State of Disunion

By J. Caleb Mozzocco, AlterNet. Posted October 6, 2004.

Ohio is a state of electoral contradictions. It is socially conservative enough to have one of the most muscular same-sex marriage amendments in the nation on its November ballot and its state government is completely in the Republican Party's control. At the same time, Ohio voters have opted for Bill Clinton twice, and there are hundreds of thousands of newly registered Democrats on the rolls.

Ohio likes to call itself "The Mother of Modern Presidents" because eight presidents came from Ohio, and because Virginia already had dibs on "Birthplace of Presidents." While John Kerry's defeat of Cleveland congressman Dennis Kucinich during the Democratic primaries guarantees that the next president won't be an Ohioan, that president is still going to have to at least come through – if not from – Ohio. This year Ohio can consider itself the "Midwife of Presidents."

Ohio's 20 electoral votes give it more than all but six other states, and of those six, only two of them are up for grabs – Pennsylvania and Florida. And while George W. Bush won Ohio in 2000, he did so only by a margin of 3.5%, or 165,000 votes, and only after Al Gore's campaign pulled out and abandoned the state 45 days before the election, mistakenly thinking Bush already had it locked down.

That's the practical rationale for the fevered campaigning in the state this year, though there's also the oft-cited trivia that no Republican has ever won the White House without first winning Ohio, and Ohio has successfully voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1960. As goes Ohio, so goes the country – or is that the other way around?

Neither Republican Red nor Democratic Blue, Ohio is technically "purple" in punditese, although it's recent history can make it look like more of a fuchsia. Democrats haven't won a statewide election in Ohio in 13 years, when the last Democratic governor left office. Since then, Republicans have (comfortably) controlled not only the governor's office but both houses of the state legislature, both U.S. Senate seats, two-thirds of the representatives to the U.S. House and every single non-judicial elective statewide office.

Of course, presidential politics is an entirely different matter than state politics, as Bill Clinton illustrated by winning the state twice during this Republican reign, so history can only go so far toward predicting how Ohio will vote. Especially considering the unpredictable issues involved this year – terrorism, war and the polarizing effect of President Bush – and the slew of out-of-state players coming in to get out the vote.

For a state used to flyover status, whose very capital city of Columbus is derisively nicknamed "Cowtown," all of this attention can be a little flattering – and a little wearisome. In the space of a few short summer weeks, the League of Pissed-Off Voters, Clothing Of The American Mind, Driving Votes, Fuck The Vote, Run Against Bush, Mothers Opposing Bush, Billionaires For Bush and sundry other anti-Bush activists have barnstormed Columbus. The city gets such attention lavished on it because Central Ohio is considered to be the most in-play part of an in-play state.

The other politically distinct sections of Ohio – referred to as "the Five Ohios" in a Cleveland Plain Dealer reported series – are easier to divide between political parties. The northeastern industrial area, including Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown, is solidly liberal. The northwestern farm lands, whose only big city is Toledo, is very rural and tends to be fairly conservative. To the southeast is Ohio's section of Appalachia; low-income and often-ignored, it's chock full of veterans and conservatives. The southwest, including Dayton and Cincinnati, is the most reliably Republican part of the state.

The way for a party to win an Ohio election, traditionally, is to win big in the most loyal of their five Ohios, not lose too badly in the other party's Ohios, and make swinging central Ohio, consisting of Columbus and its sprawling suburbs, their own.

With a relatively steady economy driven by government, education and service jobs rather than manufacturing, central Ohio is immune to some of the problems afflicting the rest of the state. Cheap cost of living draws immigrants, including a surprisingly large Somali population, to Columbus, and Ohio State University and several other colleges attract students, teachers and campus hanger-on types from around the world. The results are a state government dominated by Republicans that does business in a city completely dominated by Democrats that is housed in a Republican-controlled county. The fact that the Bush and Kerry campaigns all but collide into one another as they campaign in and out of the area shows just how hard both are working to win it.

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