The country is awash today in vibes and priors. I have my own, of course. But I do not pretend that they are enough to give me any better a sense of what is going to happen than anyone else has.

In one place, however, I will at least know what to look for: Ohio, my home state, which some have called the “heart of it all.” Results in Ohio, which we should know relatively early, will provide some useful information about both the presidential race and other contests and issues.

The results of the presidential race in Ohio will tell us more than who wins the state’s 17 electoral votes. They could also give an early sense of whether presidential polling of this race has been accurate. Today’s RealClearPolitics average has Donald Trump ahead by a little less than nine points in the state. That’s not far from the eight-point margin by which Trump won there in 2016 and 2020. Most polls in both years did not anticipate the extent of his victory. They were a bit more accurate in 2016, when the final RealClearPolitics average had him ahead by two points (with few polls showing him losing to Hillary Clinton), than they were in 2020, when the RCP average had him ahead by only a point (and some polls showing him losing to Joe Biden outright). If Trump’s margin of victory is about what the polls indicate it will be, then perhaps it is reasonable to expect accuracy in polling elsewhere.

Trump’s margin is likely to play some role in whether Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, recently profiled by Audrey Fahlberg, can dislodge longtime incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown. Much like his fellow red-state 2006 winner Jon Tester in Montana (now seriously threatened by Tim Sheehy, as I wrote earlier this fall), Brown has survived improbably long in a seemingly inhospitable political climate. For much of the fall, it appeared that Moreno would join the company of failed would-be Brown-slayers Josh Mandel and Jim Renacci. But recent polling is looking much better for Moreno. A Republican Senate victory in Ohio would help assure a majority in the upper chamber for the GOP in the next term.

State elections matter, too. Last fall, Ohioans unfortunately voted to enshrine a right to abortion in the state’s constitution. In the year since, pro-abortion forces have worked to do exactly what pro-lifers predicted they would: get rid of as many of the state’s protections for the unborn as they could, under as capacious a reading of the amended state constitution as they might manage. Their primary method has been to sue. Eventually, these court cases will be decided before the Ohio supreme court, which has several seats up for election this year (and is elected on a partisan basis). The court currently has a 4–3 Republican majority. As state representative Adam Mathews explained in National Review last week, a Republican sweep would lead to a 6–1 Republican majority; a Democratic sweep would lead to a 4–3 Democratic majority. The former configuration could thwart the latter’s likely aim of interpreting the amended state constitution to impose on Ohio an abortion regime more radical than what prevailed under Roe v. Wade. Such abortion extremism is certainly not what Ohioans voted for last fall.

So pay close attention to Ohio tonight. I know I will be. After all, it’s all Ohio.