Vis-a-vis Ohio:
If you remember back to the 2000 Election, most of the attention was on Florida but Ohio was almost as close.  Recall that Bush ended up winning the EC 271-266.  Ohio had 21 EV's then and went for Bush so flipping it would EASILY have flipped the election:

• 2,351,209 Bush 49.97%
• 2,186,190 Gore 46.46%
• 165,019 difference 0.51%

This was typical for Ohio for Generations.  If you've never heard of it, a group called Cook does a "Cook Political Value Index" that rates states, Congressional Districts, and other geographic areas by their partisan lean relative to the Country as a whole.  Ie, if your district matches the country as a whole you get a PVI of 0.  If you are 4% more Republican than the Country as a whole, you get a PVI of R+4.  If you are 6% more Democratic than the Country as a whole, you get a PVI of D+6. One advantage of this is that it accounts for landslides and really good or really bad candidates because we aren't just looking at how a district voted but how they voted relative to the Nation as a whole.  

For literally generations Ohio's PVI using this method would have been +/-2%.  Ohio was ALWAYS right on the line.  Examples:

• 2000 Gore beat Bush by 0.5% nationally, Bush beat Gore by 0.5% in Ohio indicating a PVI of R+1
• 2004 Bush beat Kerry by 2.4% nationally and by 2.1% in Ohio indicating a PVI of 0 
• 2008 Obama beat McCain by 7.2% nationally and by 4.6% in Ohio indicating a PVI of R+2.6
• 2012 Obama beat Romney by 4% nationally and by 3% in Ohio indicating a PVI of R+1
• 2016 Clinton beat Trump by 2% nationally, Trump beat Clinton by 8% in Ohio indicating a PVI of R+10
• 2020 Biden beat Trump by 4.5% nationally, Trump beat Biden by 8% in Ohio indicating a PVI of R+12.5

A mere 20 years ago, in 2004 Ohio voted slightly more Democratic than the nation as a whole.  Today that would be unthinkable.  

I remember, in 2004, that my dad, brother, and I drove to Chicago for an Ohio State game against Northwestern on October 2.  One thing I remember from the trip was how active the Presidential campaigns were in Ohio and how dead silent they were in Indiana and Illinois.  That makes sense.  Ohio was a fiercely competitive state so during the Ohio portion of our trip we heard nearly ceaseless radio ads for Bush and Kerry.  We actually saw both of their busses on the Ohio Turnpike (one on the way, the other on the way back).  Then we got to Indiana and . . . NOTHING.  Same in Illinois.  The campaigns spent NOTHING in Indiana because both sides knew that Bush would win there and they spent NOTHING in Illinois because both sides knew that Kerry would win there.  They spent lavishly in Ohio because it was up for grabs.  

On Ohio generally:
One thing I learned from a Marketing professor in College was that a lot of Marketing studies were conducted in Ohio because it made a pretty good proxy for the country as a whole.  The State had manufacturing, agriculture, shipping (both great lakes and Ohio River), a lot of medical.  Basically Ohio had most everything you would find in the Country and it tended to have it in roughly the same allocation as the country as a whole so if people in Ohio liked your widgets, they'd probably sell nationwide.  

Your summation of Ohio's cities is an interesting outsider take to me.  One funny side note is that there is some dispute as to Ohio's most populous City.  There are actually arguments for all three:

• Columbus has BY FAR the largest population IN the City.  
• Cleveland has the biggest media market.  
• Cincinnati has the most populous MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) but this includes a bunch of people who live in Kentucky and Indiana so if you are asking for "population in Ohio" they don't count.  

Ohio has more large cities than almost any other state (depending on how you define large). My point is, Ohio's most populous Cities are:

• 906k Columbus
• 373k Cleveland
• 309k Cincy
• 271k Toledo
• 190k Akron
• 138k Dayton
• 81k Parma  (Cleveland suburb)
• 71k Canton
• 65k Lorain
• 62k Hamilton

A few comparisons:

• Illinois:  Chicago is #1 and MUCH larger than anything in Ohio but their #2 is a Chicago suburb that would be #6 in Ohio.  
• Michigan:  Detroit is #1 at 639k and their second most populous city would be #5 in Ohio.  

A thing I think about Trump, and Obama, is that they strike me as being lazy.  They obviously love being adored and admired.  Neither seemed to me to get very involved and engaged with much of anything.  They could give a speech and disappear.

