Source: Time
When Hillary Clinton’s blue-tinged 737 touches down in Ohio on Monday morning for the first time in 29 days, locals will greet a changed Democratic nominee in a much changed race.
The last time she campaigned in the battleground state, Clinton was days away from a pneumonia diagnosis and derailed by a coughing fit at a Cleveland Labor Day rally, fueling a fusillade of conspiracy theories about her health.
Now Clinton has rebounded in a fine fettle, just in time to make the case for her candidacy as Ohio wraps up its voter-registration period.
Clinton will campaign in the former world’s rubber capital of Akron for a voter-registration event and deliver a speech on the economy in the aging industrial hub of Toledo. Her return to the Rust Belt on Monday comes a week before voter registration ends and early voting begins a day later.
Mail-in voting is up in Ohio compared with 2012, which gives some comfort to Clinton aides who are watching tight polls. A bonus came on the eve of Clinton’s trip, when Cleveland’s NBA giant LeBron James announced he was endorsing her. Clinton’s visit on Monday is meant to usher a final wave of registrations before the Oct. 11 deadline.
Clinton’s return is a nod to a state that has long been at the center of presidential politics, but one that is in transition. For perhaps the first presidential election in decades, Ohio is a state that Democrats can afford to lose and might break for the first time with the national winner. The state’s unofficial motto is “As goes Ohio, so goes the nation,” a recognition that the last Democrat to win the White House without Ohio was John Kennedy in 1960; no Republican has ever done so.
Donald Trump — who has suffered a slow-motion collapse after he struggled at the first debate, feuded with a Latina model and lashed out after the New York Times showed he lost nearly $1 billion in personal income in 1995 — almost certainly must win in Ohio in order to win the White House.
An internal memo circulated by Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and obtained by TIME showed that her strategists see the state as a must-win for Trump — but not for her. She can handily win 270 electoral votes without winning Ohio, Mook said in the memo; Trump almost certainly must win Ohio if he is to have a viable path to the White House.
Clinton officials are keenly aware that blocking Trump in Ohio will likely end his White House bid.
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