Donald Trump Wins Ohio for Third Straight Election

Former President Donald Trump has won the state of Ohio for the third straight election.

The Associated Press called the race for Trump shortly after 9:00 p.m. ET with 52 percent of the vote reported, the New York Times reports. Around the time of the call, Trump had 54 percent of the vote and Vice President Kamala Harris had 45 percent.

Trump scored 17 electoral votes in his column with the Buckeye State, which, along with  Florida, has transitioned into a solid red state from a swing state since the 45th president stepped onto the political scene.

Trump carried the state over twice-failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton by eight percentage points in 2016 and beat President Joe Biden by a similar margin in the 2020 election.

Under Trump’s Republican Party, Ohio has drifted even further right, as the GOP swept all statewide races there in the 2022 midterms, including the senatorial and gubernatorial races, by steep margins for the most part.

A key issue in Ohio this year is Democrat-backed electric vehicle mandates and their ramifications for the state’s auto industry. Trump has vowed to end the Biden-Harris mandate to phase out gas-powered vehicles and has promised to protect and expand manufacturing using tariffs.

Trump looks to keep the momentum up in the Rust Belt the rest of the evening and flip Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – states he won in 2016 but lost in 2020 – red. Many view what Democrats call “the blue wall” as Harris’s smoothest path to victory, and without one of them in her column, the math gets tricky for her.

While the presidential race is settled in Ohio, the U.S. Senate race between Republican businessman Bernie Moreno and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) remains too close to call. Polling throughout the cycle suggested this would be a tighter race than the presidential contest, even though Ohio is a firmly red state now.

Trump endorsed Moreno in December 2023 ahead of the GOP primary.

“Bernie will always stand up to the Fascist ‘nut jobs’ and the spineless RINOS in order to fight the corrupt Deep State that is destroying our Country,” Trump said at the time.