Ohio has been a bellwether and a battleground: What is it telling us now?

Once upon a time, winning the Ohio vote for president pretty much meant spending the next four years in the White House.

The Buckeye State was The Bellwether State for 14 presidential election cycles spanning six decades. Ohio's choice won the Electoral College in every four-year showdown from Lyndon Johnson's landslide in 1964 to Donald Trump's upset win in 2016.

That streak was the longest of its kind for any state. But even before that extraordinary run began, Ohio had voted for the winner 21 times and for the loser just four times since the Civil War.

Moreover, the winner's victory margin in Ohio was consistently close to the victory margin in the popular vote nationwide, only deviating by about one percentage point on average over the last dozen presidential elections.

The Ohio mojo has even worked when the national popular vote and the Electoral College tally produced different winners. In each case of this happening in this century, in 2000 and in 2016, the candidate winning the popular vote in Ohio lost the national popular vote but won in the Electoral College.

But something happened in 2020. In that year, Ohio gave a solid majority of its vote to then-incumbent president Donald Trump, yet Trump still lost to Joe Biden in the national vote and the Electoral College.

Even more remarkable was the margin of Trump's Ohio win in 2020. The state gave him another 8-point margin of victory, roughly the same as his 2016 margin over Hillary Clinton. Given that Trump was losing to Biden by about 4.5 points nationwide, the resulting gap between Ohio and the nation in terms of these candidates was a stunning 12.5 points.

The Ohio margin and outcome were overshadowed at the time by dramatic events in other states that