Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally in Springfield, Ohio this afternoon, his first of three events in the state today.
Trump will speak from the Champion Center Expo beginning at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The event can be viewed in the embedded YouTube player via Right Side Broadcasting.
Ohio is one of the battleground states that could currently go either way but that Trump absolutely needs to win in order to become president. In fact, no Republican has ever won the White House without also securing Ohio’s 18 electoral votes. Plus, Trump’s path to 270 is extremely narrow, and it requires him to win Florida, North Carolina and Ohio at a bare minimum; if he loses any of those three, he will most likely lose the election.
Of those three states, Trump is doing the best in Ohio, where he is ahead of Hillary Clinton in Real Clear Politics’ polling average by 1.0 percentage points. But the race there is becoming tighter than it once was, as in the first week of October, Trump was ahead of Clinton in Ohio by an average of 3.4 percentage points.
Still, many election forecasts currently have Ohio leaning towards Hillary Clinton, with The Upshot, FiveThirtyEight, The Huffington Post and PredictWise all giving her a slightly higher chance of winning Ohio than Donald Trump.
Trump has an extremely packed schedule on Thursday, as after this rally in Springfield, he heads over to Toledo for a second rally at 4:00 p.m., and then to Geneva for a third rally at 7:00 p.m.