What’s Happened to Ohio?
My state has become the Arkansas of the Great Lakes
Ohio was once thought to be a bellwether state with respect to presidential elections. “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” The implication was that Ohio was a moderate state whose voters were middle of the road, as likely to vote for one party as the other.
Just over sixteen years ago, Ohio elected Democrat Sherrod Brown to the U.S. Senate over Mike Dewine. DeWine had the power of incumbency, having served for 12 years in the Senate. Nonetheless, Brown beat Dewine by almost 13%, winning 46 of Ohio’s 88 counties. That same year, Tim Ryan was elected to the U.S. House by a 60% margin. In Trumbull County, Ryan’s home, he received 82% of the vote.
Two years later, in 2008, Ohio helped put Barack Obama over the top in his campaign for president. He won the state’s 20 electoral votes by a 4% margin over John McCain. Twenty-two of Ohio’s 88 counties voted blue in that election. His sweeping get-out-the-vote effort in Ohio helped Democrats win two Congressional seats long held by Republicans, and seize control of the Ohio House for the first time since 1994. Democrats sent 10 representatives to the U.S. House in comparison to the Republican’s eight. Ohio’s education system was ranked 12th in the nation in CNBC’s “Top States for Business” report.
In 2012, Ohio re-elected Barack Obama to the White House and Sherrod Brown to the Senate. Obama won by just under a 2% margin over Mitt Romney while Brown bested Josh Mandel by 5%. Obama won in 16 counties, Brown won 23.
Fast forward to 2020, when, of course, Joe Biden won the presidency. In Ohio, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by just over 8%. Biden won just eight counties.
Biden was the first candidate to be elected president without winning Ohio since Kennedy in 1960.
This year, 2022, Tim Ryan (D) lost to JD Vance (R) in the Ohio race for US Senate by over 6% statewide. He lost Trumbull County by 7%. Ohio Republicans swept every partisan statewide office this month. Meanwhile, the near-opposite happened in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Both chambers in the Ohio General Assembly will hold onto their Republican supermajorities. Just 7 of the 33 members of the Ohio Senate will be Democrats come 2023.
“We achieved a level not reached in more than 70 years,” Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman said in a statement. “The last time the Senate had a 26-member supermajority was during the 99th General Assembly in 1951.”
I think that Ohio really isn’t a representative of the whole country the way that it once was,” said Mark Caleb Smith, a professor of political science at Cedarville University in Ohio.
“Ohio now is a much more red state than it is a purple state,” Smith said.
Ohio voters cast their ballots for crooks
It’s significant that Ohio has become redder even as the state’s GOP politicians have been awash in corruption. As Albert Hunt reports in The Hill, “Today, Ohio politics is a cesspool of corruption, dominated by shady entrenched Republican politicians.” Jim Jordan, perhaps Ohio’s most popular Republican, has been credibly accused of helping to cover up a sex abuse scandal when he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State.
A corruption case in which First Energy allegedly paid GOP office holders $61M in bribes to get a $1.3B bailout for its aging nuclear and coal plants (one of them isn’t even in Ohio) represents the largest example of corruption in any state house in the U.S. State House Leader Republican Larry Householder got most of the money. After skimming some for his own use, he handed most of the rest out to fellow Republicans. The U.S. Department of Justice has presented evidence that Householder took part in a plan to accept bribes to get a sports betting bill passed in Ohio. In 2020, Householder cruised to reelection in spite of having been arrested by federal authorities in connection with the scandal.
It’s worth noting that another Republican House leader was forced out of office for corrupt behavior just two years earlier. In 2018, Cliff Rosenberger resigned amidst an FBI investigation into his fraudulent travel and other expenses.
Ohio voters cast ballots for poor performance
Clearly, Republicans aren’t being voted into office because of the exemplary ethical standards. Nor is it due to their performance in office. Republicans have controlled the state Senate every year since 1992. They have controlled the House all but five of those years and the governor’s office all but four.
All that one-party control hasn’t benefited Ohioans:
- The state ranks 39th in household median income, just below North Carolina and well below the national figure.
- In 1992, Ohio’s median income was just $1,500 more than the national figure. In 2021, it was $8,000 less. Our 1992 median income was $7,000 greater than that of North Carolina. Now North Carolina is above us. Ohio’s median income hasn’t matched the U.S. median income since 2003.
- The child poverty rate hasn’t changed since 2005.
- Ohio ranks 37th on that measure. (Louisiana and Mississippi are at the bottom.)
- In 2020, U.S. News and World Reports ranked Ohio #37 in health care, #31 in education, #34 in economy, and #44 in natural environment.
Ohio’s Republican leadership has been corrupt while doing nothing for the state.
