I’m afraid you’re right.
I think it entirely depends on the candidates. I haven’t really seen anyone who has come out yet, but one of the problems is that there really haven’t been any prominent Ohio Democrats for a while now.
There aren’t many in the state legislature, and they don’t have much name recognition outside of their districts (and not much within, either).
About the only Democratic politician that I know of that could really do well would be John Cranley, Cincinnati’s mayor, and he has eyes on the Governor’s mansion, rather than the senate seat.
That said, the Republicans may nominate someone who is batshit crazy, and though Ohio did go for Trump, it also did re-elect Sherrod Brown in 2018. A crazy Republican vs a moderate Democrat may lean in the Democrat’s favor.
I don’t disagree. There are certainly examples where a strong candidate on one side versus a lackluster candidate on the other resulted in the “wrong” party winning a race. Politics & Elections Forum Enemy #1 Joe Manchin is a prime example. And of course we’re a year and a half out, and I reserve the right to change my mind as events develop 
. But by the standard of, “wouldn’t be shocked if it flipped,” I would be pretty shocked if Ohio elected a Democratic Senator in 2022.
Sherrod Brown probably would have lost had he been up in 2020 instead of 2018. And 2022 has a very high likelihood of being a worse national environment than 2020 with a worse candidate than 2018. Sorry for being the skunk at the garden party. 
I think I will be happily surprised. 
I think it depends on what happens over the next couple years. If the Democrats get our economy back on track in spite of Republican obstructionism, while pointing out that the Republicans are trying to block these very popular initiatives, then the Democrats may gain some respect among moderate voters, even those who lean to the right.
If the Democratic candidate promises to go to Washington and continue to work to improve the lives of Ohioans, while the Republican vows to roll back the gains made over the last couple years, that could tip the scales a bit.
Not being a presidential year may help. In some ways, it has traditionally helped Republicans, as they tend to be more consistent in voting in midterms, but I have hopes that the Democrats are fighting this trend. We’ve seen where things go in Republican hands, and so have the Republican voters, if they are being honest with themselves. They may not turn out to support the Democrat, but they may stay home rather than shoot themselves in the foot voting for the Republican.
Like I said though, it’s more of a hope than a prediction. I may have more solid prognostications once I see who is actually throwing their hat in the ring.
Arguably the strongest Dem candidate for the seat:
A recent piece in the Intelligencer suggests that a state’s level of secularism is important in determining its political lean and offers an explanation of why Wisconsin is bluer than Ohio, despite having similar demographics.
For example, many pundits have puzzled over the divergent political trajectories of Wisconsin and Ohio. Although both states have shifted right since the Obama era, the former has remained competitive while the latter has gone solid red. If one focuses on race and education, this split is hard to explain. Both states are heavily working-class, with nearly identical percentages of Ohioans and Wisconsinites holding college degrees, while African Americans comprise roughly twice as large a share of Ohio’s population as they do of Wisconsin’s. Thus, if you only looked at these two variables, you’d assume that the Buckeye State was the bluer battleground. But religiosity presents a countervailing distinction. In Pew’s polling, 58 percent of Ohioans say they are “highly religious,” which makes their state the 17th-most religious in the country. By contrast, only 45 percent of Wisconsinites identify as highly religious; only five states demonstrate lower levels of religiosity, and all of them are blue.
Not about the Senate, but interesting:
Wisconsin was more blue than Ohio back in the day (1990s and 2000s), so it has further to go than Ohio in moving into the red column. But yeah, they are both moving in the same direction.
This is relatively good news for Democrats. There was some fear that Texas and Florida – states where Republicans will control redistricting – could gain five or even six seats between them, which would almost be enough by itself to overcome the current Democratic margin in the House. That Texas only netted two and Florida one will be a disappointment to Republicans, but also a consequence of both states doing absolutely nothing to encourage their citizens to participate in the Census. That Oregon and Colorado also picked up a seat each helps balance things out a bit as well.
When a heavily gerrymandered state picks up a seat, that does not necessarily equate to one more for the majority party. If most of the new voters are of the minority party, the gerrymanderers will have a choice between giving the minority another seat or slicing the surplus in their majority districts even thinner. There’s a limit to how much they can do the latter before those districts become tossups and they risk losing seats.
