The big, bellwether battlefield

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Jul 31st 2008 | COLUMBUS
From The Economist print edition

Over the coming weeks we will look at the states that could decide this year’s election. We start with Ohio, decisive in 2004

AP
BARACK OBAMA is doing everything he can to make it look as if the election is a mere formality, and adoring media types are keen to play along. Yet the latest USA Today-Gallup poll puts John McCain four points ahead, while the RealClearPolitics average of polls gives Mr Obama a meagre two-and-a-half-point lead. Optimistic Republicans recall that Michael Dukakis was 17 points ahead of George Bush senior in the summer of 1988, and still lost. So there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this election, like the previous two, could boil down to a tight race settled by close results in a handful of “swing” states.

Ohio is the quintessential battleground state. Bill Clinton won it by some of the narrowest of his margins for any big state—just two points in 1992 and six in 1996. In 2004 George Bush won Ohio, with its precious 20 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to secure the presidency, by a mere 118,600 votes. Had 60,000 Ohioans gone the other way, John Kerry would have been president.

Ohio is also a bellwether. It has voted for the winning candidate in all 11 presidential elections since 1960. In doing so, it has deviated from the national vote shares by only a couple of points. In 2004 it matched the national average exactly.

The reason is that it is such a microcosm of America. Ohio is a surprisingly diverse state—with everything from big cities to rolling fields, rustbelt industries to Appalachian poverty. In the Cup-o-Jo Cafe in Columbus, the state capital, 20-somethings sit around eating vegetarian food and talking about how much Mr Obama inspires them to hope for a better world. Out in the rural areas the signs on the road tell a different story—“Hell is real,” reads one, and then, a few miles later, “Repent!”.

Above all, Ohio reeks of “normality”. Not exactly in the statistical sense. Ohio’s median household income is 8% below the national average. Only 2% of the population is Hispanic. Median house prices are 23% below the national average. But it is average in a deeper psychological sense. Jason Mauk, the executive director of the Ohio Republican Party, says that “this is where national politicians go to get a gut check on middle America.”

The Democrats are optimistic about their chances of improving on their performance in 2004. In that year Mr Bush succeeded in making the election a referendum on national security and patriotism. This year support for the war is much softer than it was, and worries about domestic issues more pronounced. Ohio lost 236,000 manufacturing jobs during the Bush years. Worries about health care hit hard in a state where jobs are either threatened or disappearing.

The Ohio Democratic Party is also resurgent after a long period of Republican dominance. In 2006 Ted Strickland won the governorship by a 24-point margin, and Sherrod Brown easily dislodged a sitting senator. The Democrats also swept the board for statewide offices, giving them control of the state’s political machinery. In 2004 the Democrats argued, with some evidence, that Ken Blackwell, the staunchly conservative secretary of state, was not overzealous in ensuring that all Democrats could exercise their right to vote.

But the polls are nevertheless surprisingly close. RealClearPolitics gives Mr Obama an average 1.5-point poll lead. The most recent poll, for Rasmussen, gives Mr McCain a ten-point lead (this may be a rogue poll, but Mr McCain has been gaining in six other battleground states.)

Mr Obama, it seems, still has a problem connecting with the white working-class voters who hold the fate of Ohio in their hands—the people who dominate the old-manufacturing towns in the rustbelt around Cleveland and Akron in the north and the Appalachian countryside in the east. Mr Obama outspent Hillary Clinton by two to one in Ohio, running a blitz of ads attacking NAFTA. He had the benefit of a state-of-the-art organisation and considerable momentum from a string of victories. But he still lost the state by ten points.

Democrats argue that this was a pro-Clinton vote rather than an anti-Obama one. But this is optimistic. A quarter of Democrats nationwide tell pollsters that they are either leaning towards Mr McCain or undecided. The Ohio working class has a strong sense of tribal pride, often expressed in terms of suspicion of outsiders—particularly of the condescending coastal elites. The Democrats who have done well there have been southerners (Jimmy Carter and Mr Clinton), not big-city types or north-easterners.

Ohioans in places like Youngstown and Canton, where the landscape is littered with huge shuttered factories that once supported a prosperous middle-class, and where the only available jobs seem to be in Walmart or fast-food restaurants are cynical about mundane promises, let alone airy-fairy ones about change. They have heard it all before, and the jobs keep disappearing. One of the most common complaints you hear from lunch-pail Ohio Democrats is “Who on earth is this guy?”

Get out the vote
This suggests that the fate of Ohio may be decided by exactly the same thing that it was in 2004—the relative strength of the party machines on the ground.

It would be a mistake to read too much into the Republicans’ catastrophic defeat in 2006, which resulted from local scandals as well as a national anti-Republican mood. The governor, Bob Taft, was indicted for bribery, and the state party was caught up in a bizarre investment scam involving precious coins. This time around the Democratic Party has an embarrassment of its own: the attorney-general was forced to resign after a sex scandal.

The Republicans have a battle-hardened machine that still has access to most of the infrastructure that Mr Bush established for 2004. The mood in the party’s headquarters in Columbus is combative. The walls are decorated with pictures of Mr Obama with the word “Hope” changed into “Nope”. Mr Mauk points out that the Republicans still control both houses of Ohio’s legislature, despite the anti-Republican mood. He also says that down-to-earth Ohioans are much happier with “straight talk” than high-flown rhetoric.

But two things should worry the Republicans. The first is the enthusiasm gap. Evangelical voters were fired up in 2004: they had a close emotional bond with Mr Bush and the ballot included an initiative on one of their core worries, gay marriage. Mr Bush won among people who attend religious services weekly by 60 points to 34. But this year the people who are fired up are blacks (12% of the population) and young people concentrated in university towns like Columbus and Athens. Evangelicals are at best lukewarm towards Mr McCain. By contrast, when Mr Obama addressed the NAACP in Cincinnati, 5,000 people turned up to watch his speech on a big screen in the town square.

The Democratic Party has also revamped its political machine. Its headquarters in Ohio is a very different place from what it was four years ago, a frenzy of youthful activity rather than a morgue. In the summer of 2004 the party had six full-time staff. Now it has more than 50, thanks to Messrs Strickland and Brown.

The Democrats have also learnt from their mistakes. In 2004 they relied heavily on outside groups (“527s”) that were forbidden by law from co-ordinating with the Kerry campaign. This resulted in both mixed messages and unnecessary duplication. This time everything is being done in-house. And this time there will be no more “strangers talking to strangers”: they are going to use local people to canvass their friends and neighbours, just as the Republicans did in 2004. The party thinks that these “local validators” are particularly important when you are running a candidate like Mr Obama.

The visible improvement in the Democratic Party machine should trouble Mr McCain. There are several ways in which the Democrats can win the White House without Ohio’s 20 votes. But no Republican has ever won the presidency without also winning Ohio.