Ohioans’ proclivity for electing Republican lawmakers is difficult to reconcile with their own political sentiments. A recent poll conducted by Baldwin Wallace University shows that:
- 59% of Ohio voters would amend the state constitution to make abortion a fundamental right (a bill that would outlaw nearly all abortions is currently being blocked)
- 60% say that the U.S. should pass a federal law to legalize gay marriage across the country (Republican legislators considered a bill that would require high school girls to be subjected to a genital inspection before being allowed to participate on school sports teams. Ohio also has statutes and constitutional amendments in place that prohibit same-sex marriage and would be reenacted if Obergefell were overturned)
- 85% favor expanding background checks for gun purchasers aged 18 to 21, 79% support raising the minimum age to buy an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle from 18 to 21, and 75% approve of “red flag” laws that allow police to temporarily remove guns from owners deemed to pose a danger. (Ohio passed a law last year that allows teachers and school employees to bring guns to school with no training requirement. Republican legislators passed another law that allows permitless carry of firearms with no training or background checks.)
- 67% of Ohioans believe global climate change is caused, at least in part, by human activity. (Mike DeWine signed a bill this month that defines natural gas as “green energy”. The infamous bill that Larry Householder was bribed to get passed bailed out two nuclear plants and two obsolete coal plants, while gutting energy efficiency and renewable energy standards.)
Why Ohio is redder
So what the hell is wrong with Ohio that it keeps eagerly voting into office representatives that act counter to their interests and refuse to do much of anything to help the state?
Some would argue that gerrymandering, that’s among the worst in the nation, is responsible for Ohio’s hard right turn. But fair maps, while they might reduce the GOP’s stranglehold on the state’s House and Senate, wouldn’t give Democrats an assured majority in either. Nor does gerrymandering explain the right’s tsunami in state-wide elections. Others argue that weak Democratic candidates and campaigns are to blame. Again, though, those factors don’t explain the Democrat’s long absence from power in the state. Nor does it explain recent double-digit wins by Republicans who, just a few years ago, won state races by single digits against unworthy opponents. Richard Cordray ran a fairly lackluster campaign four years ago and lost by single digits. Nan Whaley lost in 2022 by 26%.
An answer to the question requires that we look at changes in Ohio demographics over the past two decades or so. Ohio is a state in decline. The vast majority of the state of Ohio is growing older, losing population, and losing workers. If the city of Columbus and surrounding areas are removed from the equation, the rest of the state experienced a population loss of about 1%, or 100,000 people. Ohio’s labor force decreased by 91,000 workers over the same time period. The state as a whole — and cities and metros outside central Ohio — experienced significant decreases in people under age 54.
Ohio’s rural counties are experiencing especially remarkable population declines. Fifty-five of Ohio’s 88 counties (63%) lost population over the past decade. The steepest declines were found in Appalachian Ohio, where Harrison, Monroe, and Morgan counties all saw populations decrease more than 9%.
Because of population and demographic changes, Ohio is whiter, older, and less educated than the U.S. on the whole. Two-thirds of Ohio white voters without a college degree voted for Trump in 2020. About 67% of Ohio’s voters are older than 45, and 25% are older than 65. Well over half of those voters supported Trump.
There’s also some evidence that Ohio is becoming more racist, and less tolerant of “outsiders”. Ohio is the seventh most populous state but is third in the number of hate crimes (2020). Pennsylvania has a higher population, but Ohio has more than 900% more hate crimes. Ohio has more hate crimes than Florida or Texas, both much larger in population and neither known as havens of enlightenment. In 2016, Ohio had the fourth most hate crimes per capita in the nation. We were far above Arkansas, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, or Mississippi. Just five years before, Ohio was 27th in hate crimes per capita.
One study that analyzed 12 million Twitter posts for hate language showed that Ohio was one of the eight most racist states. Another study showed that Ohio had much more than average searches for racist terms: “Other hotbeds of racist searches appear in areas of the Gulf Coast, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and a large portion of Ohio.”
Ohio ranks 11th in the U.S. in the number of hate groups headquartered here. The state is home to more than 30 anti-government militia groups. Ohio ranks second in the nation in the number of such groups in the state.
Christian nationalists, recent studies show, are especially likely to evince antipathy toward Black Americans, Muslims, and immigrants. Doug Pagitt, executive director of Vote Common Good, a group of evangelicals who are uncomfortable with the extremism of white Christian nationalists, says: “We’re very convinced that Ohio has a particular appetite for Christian Nationalism and there’s a high threat level of it taking root here.”
Ohio, then, is increasingly white, old, uneducated, and, arguably, more racist, at least in comparison to its neighbor states. All these factors are consistent with the state becoming politically more red.
Are there reasons for optimism?
Democrats, of course, fervently hope that Ohio will swing back to being a swing state, ideally in time for a Sherrod Brown victory in 2024. Brown is popular in the state and has the benefits of incumbency, but his path to another term is made more challenging by the state’s sharp move toward conservatism. State races are looking even less sanguine for Democrats. Given the current dynamics, it’s likely to be a while, if ever, before Ohio becomes a bellwether state again.
