CLEVELAND, Ohio-Other than a percentage point or two, the recently held Democratic and  Republican National conventions brought no significant changes in poll numbers between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden as the Nov. 3 presidential election nears, but the president, who leads in Ohio but lags nationwide, could make history if he ultimately wins the swing state and loses the White House to Biden this year.

"As Ohio goes, so goes the nation," is the popular cliche that reminds both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates that should you lose Ohio, the presidency is essentially out of reach, or is it?

In 2004, Ohio swung the nation as Democratic nominee John Kerry lost the presidential election to George W. Bush.

Trump won Ohio in 2016 by eight points over Democrat Hillary Clinton, and went on to nab the presidency, though Clinton did win the popular vote.

No Democrat since JFK in 1060 has won the presidency without winning Ohio, and neither has any Republican of remembrance.

Ohio is a perennial swing state like the states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, these states, including Ohio, accounting for a total of 156 electoral votes.

Biden leads Trump in Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, Ohio one of the few swing states the president will likely win in November.

Critics say Biden's campaign in Ohio is mediocre at best and that Black voters in particular are not engaged.

" I can hardly find a Biden campaign sign on the east side of Cleveland, and we are not seeing much, if any at all, of the millions of dollars of campaign money" a Black elected official of Cleveland said under condition of anonymity.

A former longtime U.S. senator from Delaware, Biden served as vice president under former president Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president.

Obama won Ohio when he was fist elected in 2008, and again when he was reelected in 2012.

A popular Republican among his strong base of supporters, President Trump still lags behind Biden nationally in nearly every poll, and up to 11 percentage points, including Quinnipiac, CNN, ABC News/Washington Post, and Emerson polls.

Even the conservative-leaning Fox News poll shows Biden ahead of Trump.

The president's approval rating is at 46 percent as 54 percent of Americans disapprove of his performance, the coronavirus pandemic and Trump's response to escalating racial unrest behind erroneous police killings of unarmed Blacks nationwide, including George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, major factors, polls show.

Meanwhile, Biden and his running mate for vice president, U.S. Sen Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to run on a major party presidential ticket in America, are moving closer to winning the White House with less than eight weeks until election day.

The former vice president officially clinched the Democratic nomination in early June and both he and Trump accepted their nominations for their respective parties at the Democratic and Republican conventions this summer.

Biden needed 1,991 of the 3,979 pledged delegates to claim the nomination, which he surpassed.

Winning the nomination was all but ensured when Biden's closest opponent dropped out of the race, U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a socialist  Democrat who was making his second bid for president after losing the nomination to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Clinton going on to lose the general election to Trump, a real estate mogul and former television personality.

During his bid this time around for the Democratic nomination Sanders, as was Biden, was effective in narrowing the more than 28 Democratic candidates down to the two of them.

Sanders nearly won Iowa, coming in second place to Pete Buttigieg, who left the race and announced his endorsement of Biden.

Sanders went on to win New Hampshire and Nevada.

But Biden, powered by the Black vote and an endorsement from Black U.S. Rep James Clyburn, subsequently won South Carolina, and Super Tuesday, and never looked back.

Biden, 77, remains the pragmatic choice of Black voters for president, and southern and elderly Black voters support him in large numbers too.

And while polls show Biden is the favorite to win the presidency this year, when Democrats and Black people stay home and do not vote, or, since the coronavirus outbreak, choose not to vote by mail, it helps the Republicans, data show.

While Black voter turnout for the first time in history proportionately outpaced Whites in 2012 when Obama ran for reelection, it declined by seven percentage points in 2016 when Clinton lost the presidency to Trump, pundits saying that if Blacks vote in this year's election like they did in 2012 Biden has a good chance of beating Trump.

There is no question that both Blacks and Democrats must vote in large numbers for a win for Biden to materialize, pundits have said.