In the '80’s, it had two D Senators and a D Governor. In 2006, they elected Ted Strickland as Governor, and Sherrod Brown unseated Mike DeWine in the Senate. In 2008, Dems won control of the Ohio House of Representatives and Obama beat McCain by almost 5 points. He won it again in 2012 by 3 points. In 2016, everything kind of went all to hell for Ohio Dems though. The Reuters article cited above describes it like this:
What’s driving this swing in Ohio? Is it disorganization on the Dem side? Particular motivation or organization on the Rep side? Just Trump’s appeal in the Rust Belt? Something else?
I think Ohio has been pretty much what it has always been. The Democratic party over the years has become the party of cities, and in particular, coastal cities. It might have made sense to go where the voters are, but as we’ve seen in 2 or 3 of the last 5 elections, the Democrats are running into an electoral college problem. It’s also the same problem that plagues them in congressional races and even governor’s races in states that used to be reliable blue.
On a related note, I was listening to a public radio story the other day about how some pretty influential labor groups that have long just automatically sided with the democratic party have now openly debated that strategy, particularly in light of the fact that many union members voted against their own unions’ official endorsements.
All of this says to me that the democratic party threw its chips behind the Obama revolution and counted on diversity as its path going forward. This is despite the clear evidence that it wasn’t really working that well even during Obama’s term. I’m not at all saying that the Democrats should abandon diversity and pluralism, but it definitely does need to reconnect with the less sophisticated folk who represent suburbs and small towns. Democrats used to smash the GOP in these areas and they’re losing more and more convincingly with each election. But this is not an Ohio problem; it’s a nationwide problem for Democrats.
There has been a struggle between the centrist Dems and the more progressive Dems for some time. There was a similar struggle in the Republican Party, but that one is over, and the batshit baboons have won. See the difference?
Nonetheless, I have little doubt that the Dems appreciate your, ah, concern.
I have the impression that it’s largely to do with a combination of lack of organization on the Dem side, both in 2016 in the sense of poor message and neglected voter pools, and in terms of Ohio Democrat Party organization going back decades. The Democrats in Ohio also point to a lack of fundraising or money available to downticket candidates in 2016. I can’t tell if this has been a persistent issue, but there has been a lot of talk about the Dems taking Ohio for granted, so it wouldn’t surprise to me to learn that this has also been a longer term problem.
The financial situation in the Rust Belt also contributed. Because the economy overall is looking good, there are these population groups in various parts of the country where the economy is not doing well, who were essentially neglected. Just as with coal miners, there are swaths of the population in Ohio who want to hear that their jobs will be back.
As I understand it, the swing has mostly been in white working-class voters. Traditionally, Republicans have done very little for these voters, so they’ve been reliably Democratic. This year, though, the Republicans are still doing very little for them, but managed to convince them otherwise.
Columbus bucks the trend, and the state of Ohio as a whole is also increasing.
So we have most cities with population declining while the state’s population is increasing. That seems to indicate that the state is becoming more rural and rural areas tend Republican.
Lance Turbo, those links are just for the metropolis, and include people moving to the suburbs. A better measure would be the county, or the entire metropolitan area. Cuyahoga County, for instance, only dropped by 0.38% from 2011 to 2012 (the most recent numbers I was able to easily find). Columbus doesn’t show the same trend, because it’s absorbed most of its suburbs, and so people moving to the outskirts of town are still within the city limits.
2006 was an unusually bad year for Ohio Republicans. There was the national disaster for the party and a bunch of state-specific stuff. (And Ken Blackwell was a terrible candidate.) So, at the very height of the Ohio Democratic Party’s power in the last 25 years, it won some (but not all) statewide offices and a slim majority (that lasted two years) in one house of the state legislature.
It’s a little odd that the party did so badly in a presidential elections, but the same forces also flipped Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The rural areas are mostly shrinking in population. Population growth is in suburbs and Columbus (Columbus has a lot of suburban areas but there’s also growth in the more urban areas).
I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about HRC leading the Dems off the edge. Never much cared for her version of “centrism”, indecisive is bad enough, timid indecision is much worse. (Though nobody talks about her being the founder of a lesbian Maoist study group at Wellesley, which she tried to cover up by working for Goldwater…)
If anyone in the Democratic Party fit that…umm, I’ll be charitable and call it ‘provocative’…characterization, it’d be the far left. In more common parlance, Bernie Bros.
All the people I know that flipped (here in Ohio) are middle class and upper middle class white guys who like Trump’s personality (regardless of the fact that they have daughters and granddaughters), prefer Trump’s economic stance to Hillary’s, believe everything he says and are completely, absolutely and utterly blind to the social concerns of Everybody Else.
Also, Trump made it ok to be openly racist and sexist again, so that was a good reason to vote for him. Whew.
From my experience, living in central Ohio, you need to distinguish several different areas.
With the inner cities, distinguish Columbus from the other big cities, since most of inner Columbus is desirable to live in, while Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo on the whole are not.
Suburban areas tend to be the best areas to live – and tend to vote Republican – and Franklin and Delaware Counties (suburban Columbus) are where the growth is.
Away from the big cities, there’s:
Rustbelt Ohio, in Akron, Canton and Youngstown.
Appalachian Ohio, in the south east. (And Steubenville, next to the northern panhandle of West Virginia manages to combine Rustbelt and Appalachia)
Southwestern Ohio, which shares the characteristics of northern Kentucky and southern Indiana.
Northwestern Ohio, which is a bit like southern Michigan.
Most of those parts are tending Republican these days, along with the trends in the neighbouring states. The only bright part for Democrats is the City of Columbus, which they have held for a long time.
Fellow Ohian. It’s less complicated than that. Most of Ohio (certainly anything south of Akron) is just Northern Kentucky. I wasn’t surprised that Donald won, here.
I think the issue with Ohio for Democrats is simply bad luck the last few cycles. I don’t see a major swing to the right, I just see better Republicans running against lousy Democrats. And the Democrats’ propensity the last few cycles for disrespecting the people by putting up retreads they’ve already rejected hasn’t helped them anywhere.
Dewine’s AG and that’s probably his last office. Democrats have actively recruited previously rejected incumbents for Senate, thinking they’ll get a different result.
Ohio’s population didn’t change; the Democrats’ message has changed a lot. But as I said, it’s not just a problem in Ohio; it’s a problem now in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and if the Democrats aren’t careful a state like Minnesota could be next. The warning signs were there all along: Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, despite being reliably blue in presidential elections had already elected Republican governors, senators, and legislatures – presidential races were the outliers. It’s a bit of a mystery as to why Democrats believed that this was somehow bought into this blue wall theory. It was cracking long before Trump came along and took a bulldozer to it.
None of this is to say that the Democrats are wrong to promote diversity and civil rights – they should absolutely stay on message there. But they need another message that reassures middle class white voters and the white working poor that they’re not forgotten. There hasn’t been an effort to communicate with them, and shockingly, they’ve just decided to write off much of flyover country, not even campaigning there. It’s the failure to compete and campaign that has been the most disastrous for the Democrats, IMO. This has to change, but I’m not sure that they get it just yet. Bernie Sanders, as much as I’ve criticized him, seems to, but I think he and his supporters over-estimate the popularity of their ideas.