UPDATE, 9:39 a.m.: Communities in Northeast Ohio saw between 2 and 4 inches of snow from Tuesday morning’s winter storm.

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CLEVELAND, Ohio — A winter storm sweeping through Northeast Ohio early Tuesday is slowing the morning commute and prompting widespread school closures across the region.

Light to moderate snow continued to fall across much of Northeast Ohio early Tuesday, with periodic bursts reducing visibility to under a mile in some areas.

The Ohio Department of Transportation map showed a crash on Interstate 71 southbound blocking the two right lanes just south of the interchange with Interstate 90. Slowdowns also were reported across the region, including on I-71 in Berea, I-90 heading into downtown Cleveland, I-480 near I-71 and in Maple Heights and I-77 in Brecksville, near the Ohio Turnpike.

In Lake County, the speed limit on I-90 east of Ohio 44 had been lowered to 50 mph.

“You can’t get to work in the normal amount of time that it would take. It’s going to take you longer,” Ohio Department of Transportation spokesman Brent Kovacs told cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer news partner WKYC Channel 3. “It’s going to be slower.”

About 250 ODOT plow trucks are working on keeping roads clear during this storm, Kovacs said.

A parking ban was in effect Tuesday in Cleveland. Stopping, standing and parking of vehicles is prohibited on city streets with posted red and white signs.

At Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, the majority of departures were operating on time. Ten flights were delayed Tuesday morning, including routes to Detroit, Miami, New York, Chicago and Las Vegas.

Snow expected to diminish later Tuesday morning

An upper-level system moving across Ohio, along with stronger winds higher in the atmosphere, was supporting steadier snow through midmorning, according to the National Weather Service in Cleveland.

Most of the region was expected to pick up 2 to 4 inches of snow through sunrise, with slightly higher totals possible from Central Ohio toward Youngstown, where snowfall rates may briefly approach an inch per hour.

Snow is expected to diminish quickly later Tuesday morning as a dry slot moves in from the southwest, though forecasters noted that lake-effect snow showers could redevelop during the afternoon as colder northerly winds flow across Lake Erie.

Models show convergent bands forming over the lake and occasionally pushing onshore, including into the Cleveland metro area. Any additional accumulation should be limited, though.

Conditions are expected to stabilize Tuesday night as high pressure builds in from the southwest, before shifting southeast on Wednesday.

A new poll of Illinois voters has found that Democratic Governor JB Pritzker still holds the lead over his potential Republican rival in next year’s gubernatorial election, despite his approval rating dipping.

In a survey of more than 1,200 likely Illinois voters, carried out between November 20 and 25 and seen by Fox 32, Chicago-based Victory Research put Pritzker at 54.3 percent of the vote, compared to 34 percent for GOP candidate Darren Bailey.

Newsweek reached out to Pritzker and Bailey’s campaigns, as well as Victory Research, via email Tuesday morning for comment.

Why It Matters

Pritzker has become one of the leading Democrats trying to stand up to President Donald Trump and his immigration policies, which in turn has meant the Republican has attacked the Illinois governor over his record on crime, particularly in Chicago.

First elected in 2019, Pritzker is hoping for a third term as governor, and next year’s election will fall on the same day as the midterms—a key test for the Trump administration and the Republican Party’s grip on Congress.

What To Know

When voters were asked to pit Pritzker against his potential Republican rivals, Victory Research noted he did well, including the lead over Bailey, a former state senator whom he defeated in 2022.

Other names on the GOP list were less well known, including DuPage County Sheriff James Mendrick; policy expert Ted Dabrowski; and Rick Heidner, a real estate developer.

While name recognition appeared to be on Pritzker’s side in the poll, there were some policy areas which caused concern among the voters surveyed, including crime, taxation, and immigration.

On crime, Pritzker received a 34.1 percent good rating, compared to 58.9 percent of voters saying he was doing a bad job. When it came to immigration—a key issue the current governor has been vocal on—he received a 36.3 percent positive rating, compared to 57 percent bad.

Overall, 59.5 percent of those polled felt Illinois was on the wrong track.

For Bailey, who recently took time off from his campaign to grieve the loss of his son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren in a helicopter crash, he recently told the Chicago Tribune that he feels confident in his chances going into next year’s election, having learned lessons from his 2022 campaign.

One such lesson was the pushback he got from calling Chicago a “hellhole” three years ago, saying he understood the city had its problems, but that Chicagoans were proud of their city—one which has been a focal point for Trump’s immigration crackdown in recent months.

Pritzker, meanwhile, had focused on the impact of Trump’s policies on his state, including rising grocery prices and health care costs, while also appearing alongside those protesting the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Chicago and surrounding towns.

What People Are Saying

JB Pritzker, on X November 20: “You shouldn’t be burdened with financial uncertainty just because you got sick. While the Trump administration is causing chaos and making health care unaffordable for working families, in Illinois, we are working to ease the financial burden for the most vulnerable.”

Darren Bailey, speaking to the Chicago Tribune December 1 on Trump’s agenda: “I believe that in the next nine months, I personally believe that we’re going to see some of this stuff make sense. I mean, right now in Illinois, I point my fingers solidly at JB Pritzker and I have to ask: Why? Why the gas tax (increasing every year)? Why? Just why the continued spending? Why, every time there is a problem, we never address the problem?”