A mover and shaker like LBJ worked hard, like him or not.  LBJ got stuff DONE.  He knew the levers of power and knew what he wanted.  Even Bush II got a lot of legislation signed.  I didn't view him as that bright, but he wasn't lazy.  He worked at it.

I agree with utee here, four more years of Trump would be a lot of occasional bombast and Congress off trying to find some direction.  Trump probably would have some impact on foreign policy, Ukraine would probably be in bad shape.  I figure Ukraine is going to end up negotiating anyway, and no from any position of strength.

Trump would reverse some Biden EOs, but they MOSTLY do little, in my view.  Opening up new areas for drilling doesn't start more drilling necessarily.  Producers are producing now, under Biden's "war on oil" at record levels, and the price of oil isn't high enough to push some avalanche of new drilling.

I wouldn't say Obama was lazy. He was merely just a tool of the Democratic party establishment, it's Wall Street donors, and the military industrial complex. Just like most if not all politicians are today. His hope & change bullshit was some awesome marketing, but at the end of the day he didn't mean any of it. He endorsed the very worst of the policies of his predecessors Bush II and Clinton and expanded executive authority to unprecedented levels. He expanded illegally, the spying powers of the surveillance state, his foreign policy was a complete and utter disaster, he expanded the forever wars and fought new ones. He went on the warpath and led an assault on freedom of the press and whistleblowers as he prosecuted more whistleblowers than every president before him....combined. He was: not very good. Nor that liberal.

As for Trump, he 100% got rolled by people he should've never let close (scoundrels like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo) he did have to fight through all kinds of bullsh*t investigations (RussiaGateLOL) and two impeachment attempts- the last one which likely caused him to renege on his word to pardon heroic journalists and whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. He was also of course hit with COVID for the last 9 months of his administration- which was a disaster. Despite all that, I tend to agree with you that he didn't not really seem to be good at getting stuff done at home. Could that be lack of caring too? Could that be laziness? Could that be lack of know how in getting Democrats to work with him? I don't really know. What I do know is this: the two areas where Trump is vastly superior to any President that came before him in the last 40 years are his views on trade and his views on foreign policy.

As for Ukraine- well Ukraine already is in terrible shape, and it's not getting any better for them- and that's precisely in large part because of the foreign policy of the current administration, the Obama administration, Bush II administration, and Clinton administration. Doesn't really matter who is President of the United States at this point, Ukraine is utterly and completely f*cked and stuck in a war it cannot ever win. The population of the country has shrunk from 42 million to 26 million, there have been countless millions of Ukrainians who have fled to other countries, the real death toll is orders of magnitude of what's been reported, and the country is effectively destroyed and what is left is a rump state that is effectively a colony of the United States of America and will collapse into a failed state the second US dollars stop propping it up.

As far as oil goes- the biggest sea change Trump will do is reel the Saudis back in. They are all that matters when it comes to the oil trade. They are the king shit. Biden can't get them to take his phone calls and when he flew over there to try and meet the Crown Prince he was refused. MbS loves himself some Trump. The Saudis will go back to playing ball with Trump and increase output or decrease output whenever and wherever it is beneficial to the United States.

What's the best example of this?

guess you've never heard of WikiLeaks or The Intercept? 

Rep. Adam Schiff raises concerns about Biden ability to beat Trump (thehill.com)

Adam Schiff is a sniveling, lying, pathetic, two faced dirtbag. That's all. 

Biden ain't dropping out. He's dug in. And if he did step down all that money that's been raised for his campaign would have to go to....Kamala Harris. 

I believe I just saw that Kamala Harris is down 10 points to Trump in Georgia post-assassination attempt. Ten points. She's a literal moron and an even worse candidate than Biden. Biden at least has an excuse, he's very old and is suffering from dementia. Kamala is just a f*cking moron. 

This is really fascinating. What I take away from this is not that Ohio necessarily changed. But there's something about Ohioans that make them just LOVE them some Trump. Because I find it hard to believe the state made an 8-10 point swing overall in political party preference in 4-8 years between 2012 and '16 or '20.

There's nothing that I can see in demographic changes that would explain that.

Any thoughts?

Maybe its just that independents have gone bigtime for Trump

Biden has really been a very bad President and the whole country knows it