Ohio

Connecting the East with the great interior, bordering the South yet also on the Great Lakes, Ohio was the first entirely American state. The original 13 states started as British colonies, and the next three, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee, were spun off from them. But Ohio sprang Athena-like from the head of Congress, as the first state formed from the Northwest Territory. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established 6-mile-square townships, which imposed geometric order on diverse American landscapes west to the Pacific. It set aside one square mile per township for public schools, and the land was soon peppered with schoolhouses and small colleges, the foundation stones of a literate republic. The ordinance prohibited slavery, opening the way for free labor to clear fields, raise crops, and build mills and factories. In less than half a century, the former wilderness was one of the most productive parts of the young country. In the years after the Civil War, Ohio became one of the great industrial states, the original headquarters of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the site of major steel mills along the narrow and languidly flowing Cuyahoga and Mahoning rivers, and the location of the biggest soap companies, machine tool makers and tire manufacturers. Dayton was the home of the Wright brothers, who developed the airplane; of James Patterson, the inventor and manufacturer of the cash register; and of Charles Kettering, the inventor of the automobile starter. Akron was the home of Harvey Firestone, B. F. Goodrich and F. A. Seiberling—the great tire manufacturers. Cincinnati was the headquarters of the founders of Procter & Gamble. The state was settled by New Englanders in the northeast (in the Western Reserve) and by Virginians in the south, creating a split between the Southern-accented counties south of the National Road and U.S. 40 and the Northern-accented cities and towns to the north. It was also divided between Butternut and Copperhead territory that didn’t want to fight the Civil War and Yankee territory that fiercely prosecuted the war and Reconstruction afterward.

This split heritage made Ohio politically a closely divided state—and a nationally pivotal one. A little more than a century ago, Ohio produced the candidate and campaign manager who won the presidency in 1896 and 1900: former Gov. William McKinley and iron and coal industrialist Mark Hanna. They inaugurated a 34-year period of Republican national majorities. McKinley’s Republicans were for high tariffs and hard money and had a friendly regard for workers and even some unions, but they had no patience with large unions. They preached a nationalist Americanism tempered by wariness about making major commitments abroad. Republicans were the majority in this increasingly industrial Ohio, losing rural Butternut counties but carrying the big industrial cities of the north.

Then came the Depression of the 1930s, and Ohio became the scene of something like class warfare, with sit-down strikes and victories for the CIO industrial unions in autos, steel and tires. CIO cities (Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, and Toledo) moved sharply toward the Democrats, while places with fewer union members (Cincinnati, Columbus, the dozens of small factory towns dotting the flat limestone plains of northern Ohio) stayed Republican. The political fighting was fierce, and the stakes were high. CIO leaders hoped to organize the entire workforce and build a Scandinavian-style welfare state. Republican leaders like Ohio’s Sen. Robert Taft feared union control of business would imperil freedoms and throttle the economy. In the 1930s and 1940s, the unions made great gains, but Taft held them off, reducing union power with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and his own re-election to the Senate in 1950.

In the years since, Ohio has oscillated as it’s been courted by national campaigns. It has not voted for the loser in a presidential election since 1960. Democrat Bill Clinton carried the state twice, but by the narrowest of his margins in any large state—40%-38% in 1992, 47%-41% in 1996. And Al Gore lost here 50%-46% in 2000. Ohio Republicans won smashing victories in 1994 and 1998 and held their own in 1996 and 2000. The leading figure was George Voinovich, elected governor in 1990 by 56%-44%, re-elected in 1994 by 72%-25%, by far the biggest margin since 1826, when neither the Republican nor the Democratic party existed. From 1976 to 1994, Ohio was represented by two Democrats in the Senate, but when they retired, they were replaced by Republicans: Mike DeWine and Voinovich, both of whom had run unsuccessfully for the Senate before. In 1998, Republican Bob Taft, bearer of a great Ohio name, was elected governor over Democrat Lee Fisher by 50%-45%. Until that election, Ohio’s governorship had been passed back and forth between the two parties, with neither holding it for more than eight years since Republican George K. Nash won in 1899. Republicans also held every other statewide office, had seemingly impervious margins in both houses of the Legislature, and made up the majority of the U.S. House delegation. Despite the state’s lagging economy, President George W. Bush carried Ohio 51%-49% in 2004, as turnout surged as much as 20% in a state with very little population growth.