What’s Next

The Illinois primary day is scheduled for March 17, 2026, for both parties. Election day itself will be November 3, 2026.

Amid growing signs that even some Republicans are starting to view Donald Trump as something of a lame duck, the president and his allies have apparently chosen Indiana to reassert his dominance of the party.

They’ve picked a fight over redistricting in the Hoosier State as the battleground to prove that Trump can still bend GOP politicians to his will. They want to force those lawmakers to pass a map that they’ve previously opposed that would give Republicans more winnable US House seats.

It’s a risky bet for Trump and a hugely symbolic clash.

And it’s a thoroughly dangerous situation – both literally and for our democracy.

For months, the White House has been applying pressure on states to redraw their congressional maps to include more GOP-leaning districts. But in some states, this has led to resistance even from Republicans.

Perhaps nowhere has that been more striking than in Indiana’s state Senate. Despite Republicans having a 40-10 supermajority in the chamber, it has repeatedly rejected Trump’s calls – including by voting to adjourn two weeks ago. Around the same time that was happening in mid-November, Trump world began upping the pressure.

And there has now been an apparent deluge of threats against GOP state senators who have declined to sign onto the effort.

CNN reported before Thanksgiving that at least eight GOP state senators and Republican Gov. Mike Braun had all faced threats. In recent days, GOP state Sens. Jean Leising and Mike Bohacek cited bomb threats. That means roughly 1 in 4 Indiana GOP state senators has now faced such a threat.

There is no evidence tracing these threats directly to posts or comments by Trump or anyone else. But what’s abundantly clear is that the Trump administration hasn’t done much of anything to tamp them down. It’s gone right along applying pressure. Trump certainly hasn’t publicly rebuked the threats like Braun has or like the bipartisan leaders of the state legislature have.

At one point two weeks ago, Trump posted on social media on a Sunday attacking two lawmakers. One of them was the victim just hours later of a swatting attack, in which someone calls in a fake emergency report at a target’s address to induce the SWAT team response (which can be extremely dangerous).

Despite this, Trump the very next day again lashed out at the other lawmaker he had cited, state Senate President Rodric Bray. He also said he would endorse against anyone who ran afoul of him on this issue.

To this point, the pressure campaign appears to have had at least something of an impact. Despite having voted to adjourn until January, Bray last week reversed course and agreed to hold a vote next week.

That vote will follow the state House, which has been more supportive of the new map and is expected to approve it this week. (The map, which was released Monday, would give the GOP an advantage in all nine districts in the state by splitting up two blue districts based in Gary and Indianapolis.)

That doesn’t mean the state Senate will approve the map, and there are actually signs that opponents are digging in. Both Leising and Bohacek have been defiant, with Bohacek citing how Trump had recently called Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz “seriously retarded.” (Bohacek, who has a daughter with Down Syndrome, said “words have consequences.” He’s since been relentlessly attacked on social media by Trump allies.)

But it seems at least possible that Trump’s pressure campaign — as well as the threats from others — could ultimately sway lawmakers to do something they clearly didn’t want to do.

And that would be a remarkable moment in our democracy.

While it’s a difficult issue to pin down, there has long been evidence that threats of physical violence can play a significant role in Trump’s domination of the party. While there is no established connection between these specific threats and Trump, he has often spoken suggestively about justified violence from his supporters. And many of them did rise up in violence on his behalf on January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol.

Several Republicans who have found themselves on Trump’s bad side have pointed to the impact these kinds of threats can have in preventing lawmakers from voting in ways he doesn’t like.

“They felt that that vote would put their families in danger,” now-former GOP Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan has said of Trump’s pressure on members not to certify the 2020 election.

Former Sen. Mitt Romney said in a 2023 book by The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins that a GOP congressman had confided that he voted against impeaching Trump because of fears for his family’s safety.

But with Indiana, rarely will it have been so easy to trace lawmakers changing their positions so directly to intimidation and threats of physical violence. And the lesson that some might take away is that threats are a great way to get what you want.

It was just two weeks ago, after all, that nearly half of the state Senate Republicans voted to recess rather than do what Trump wanted.

But that also points to the political risk for the president here, given the real doubt about whether these lawmakers will now actually do what Trump is demanding.

Because Republicans have such a huge majority, about 16 of them would need to vote with Democrats against the map. As of Monday, the Indianapolis Star counted 10 who were openly against the map and 14 who had said they were for it. That left 26 Republicans who were seemingly free agents, and Trump needs to win over the vast majority of them.

Imagine a situation in which the state Senate ultimately rejects what Trump wants – despite all the Truth Social posts, the repeated interventions from Vice President JD Vance and the recent efforts of House Speaker Mike Johnson.

If Republicans can’t push through Trump’s much-desired outcome in a 40-10 GOP chamber after all that, that will have been a stunning rebuke – and at one of the worst possible times for Trump, given the emerging lame-duck narrative about his presidency.

And it will have been all for a potential two-seat gain that might not even determine who controls the US House after the 2026 election.

But this is the battle Trump has chosen. Now he – and the country – will deal with the fallout.