I’m not certain what this means for TX and FL, but I suspect one of the new TX districts will be blue. If TX had gotten three new seats, I’d be more certain one would be heavily D.
I’m in a predicting type of mood, so here goes. I think one area that Rs will target, especially in light of gains among Latinos last year, will be the Rio Grande Valley. Currently the Valley is divided up into three districts stretching roughly north and south. The 28th centered around Laredo / Webb county, the 15th centered around McAllen / Hidalgo county, and the 34 centered around Brownsville / Cameron county. My guess is that they will draw some funky shaped districts resulting in two heavily D districts and one or even two slightly R districts. They’ll probably combine the more urban Brownsville and McAllen together. They could then lump together the very rural counties north of the Valley with Republican leaning areas of San Antonio (Joaquin Castro’s 20th district) to make a R district. The remainder could be made up by removing the more rural border areas like Zapata and Rio Grande city, which trended red, into the new district. Castro’s district would become more safe, but there would be a new rural district where the rural areas / King Ranch country were previously being dominated by the more populous border areas. Just my WAG 
Certainly true that there are limits to what a gerrymander can accomplish (you’ve got to put those millions of Texas Democrats somewhere), but my own sense is that Texas is by no means so gerrymandered already that the Rs couldn’t squeeze out a couple more districts. As @FlikTheBlue says, Rs made some strong gains in South Texas last election (coming within three points of knocking off a Democratic Congressman who won his previous election by 20). I guess we’ll see.
ElectoralVote.com, a political blog by a couple of IMO very savvy analysts, has their take on redistricting.
For those who don’t want to read it, the tl;dr is that there are 8 seats they’re sure of and 6 are uncertain. The D’s will pick up one seat among the certains. The two Texas seats are among the uncertains, but their guess is that they’ll be split, one to each party.
You may wonder why the number of seats they prognosticate is 14 when there are only 6 states with additional districts. Texas gets 2 new districts, so that makes it 7. The other 7 is because that states that lose seats will have to play musical districts with someone not being able to find a chair. So how redistricting works in those states counts too.
According to media reports, Val Demings has decided to challenge Marco Rubio in Florida. While any Florida Democrat is going to have an uphill climb against Rubio, she’s got some national exposure as an impeachment manager that should help boost her fundraising and has a background in law enforcement and moderate profile that make her hard to tar as a “lefty extremist” (not that Republicans won’t try).
I was ready to move Florida into “lost cause” territory after last November, but I’ll give it one more cycle to see if Democrats can turn around their recent fortunes.
Here’s more on that story:
That’s a pity. Demings will lose and she will lose decisively.
Florida is a lost cause. It has been drifting toward the GOP for a while. The losses in the state in 2016, 2018 and 2020 should make this clear. Pre-election polling in each of those elections was very misleading.
The continued fantasy that it is a purple state just makes me sad. Democrats would be better served spending money and energy elsewhere.
Like Tim Ryan in Ohio, Demings is probably going to have her district annihilated, so she doesn’t have anywhere to go but a futile statewide run. For the same reason, Stephanie Murphy is considering running for the same senate seat, and Charlie Crist is running for governor. All three of them were in the House because of a court-ordered redistricting in 2016, but the Florida Supreme Court has since been flipped to 100% Republican control.
It’s a long shot, but it’s good that Demings is running (she’s about as good a candidate as possible), and we shouldn’t abandon all long shots. Sometimes we win long shots - not often, but occasionally.
I’m as down about the trend lines in Florida as you are, but – should FL Democrats just give up? Not run at all in statewide races? Or run z-tier candidates on shoestring budgets? Because it can make the difference between losing Florida for a decade and losing it for a generation.
As a Texan, I’ve been down that road, my friend. And I can tell you that it leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of losing. Young, ambitious Democratic politicians see no conceivable path forward in their lifetimes, so they leave politics or battle each other for the handful of “safe” legislative seats. Donors stop giving to the state party and spend all their money nationally, leaving the party unable to invest in the kind of infrastructure that might let it rebound. Activists and volunteers grow dispirited and stay home. All this just digs the party into a deeper and deeper hole.
That’s why it’s important to still fight, so that your own people can see a path out of the wilderness. And so that when the stars do align, you’re ready to pounce. If Texas Democrats had been just a little more organized and better resourced in 2018, Beto O’Rourke might be sitting in the U.S. Senate.