Fox News: “Ohio has long played a crucial role in presidential elections. It was famously the state that put President George W. Bush over the top in 2004, as he won a second term in the White House. President Barack Obama narrowly carried the state in 2008 and 2012. Trump’s margin of victory was the largest by any presidential candidate in nearly three decades. Fast forward four years and Ohio – at the beginning of this presidential cycle — wasn’t expected to be a battleground in the White House race.”

“But an average of the latest public opinion polls in Ohio compiled by Real Clear Politics shows Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with a 3.3 point edge over the president. That includes a Fox News poll conducted Sept. 20-23 and released Thursday that had the former vice president topping Trump 50% to 45% among likely voters in Ohio. ‘I always felt that 2016 was an anomalous result for Ohio,’ Paul Beck, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University, told Fox News. ‘Trump did very well in 2016 here in Ohio, and he had a lot of things going for him in Ohio, one of which was the unpopularity of Hillary Clinton,’ said Beck, an expert on the state’s political trends. ‘Biden plays well in areas of Ohio, I think, where Trump did well in 2016, and that is particularly true in northeastern Ohio, where Trump cut into the normal Democratic advantage pretty heavily there …. particularly among white males. And I think Biden has more appeal to white males than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.'”