The coronation of Lee Fisher in 2010 was pretty annoying (I voted for Brunner) since he hadn’t won anything on his own in 20 years, but I don’t think Strickland was an obvious reject when they chose him (maybe too old though). He lost by less than three in a bad year, after coming back from polls showing an impending blowout for Kasich.
Better Republicans running against lousy Democrats can certainly explain Kasich beating Fitzgerald, and probably Portland beating Strickland. But how do you explain Trump beating Clinton?
It’s largely suburbanization, not ruralization. People aren’t moving out to the country, they are moving to suburbia. I am currently sitting at ground zero of a pretty massive wave of upper middle class suburban development. Houses are going up and people are moving in. And these people are largely, based on the socioeconomic demographics, going to be republican, especially when they get here, and see that it has been pretty tough to be a democrat for at least a couple decades in the area. Local elections are decided at the primary level, as the republican nominee will win.
So yeah, a large part of it is that upper middle class republicans are moving into ohio, and republicans are being raised in ohio to stay.
Then you have the little “cities” like middletown (bucking for a record of opiate OD’s this year), that are largely poor whites, who used to vote for democrats, because democrats supported unions and worker benefits and stuff like that. Democrats lost enough power to no longer be able to protect unions from the republicans, so when the unions got busted up, people started voting for the republicans.
In 2008, nearly everyone I knew voted D. They voted for Obama, they voted for their state representative to be a Democrat. They’d voted for strickland in 2006. Boehner was about the only republican to get a national office out of the area. Local politics still swung right, but it was a very moderate right, and a few democrats actually did pick up some traction.
By 2010, something had changed. Many of the people I knew that had voted for democrats in the 2008 election had become disillusioned with them. It had been 2 years, and they were still not making what they were making before the 2008 recession. They didn’t seem to care that the republicans had blocked further stimulus efforts, they put the blame for the economy not rebounding in 18 months on the people “in charge.” They didn’t like some aspects about the ACA, mostly aspects that did not exist, I heard complaints about death panels and rationing of care, and some aspects that did, like the mandate. The nuance of how the ACA came to be, and why it was not a perfect bill, and the fact that we needed to elect and re-elect D’s to office to improve upon it was lost on them, they had heard the negatives about it, and that was all, and that was enough, so they voted against the people who wanted to improve the bill, and voted for the people who wanted to tear it up. This was unfortunate, as it put enough R’s in the state house that they could get away with some pretty crazy gerrymandering, which meant that by 2012, while the republicans did get more votes, 2.6m to 2.4m, they had a disproportionate number of representatives, 13 to 5.
By the time 2012 swung around, I didn’t have as many R friends, as they didn’t want to be friends with someone who still supported Obama. Any gathering I went to, inevitably someone would bring up death panels, birth certificates, or some other made up right wing talking point. This is when I stopped talking politics with anyone who wasn’t a close friend, as it just became insane. They would just make unsupported allegations, to which most of the room would simply nod in agreement, and leave me trying to refute 3 lies and a misunderstanding, and while I am trying to do that, another 2 lies and a deliberate mischaracterization come in from someone else, and this would continue until I would simply give up, shouted down by lies and innuendo. I think once these echo chambers ejected their liberal friends, they snowballed quickly into further and further self-radicalization, until their connection with reality came solely through right wing media.
With most of the recovery since the 2008 crash going to higher earners, and people with college degrees, the further lack of economic gains by the high school educated crowd, along with the insular nature of their social groups, continued to eat away at support for liberal policy. By 2014 and especially 2016, these people who had gladly rejected the republicans in 2006 and 2008 due to their lack of capability of governing were rejecting democrats, essentially for their lack of capability of getting elected.
