MAGA voters serve Trump a reckoning as red state turns purple

President Donald Trump is so unpopular that pro-Trump media are bleeding viewers and many of his staunchest bases of support, such as non-college educated voters and the manosphere, are peeling away from him. Now a new report in The New York Times reveals that Trump is even starting to shake the once-reliably Republican state of Ohio.

“Across Ohio, a state that receded from the nation’s political battle zone as its voting patterns turned an ever deeper shade of red, signs of discontent this year are everywhere,” wrote The New York Times' Campbell Robertson and Jessica Contrera on Sunday. “In packed public forums, residents rage about data center projects. In grocery store aisles, shoppers lament to cashiers how little they can get for $50. In the soybean and corn fields, farmers express anxiety and pessimism. The basics of life and business have gotten punishingly expensive, and many have come to doubt that relief is coming anytime soon.”

A 59-year-old named Kim Hall told The Times, as she shopped at a Dollar General in North Ridgeville, Ohio, that “it’s all dumpy. Businesses are closing, the roads look like crap. Grocery prices are outrageous, and I can barely afford to live.”

Similarly former Dayton mayor Nan Whaley told the Times that the Democratic Party now has a winning strategy.

“You hate everything and you can’t be mad at the Democrats,” Whaley told The Times. “They haven’t been in control.”

She later added, “People are just so — I’ve just not seen them this pissed.”

The Times elaborated on what they saw.

“In Millersport, a village outside Columbus, a school cafeteria was packed for a hearing last week about a proposed power plant that would provide energy to a $2.1 billion data center project being built in nearby farmland,” the Times wrote. “The residents in the cafeteria were virtually unanimous in opposition: A Democratic statehouse candidate wearing a Pride pin railed against the process, her criticisms later echoed by an Air Force veteran wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” shirt with an Infowars logo.”

They also quoted individuals like 30-year-old software engineer Taylor Dupont, whose employer recently told her that both she and roughly 200 of her co-workers were being laid off.

“Her child’s school district then cut busing, meaning she’d have to put more miles on her beat-up Kia at a time when gas prices felt outrageous,” Dupont told the Times. “Her grocery costs, utility bills and rent on her two-bedroom duplex were all rising, and she didn’t know what to do about it all. But she did know who she blamed: ‘The president,’ she said, ‘and the billionaires.’”

The Times added, “On Wednesday, she was combing through the half-off aisle at Goodwill. She said she planned to vote in the midterms for the first time, straight Democratic, but she hadn’t yet paid too much attention to any of the races. She needed to land another job, get her car fixed, and before any of that, find her daughter outfits for her first week of school. ‘Remember,’ she told her so.”