I have a theory about Ohio. It’s underrated.

On the coasts, people sometimes confuse it with Iowa. Even in in the Midwest, it doesn’t quite get its due, Illinois has Chicago. Michigan has its lakes. Minnesota seems to have a very good publicist.

But I realize I have been traveling to and through the Buckeye State for years now. Lots of various reporting trips—campaign coverage every four years, and more recently three trips to Springfield, after President Trump viciously attacked the Haitian community there and ultimately shattered it. I was so impressed by the response of most of the people of Springfield to Trump’s pointless and cruel attack on their neighbors.

And then there are our family trips the past couple of summers, to Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, and this past August to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.

The long vistas. The old brick towns. The plenteous farmland. The cities that made things—and still hold their heads high now that most of the factories are long gone.

When I think of cities, when I visit them, I have a pretty simple criterion of judgment: Do the people of the city live and die by their sports teams? Pro, college, high school. If yes—you’re in a real city. If no, you’re in Tampa Bay. Cleveland is a great city.

In Ohio, there’s a deep connection to older ways. A confidence in the place. A sense that a good life could be made here.

But that sense is threatened and it is eroding, in Ohio and across the country. I think this election is centered on the fact that too many Americans feel that good life—safe, secure, reasonably prosperous—is slipping beyond their reach.

Last weekend, I went to Ohio with the “America in Person” reporting team. Siddarth Kejriwal, Nathan Keowen, and Amanda Fernandes are young journalists who’ve joined me on the road to cover these midterm elections in long-form reports where we try to get past the negative ads and canned stories and listen to voters about their hopes and concerns as Election Day approaches.

Our report from Ohio has just dropped. Take a look—and tell your friends!

We stopped in at Cleveland’s West Side Market, as late-afternoon light poured through the high windows onto the counters and the shoppers. The place is beautiful; built in 1912 on the site where there’d been a market since 1840.

Somebody had thought it worth building a beautiful place for people to buy dinner. That is a kind of civic faith. We need more of it.

We met three young women: Carmella Fassett, 23, Payton Johnson, 18, Neveah Rose, 17. They were vibrant and full of laughter, as they should be. Then they talked to us about prices. They knew the numbers: what things used to cost, what they cost now.

I was struck by that. When I was there age, I don’t remember keeping such careful accounts. (Perhaps that’s because there wasn’t as much to buy back then—or feel pressured to buy.)

A young woman whose parents came from the Philippines began to cry when she talked about our country’s changed attitude toward immigrants. Her family had made a life here. Now she was worried about their place in it.

Those values are being ground down by an economy that no longer works for most people—especially young people—and they are being vandalized by a political movement that has unleashed dark impulses in our country.

We left the market and headed west out of town. At the little racetrack outside Lorain, people were working on their cars, taking practice laps, fixing broken bleachers in the grandstand.

I liked the place immediately. It took me back to growing up in the Midwest, seeing the occasional race car on a trailer headed for the local speedway down the road in Carpentersville or a little farther out in Rockford.

I’m not a car guy. But I liked knowing that the speedways were there, that people could go there on a summer weekend, that they did something they loved doing. I liked the radio ads, too: “SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!”

This was once part of the good life in America.

One more scene: Medina. A tidy town a half-hour or so south of Cleveland.

At one point, it was dubbed “The Sweetest Place on Earth,” for the honey and beekeeping industry there. A local jeweler named Amos Root developed innovative techniques for honey production; The Root Candle company survives and prospers there.

Medina has a lovely town square, with a gazebo and fine old buildings surrounding it. And this, too made me think of an America that had found a certain balance. Work and commerce, beauty and a place to sit. Room to gather in the evenings, hear some music. .

Of course, that America shut people out. The past’s prejudices were real, and so were its achievements. We ought to be able to learn from both.

I came home thinking about how these places matter to people. And how the people, and their well-being in a functioning and democratic America, matters to these places.

Ohio is underrated. Much of the goodness it has carried is easy to overlook because it takes such ordinary forms: a market, a town square, a grandstand someone bothers to repair.

I want those young women to have more to look forward to than a lifetime of careful subtraction at the end of every month and little faith that their votes will change things.

This Sunday, I thought we should have an Ohio poem. This one is by Alice Carey, born on a farm in Cincinnati in 1820. Alice and her sister Phoebe read and wrote poetry their whole lives. They published a book of poems together in 1850, and it made them famous. Alice died in 1871, and among her pallbearers were P.T. Barnum and Horace Greeley. Phoebe was an editor at Susan B. Anthony’s newspaper, The Revolution.

The poem from Alice is called, “Nobility.” It is very old-fashioned and may sound very hokey to modern ears. But I think as we set out to build the next America, we shall need some of the sturdy Ohio values Alice Carey sets out here.

—Terry

by Alice Carey

True worth is in being, not seeming,—

In doing, each day that goes by,

Some little good—not in dreaming

Of great things to do by and by.

For whatever men say in their blindness,

And spite of the fancies of youth,

There’s nothing so kingly as kindness,

And nothing so royal as truth.

We get back our mete as we measure—

We cannot do wrong and feel right,

Nor can we give pain and gain pleasure,

For justice avenges each slight.

The air for the wing of the sparrow,

The bush for the robin and wren,

But always the path that is narrow

And straight, for the children of men.

’Tis not in the pages of story

The heart of its ills to beguile,

Though he who makes courtship to glory

Gives all that he hath for her smile.

For when from her heights he has won her,

Alas! it is only to prove

That nothing’s so sacred as honor,

And nothing so loyal as love!

We cannot make bargains for blisses,

Nor catch them like fishes in nets;

And sometimes the thing our life misses

Helps more than the thing which it gets.

For good lieth not in pursuing,

Nor gaining of great nor of small,

But just in the doing, and doing

As we would be done by, is all.

Through envy, through malice, through hating,

Against the world, early and late,

No jot of our courage abating—

Our part is to work and to wait.

And slight is the sting of his trouble

Whose winnings are less than his worth.

For he who is honest is noble

Whatever his fortunes or birth.