That didn’t just happen in Ohio; it has happened in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well as other areas that used to be consistently democratic or at least where democrats were competitive. Democrats are not communicating with people outside of well-educated, diverse metropolitan areas. They stopped probably a good decade ago or more. I remember a remark made by then-presidential candidate Howard Dean saying the Democratic party needs to not only talk with diverse communities but also the white guy with the confederate flag on his pickup truck. The Democratic party left shut that kind of talk down immediately because they could. They knew what Dean meant and that he wasn’t being racist or saying that we needed to compromise on values, but that didn’t matter. They didn’t even want to hear that kind of message. And the Democrats wonder why they keep getting drubbed in elections.
I’m not sure if you are trying to be cute, or you are actually accusing HD of concern trolling. I’ll go with the former, but in the future do not come come even close to this type of accusation again.
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I grew up in Ohio, but haven’t lived there this century, so my understanding is secondhand through family and friends.
Ohio really is a mirror of the whole US. You have the hollowed-out rust-belt cities, booming tech-sector cities, poor rural areas losing population, encroaching suburbs, etc. If you want to test your political messaging, Ohio is a great place to do it.
Democrats’ failures there are their own fault, not because Republicans are doing great. This is good news for Democrats (and bad for Republicans), because it means if they can get their act to together, they will stomp the Republicans. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy.
Based on mine own family and friends there, it is hard to get a good job without a college education. That means a lot people are barely getting by, bouncing from one low-skill low-pay job to the next, with a lot of financial insecurity. Getting a college education opens the door to better jobs, but is no guarantee and comes with a large price tag. If that sounds like America in general, it is.
Bernie has policies that could help, but his style of messaging won’t capture Ohio. I’m not sure how to articulate it, but none of the Democrats in Ohio I know (they’re mostly rural) liked Sanders. But Obama did well. Future candidates need to sound more like him than Sanders, even if there’s no difference in policy.
Could you explain this a little more? The city of Columbus has actually grown in geography? Annexing suburbs? Why haven’t other Ohio cities followed Columbus’ example?
It doesn’t make a city better, just bigger.
I don’t know about cleveland, but cincinati can’t really grow, as it is mostly bounded by incorporated areas that do not wish to be annexed by the city.
Columbus was more of a farmland not too long ago (as was many places, where I am sitting now was a farm maybe 15 years ago), so was surrounded by farms that got turned into suburbs that got gobbled up by the city.
A thousand times this. The signs were there. The Democrats gave people in these states no reason to vote for them. So they didn’t.
I think it now famously knows that the Clinton campaign ignored pleas from Rust Belt states to devote resources there - yet those races were clearly close ones. They weren’t runaways like California or Massachusetts, but they got little attention. Had the Clinton campaign paid more attention to the polls and less to their own party myths, they could have won those states. Trump won Wisconsin by less than 1 percent, won Michigan by less than a quarter of one percent, won Pennsylvania by less than a percent. Flip those and she’s the President, with 273 electoral votes (assuming the faithless electoral votes are still faithless, which they would not have remained, so it’d be a bit more than that) and the world isn’t in this terrible mess.
Wow, I’m having a tough time finding a good cite, but I’ll try to explain from what I remember. I’m a 3 time resident of the city, most recently in 2004. The city of Columbus, being a small quiet capital city, wasn’t part of the industrial era such as Cleveland and Cincinnati were. After World War II, numerous suburbs popped up in Cleveland and Cincy and the population went there. So, these days, the actual cities of Cleveland and Cincinnati have relatively low populations and total areas.
Columbus wasn’t the same, it was a capital city with a large university, surrounded by a lot of rural land in the middle of the state. The city of Columbus began annexing surrounding areas in anticipation of future growth. The combination of an educated population with a low cost of living does seem to be a recipe for growth. If you drive around the Columbus metropolitan area, you’ll constantly find signs telling you when you’re entering Columbus, it is a patchwork of different areas, but a lot of them are in the city limits.
There are suburbs of Columbus: Westerville, Worthington, Dublin, and Hilliard spring to mind. But the city of Columbus comprises much more of the Metropolitan Statistical Area than you’ll find in Cleveland or Cincinnati.
