Will Republican Sen. John McCain become president? That's unanswerable. As for reading between the lines, if Ohio's economy stays bad, he won't carry Ohio -- unless (as of today) Democrats run Sen. Barack Obama. So yes, though it would be no day at the beach, Sen. Hillary Clinton could snatch Ohio from McCain. Obama likely would not.

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday showed that among 1,238 Ohio voters surveyed, "Clinton beats McCain 48 to 39 percent; Obama gets 43 percent to McCain's 42 percent." The poll, taken March 24 to March 31, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent.

Given that Obama leads in the Democrats' national delegate count, the dilemma for party insiders is obvious. But one party's true believers don't decide a general election.

That said, and as history shows, any Ohio lead Clinton may have today over John McCain will close up; somewhere, maybe in the archives of Ripley's Believe It Or Not, there may be a 1972 poll showing George McGovern beating Richard Nixon in Ohio, or even a poll showing Adlai Stevenson walloping Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. In Ohio, early polls are mile-markers on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

True, too, all bets are off if the usual terrorist psychos attack inside the United States, because the GOP is seen as the national-defense party. (That's despite, say, such things as the disgraceful "care" President Bush's administration gave wounded Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.)

Finally, Ohio is, in fact, a Republican-trending state. So stats give McCain a leg up. First, roughly 20 of the 88 counties will never vote for a Democrat for president. The biggest are Allen, Delaware and Hancock. Because of Columbus spillover, Democrats might at least try to woo Delaware. Those 20 counties wanted to keep Prohibition in 1933, approved a union-busting Right to Work initiative in 1958 and voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Then there are about 12 more counties that could stomach a Jimmy Carter in 1976 or a Bill Clinton in '92 or '96; otherwise, forget about it (though Sen. Clinton may have curb appeal.

The Ohio maxim had been that if Democrats turned out, their candidates won. Republicans trumped that in 2004, notably in the southwest Ohio suburban blob anchored by Cincinnati, Dayton and Lebanon, including Butler (Hamilton and Middletown) County.

For McCain to have an Ohio win, he'd have to swamp Clinton in southwest Ohio despite those Cincinnati-area Republicans who think he's a closet Democrat. But what if there and everywhere else in Ohio black Democrats stayed home, irked that their party spurned Obama? Advantage, McCain.

Still, McCain would have to counter a long-term Democratic trend in Greater Columbus and hold voters along Rts. 23 and 33 below Columbus, a region that liked Carter and Bill Clinton.

Sen. Clinton's downstate strategy would be to stymie McCain's. Then she'd aim to wallop him in greater Cleveland and the Akron-Canton-Youngstown triangle. To guarantee that, Clinton would need to make book with black Cleveland-area Democrats without risking her potential November edge in a crescent of Appalachian counties, usually Republican, that pivots around Athens.

Those GOP-leaning counties gave Ohio's electoral vote to Carter in 1976 -- by 11,000 popular votes. And that illustrates the math McCain and Clinton surely would do: Either way, Ohio will be close this November.

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University.

tsuddes@gmail.com