Reconsidering the Ohio Results

By Ruy Teixeira, The Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation. Posted December 9, 2004.

In this edition of Public Opinion Watch:
(covering polls and related articles from the weeks of November 29-December 5, 2004)

• Reconsidering the Conventional Wisdom about Ohio
• Bush's Hispanic Support Headed Downward
• Still a Roe v. Wade Country

Reconsidering the Conventional Wisdom about Ohio

Everybody knows what happened in Ohio, right? Hordes of evangelicals descended on the polls in rural and exurban areas and their votes for Bush swamped the Democrats' valiant, but doomed, mobilization efforts in urban areas.

Steve Rosenthal, head of the leading Democratic 527, America Coming Together (ACT), has a very interesting article in the Washington Post on Sunday that questions this conventional wisdom with hard data, including a post-election poll of 1,400 rural and exurban voters in Ohio counties that Bush won by an average of seventeen percentage points. I recommend it strongly.

Here are some key excerpts from the article:

The first myth: Many more churchgoing voters flocked to the polls this year, driven by the Bush "moral values" and the gay marriage referendum. Reality: In Ohio, the share of the electorate represented by frequent churchgoers actually declined from 45 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2004.

Second myth: The Bush campaign won by mobilizing GOP strongholds and suppressing turnout in Democratic areas. Reality: Turnout in Democratic-leaning counties in Ohio was up 8.7 percent while turnout in Republican-leaning counties was up slightly less, at 6.3 percent. John Kerry bested Bush in Cuyahoga County (home of Cleveland) by 218,000 votes – an increase of 42,497 over Gore's 2000 effort. In Stark County (Canton) – a bellwether lost by Gore – Kerry won by 4,354.

Third myth: A wave of newly registered Republican voters in fast-growing rural and exurban areas carried Bush to victory. Reality: Among Ohio's rural and exurban voters, Bush beat Kerry by just five points among newly registered voters and by a mere two points among infrequent voters (those who did not vote in 2000).

Fourth myth: Republicans ran a superior, volunteer-driven mobilization effort. Reality: When we asked new voters in rural and exurban areas who contacted them during this campaign, we learned that they were just as likely to hear from the Kerry campaign and its allies as from the Bush side.... [A]ccording to our post-election polling; only 20 percent of exurban and rural Ohio voters reported that they had been contacted by someone from their church, and only slightly higher percentages were contacted by conservative organizations.... [V]oters in these Republican counties were just as likely to be visited by a Kerry supporter at their homes as by a Bush supporter. Fewer than 2 percent were visited by a Bush supporter whom they knew personally.

I would add the following to what Rosenthal says, based on my own analysis of Ohio county voting data. Gore lost Ohio by about 165,000 votes in 2000, so Kerry needed a net gain of over 165,000 votes to take the state. My analysis shows that Kerry only gained about 103,000 net votes in all of metro Ohio outside of the exurbs. Therefore, Bush's 66,000 net vote gain in the exurbs and rural areas was not particularly consequential to the outcome. Kerry didn't gain enough votes outside of those areas to win anyway.

Or look at it this way. If you take all of the metro, non-exurban counties where Kerry registered net vote gains, including Cleveland's Cuyahoga county (52,000), Columbus' Franklin county (37,000), Cincinnati's Hamilton county (18,000), Akron's Summit county (14,000), and the rest, he still only had a net gain of about 155,000 votes, which is not enough to take the state even before any counties where he lost net votes – non-exurban metro, exurban, or rural – are taken into consideration.

In that light, consider Warren county, that much reported-upon exurban county outside of Cincinnati, which made for great copy in the 2004 election, as a sort of an evangelical-drive vote machine for George Bush. But in the end it was not key to Bush's victory in Ohio; he would have carried the state even he had not received one additional net vote from Warren this year.

Finally, it's instructive to compare Kerry's performance in 2004 not just with Gore's in 2000 but with Clinton's in 1996, when the Democrats actually carried the state. While there was heavy falloff in 2004 from Clinton's performance in Ohio's rural and exurban areas, it is also true that Clinton did much better – by a margin of 150,000 votes – than Kerry in Ohio's non-exurban metro areas. Interestingly, about two-thirds of this falloff can be accounted for by declining Democratic support in Ohio's medium-sized metro areas (think Youngstown's Mahoning county, Canton's Stark county, Dayton's Montgomery county, Toledo's Lucas county, and so on). Even more interesting, if Kerry had matched Clinton's victory margin in non-exurban metro counties as a whole, he would have won the state, despite the sharp fall-off in rural and exurban support.

Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation.

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