This is, incidentally, why Columbus is by a very wide margin the largest city in Ohio by population, despite the fact that in terms of the metro area it really isn’t any more populous a city than Cincinnati or Cleveland. It’s just how the borders are drawn.
First question ought to be if voting for Il Douche is really “moving to the right”? If, for instance, we take someone like Barry Goldwater to be a reasonable choice for conservative spokesperson. So, in what way does Trump represent conservative principles? Personal responsibility? Fiscal prudence? He does seem to relish sabre-rattling, so I guess that’s one.
But what else? Is Trump “conservative”? Does he have any actual principles at all, much less conservative ones.
It looks like the only decent looking Democratic governor in a rural state, at the moment, is this guy:
Here’s his platform:
Sounds pretty Trumpist, if I’m honest.
While I don’t think Trump is a good example of conservatism, is there any question that his agenda (Build a wall! Rebuild the military! Cut taxes!) is to the right of BHO and HRC? Assuming you agree, voting for him instead of HRC would be “moving to the right”, especially given that Ohio twice voted for BHO, wouldn’t it?
His most conservative legacy may simply be his Supreme Court picks.
So, then, if a voter votes for Trump, they have moved to the right, but not necessarily more conservative. But if one becomes more conservative in their vote, they have moved to the right?
As well, someone who supported Bernie Bedhair but then voted for Hillary has also moved to the right, by action if not conviction. For that matter, Hillary is a wee tad more conservative than Obama, so voters who voted for Hillary and Obama both…moved to the right.
(Shit, I’d give good money to hear the ghost of Bill Buckley opine on Donald Trump! And if Barry Goldwater had to shake hands with him, he would braize he fingers in a blow torch to prevent contagion…)
The suburbs of a metropolis never particularly want to be annexed, but the metropolis can offer them incentives, as Columbus did. As I understand it, the big one was utilities access: It costs a lot to build something like a water treatment plant, and so suburbs usually make some sort of deal with their metropolis to connect to the already-existing one. But Columbus made annexation a condition for connection.
Columbus annexed the land before it was suburbs (it did this by refusing to sell water outside of the city limits, so any developer who wanted city water had to request annexation). It’s too late for the other big cities to do it now. Incorporated suburbs simply can’t be annexed, and existing unincorporated suburbs will fight it all the way. (Annexation is based on the consent of the owner. A farmer who is moving out, or a developer who wants the water, has a good reason to consent. An existing suburbanite just sees the Big Bad City coming to ruin their leafy idyll.)
Just for the record: I’ve never lived in Ohio, I have friends from there and I’ve been through there, but I’m not speaking as local Buckeye; that said, I DO follow the political scene, and I think your initial question is slightly flawed.
Yes, Ohio had two Democratic Senators in the 1980s, but one of them was named John Glenn and that’s primarily why he won. Ronald Reagan absolutely trounced Jimmy Carter in 1980, and he won even bigger in 1984 when labor’s biggest choice ever, Mondale, as the nominee. Carter’s win in 1976 was only by about 11,000 votes. Indeed, Ohio has sent eight Presidents to the Oval Office and all of them were either Republicans or the precursor to the GOP, the Whigs.
Ohio is what it’s always been. It’s the most conservative of the Rust Belt states. Indeed, Republicans cannot win without it and never have. But it’s a state that on the whole is a good microcosm of the country as a whole.
Besides…you’d also have to consider who the opponents of some of the victors were, too.
Just my two pennies.
Columbus had a mayor with big plans, for years (1950s through early 1970s), he made multiple moves (generally by hiking water rates) to “encourage” suburbs to vote to allow themselves to be annexed to Columbus. The city took over the majority of Franklin County and bit into some surrounding counties. As industrial towns, Cleveland and Cincinnati, (and Toledo, Dayton, and Youngstown) were not surrounded by farmland the way Columbus was and had less opportunity, (and, perhaps, less desire), to swallow smaller towns.