Its place in the middle of the national voting leads to a third argument for its importance as a presidential bellwether state. More often than any other state, Ohio puts the winning candidate over the finish line in the Electoral College.
OHIO: THE DECIDER
Technically, in 27 of the 30 elections from 1896 to 2012, the winning candidate still would have won without Ohio’s electoral votes. The exceptions are 1916, 2000, and 2004. However, that statistic doesn’t tell the full tale of how often Ohio votes close to the national average and how often it casts the decisive vote for the winner in both competitive and uncompetitive elections.
While Nevada and New Mexico have similar batting averages to Ohio’s when it comes to voting with the winning presidential candidate, the Buckeye State has an obvious but nonetheless important advantage: it’s always been much more populous than these far more sparsely populated western states. Ohio cast 18 electoral votes in 2012: while Ohio’s number of electoral votes has been declining because of slow population growth, it was still the seventh highest in the nation, and Ohio has always ranked among the Electoral College’s biggest prizes.
Nevada and New Mexico cast just six and five electoral votes, respectively, in 2012, and they’ve never cast more in any election. The small size of those two states means that they are not nearly as valuable to the candidates in terms of assembling a winning electoral coalition. They are too small, practically, to make the difference between winning and losing in all but the closest elections. Indeed, neither state has actually been decisive in the past 30 presidential elections.
Meanwhile, Ohio has produced the winning electoral vote for the victorious presidential candidate more times over the last 30 elections than any other state. In five of those elections, Ohio’s electoral vote put the winner over the finish line.
Here’s what that means: One can take the states that voted for the presidential winner and put them in order, from biggest margin to smallest, rather like Trende’s hypothetical pool cited in chapter 1. Under this model, the state that produced the biggest percentage-point margin for the winner casts the first votes. For instance, in 2012, the District of Columbia voted for President Obama by an 83.6 percentage-point margin, by far the biggest margin won by either candidate that year in any place that cast electoral votes. So Obama got his “first” three electoral votes from DC. Obama’s next four votes came from his birth state of Hawaii, which he won by 42.7 points. That put him at seven electoral votes. In that same election, Romney got his first six electoral votes from Utah, which he won by 47.9 points thanks to overwhelming support from his fellow Mormons (although Utah is frequently among the most Republican states in presidential elections). And so on. Once the winner gets to 270 electoral votes, the rest is gravy.
Table 2.4 lists the 30 elections from 1896 through 2012 and the “decisive” state in each election. In recent years, this means the 270th electoral vote in the current Electoral College, which has 538 electoral votes, a total reached in 1964 with the addition of the District of Columbia and its three electoral votes.
Table 2.4. States providing decisive electoral vote, 1896–2012
Ohio cast this decisive vote five times: 1896 for Ohioan William McKinley, 1936 for Franklin Roosevelt, 1968 and 1972 for Richard Nixon, and 2004 for George W. Bush. The most recent instance was the most important: if Bush had lost Ohio in that close 2004 election, John Kerry would have been elected president. The other elections were not very competitive, except for 1968, which Nixon won by less than a point in the two-party vote over Hubert Humphrey.
No other state has cast decisive votes in more than three elections in this period: Illinois, Michigan, and New York each have been decisive three times. In fact, just 16 of the 50 states have cast the winning electoral votes in this 116-year period.
Additionally, Ohio has been just one slot away from being the crucial state five other times: 1900, 1948, 1964, 1976, and 1984. Included are two of the most competitive elections of the past century, Harry S. Truman’s then-shocking upset of Thomas Dewey in 1948 and Jimmy Carter’s near theft of defeat from the jaws of victory against hard-charging, unelected incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976.
In 1948, Truman won the national popular vote by about four and a half percentage points over Dewey, but Truman’s victory was dependent on two very narrow escapes. One was in Ohio by a quarter of a point, and the other was in California by a little less than half a point. In 1976, Carter squeaked by in Ohio by about a quarter of a point, and in Wisconsin by less than two points. Later chapters will analyze these elections, and the candidates’ performances in Ohio, in more depth.
Two key points: First, these statistics illustrate how Ohio is almost always near the national presidential voting, whether in very close elections (1968 and 2004) or in those that are not close at all (1936 and 1972). Second, the data also suggest that Ohio, because of its size, is more valuable to win than many other states. For all Nevada’s and New Mexico’s success in supporting the winner of presidential races, those two states have never during this 30-election span cast the decisive vote.
WHY OHIO?
Through Ohio’s record of voting for the winning presidential nominee (28 times in the last 30 elections), its hewing to the national average (deviating an average of only 2.2 points from the country as a whole over those 30 elections), and its decisiveness in national elections (casting the winning votes more times than any other state), the Buckeye State has a strong claim as the most consistent and durable bellwether state over the last 30 presidential elections. The next logical question is: Why?
THREE
Typical in All Things
“Perhaps, as the social scientists say, we are only a national average, a convenient yard stick, typical in all things, singular in nothing,” Harlan Hatcher writes in The Buckeye Country. Hatcher, an Ohio State University professor and fifth-generation Ohioan, did not agree with the assessment, though: “We Ohioans know that there is an illusive something more . . . the subtle X that colors our politics and religion; that gives tone to our big cities, and our country acres; that emanates from the college campuses and university halls; that broods over the hills of the Muskingum valley and over the lake shore and the plains; and we call it simply Ohio.”1
From a political standpoint, figuring out that “subtle X” is crucial to understanding Ohio’s presidential voting history. What is it about Ohio that places it so close to the national average in presidential elections? Is it something unique about the state—or is it something decidedly non-unique?
OHIO’S REGIONS
Before exploring why the state mirrors the nation, it’s first important to take a quick look at the state’s politically and culturally diverse regions. The Ohio Politics Almanac, created by former Columbus Dispatch associate publisher Mike Curtin (who also has served in the state legislature as a Democrat), divides the state into six.
These regions are based in part on Ohio’s media markets, which is very important in political campaigns because of the massive amounts of money each campaign and its allies spend on television advertising. The rise of targeted advertising through cell phones and Internet browsing may eventually make such media market distinctions less important, but as of the mid-2010s television advertising on broadcast and cable was still the primary way that campaigns reached voters.
Let’s take a closer look at these six regions and how they voted from 2000 to 2012. While in 21st-century elections the state—like the nation—features a strong urban versus rural dynamic, with Republican candidates winning most of the counties but Democrats running strong in the state’s most populated areas, there is a regional divide in the state as well, with the northeastern part of the state being the most Democratic and Republican strength lying in the western and southern portions of the state.