Then in 2006 came a great turn toward the Democrats. Unused to having one party in control for more than a decade, Ohio recoiled against the Republicans. It did not help that the supposedly fiscally conservative party had raised taxes several times or that individual Republicans were tarred with scandal. Ohio’s state and local tax burden, rated 45th highest in the nation in 1977 by the Tax Foundation, was rated seventh in 2008, and Republicans had held the governorship for 24 of those 31 years. Gov. Taft pleaded no contest in 2005 to criminal violations for failing to report some $6,000 in gifts. The state Bureau of Workmen’s Compensation, controlled by Republicans, was under investigation for placing $50 million in investments in a rare-coin business run by a major GOP contributor, with $13 million of state assets missing. Democratic U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, a former minister and prison psychologist, was elected governor by 61%-37% over Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Taft critic from the right. Strickland carried 72 of 88 counties; the only major metro area Blackwell carried was his home base of Cincinnati. Democrats won the offices of attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer. Democratic Rep. Sherrod Brown beat two-term GOP Sen. Mike DeWine by a solid 56%-44%. Democrats did not quite sweep the board. Republicans won the race for auditor and two seats on the state Supreme Court, and they held on to majorities in the Legislature.

The Democratic trend continued in 2008. Ohio was once again a target state in the presidential contest, with Republicans hoping that Democratic nominee Barack Obama would be a weak candidate in a state where he had lost the Democratic primary to Hillary Rodham Clinton, carrying only five of 18 congressional districts. Ohio was the scene of many candidate visits. Republican nominee John McCain introduced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee in Dayton, and there were intensive organizational efforts on the part of both campaigns. This was the third campaign in a row in which Ohio was a major—arguably, the major—target state, and a certain fatigue may have set in. Turnout was up only marginally from 2004, the lowest increase in the nation. Obama carried the state 52%-47%. Democrats made further gains, winning two open U.S. House seats and seven seats in the state House, giving them majorities of 10-8 in the House delegation and 53-46 in the state House.

The Republican trend of the 1990s and the Democratic trend of 2006-08 occurred in a state that is still more industrial than post-industrial, a state changed by the immigration of the early 20th century but little touched by the immigration of the late 20th century, a state where cultural liberalism has a far smaller constituency than it does on either coast or even in nearby Illinois and Michigan. It used to be said that Ohio was a typical state, a great test market, close to the national average in income levels, urban-rural balance, and ethnic mix, as well as presidential percentages. But economically and culturally, it is different, a template perhaps for Indiana and Missouri but not for Oregon and Arizona. There are few immigrants here, and the population is only 2% Hispanic. In manufacturing jobs, Ohio trails only California and Texas—which have three and two times as many people, respectively—yet it has 500,000 fewer than it did in the peak year, 1969. From 2000 to 2007, it had a lower rate of population growth than any other state except West Virginia, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Louisiana. Ohio economy’s never seemed to recover from the 2001-02 recession. The state has one of the lowest rates of business start-ups in the nation, according to the Kauffman Foundation, and its income levels have languished as first the steel companies, then the auto subcontractors and finally the Detroit Three laid off thousands of workers. Honda decided in 2006 not to build a fourth plant in Ohio but to go to Indiana instead. The state’s encouragement of bioscience and high-tech businesses has not generated nearly as many offsetting jobs. Columbus, the one metro area with significant post-industrial growth, nonetheless seemed threatened by the 2008 crisis in the financial-services markets.

For over half a century, there have been two politically distinct parts of Ohio. Northeast Ohio—centered on Cleveland and extending westward to Toledo and south and east to the factory towns of Akron and Canton, Youngstown and Warren and the gritty industrial cities south along the Ohio River—has been the state’s Democratic heartland, with the highest percentages of union members and a large black population in Cleveland. In 2008, this area remained Democratic, but there was no significant trend toward Obama except in northwest Ohio around Toledo, an area hurt by the troubles of the auto subcontractors and Detroit auto companies. Indeed, in Youngstown, Warren and the Ohio River counties, Obama’s percentages ran behind those of Democratic nominee John Kerry four years earlier, an example, at least in part, of his weakness among voters of Scots-Irish Appalachian origin that was so evident in the Democratic primaries. The other part of Ohio—south and west of the industrial belt and including Columbus, Cincinnati and Dayton—was never as heavily unionized and in national elections has tended to vote Republican, much like most of Indiana. In 2008, in contrast to Indiana, which gave Obama a narrow victory, this area continued to vote Republican, although by lesser margins. Obama carried the counties containing the central cities of Columbus, Cincinnati and Dayton, but ran behind in the latter two metro areas and won only a small lead in metro Columbus.