Shaun Malinowski
WKSU.org Y ou’ll be forgiven if, what with all the prodigal-son- pardoning that Cleveland was doing at the end of last week, you’ve already forgotten that the city also locked down the 2016 Republican National Convention. Come that far-off summer, the streets of this jewel of the Rust Belt Riviera will be awash in power ties and quaint ideologies and social mores; the GOP’s glitterarti, coiffed, gusseted, and ready for battle, will be busy appropriating Cleveland’s blue collar culture. While only fools and state party chairs ever believe a convention location will swing a state, it’s a clever bit of marketing by the Republicans to throw their prom in a stronghold of Democrats and labor unions. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Grand Old Party’s princes won’t have their own supporters in the region. Northeast Ohio, for all its steelworker socialism, features some of Ohio’s swing-iest areas—those filled nearly equally with the country’s most important partisans, red and blue, the varsity...