As jockeying for 2022 begins — with a Senate seat and Ohio’s governorship in play — a related question comes up, inside and outside Ohio: Why do Democrats, except for Sen. Sherrod Brown, keep losing Ohio elections?
Democrats don’t necessarily lose county, city and village offices. They win and hold many. And for some reason, there’s amnesia about the three (of seven) Ohio Supreme Court seats Democrats have won.
True, as for Ohio’s U.S. House of Representatives delegation, the Republican-run General Assembly rigged Ohio’s 16 districts so 12 will elect Republicans. (And the GOP may be closing in on another district, the Western Reserve’s 13th, held by Rep. Tim Ryan, a suburban Warren Democrat, though congressional districts will be redrawn before the 2022 election.)
In 2008, Ohioans gave 51.4% of their votes to Barack Obama, and in 2012, 50.6%. Until then, the last times Democratic presidential nominees had won at least 50% of Ohio’s vote were in 1964 (Lyndon B. Johnson) and 1940 (Franklin D. Roosevelt).
But Obama’s Ohio victories didn’t seem to matter. In 2016, Ohioans cast 51.3% of their votes for Donald Trump and, last November, 53.2%.
Combined, those factors call to mind lyrics written by Stephen Stills: “There’s something happening here, But what it is ain’t exactly clear.” Anyone who says otherwise is kidding himself or herself.
One possibility, as others have noted, is that Ohioans in the main aren’t particularly liberal (as that term is now applied to Democrats nationally). Ohioans want jobs, and — all else equal — a fair shake in the marketplace and at city hall, the courthouse and the Statehouse. (Ohio House Bill 6, which will enrich the owners of the Perry and Davis-Besse nuclear power plants, isn’t a fair shake.)
Since 1920, the only Democratic governors who could be termed liberal were Toledo’s Michael V. DiSalle (elected in 1958); Cincinnati’s John J. Gilligan (elected in 1970); and Greater Cleveland’s Richard F. Celeste (elected in 1982, reelected in 1986).
Voters denied DiSalle and Gilligan second terms. (When Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland ran for governor in 2006 and 2010, the National Rifle Association endorsed him, and Strickland left the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio pretty much as he found it.)
As for the U.S. Senate, since popular election began in 1914, Ohioans have backed three Democratic liberals: Sherrod Brown; Howard M. Metzenbaum; and Stephen M. Young. (Sen. John Glenn repeatedly won because Ohioans respected him personally.)
In Columbus and other state capitals, Republicans have been strategically clever in “nationalizing” issues really decided in Washington. That’s why rural and Appalachian Democrats have all but disappeared on Capitol Square. At the McDonalds in an Ohio county seat, the kaffeeklatsch consensus may be that Jane or Joe Democrat is a good neighbor and a fine person, but, hey, Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat, too, and we can’t have her kind at the Statehouse. It doesn’t matter that Pelosi has nothing to do with setting Ohio’s tax rates or deciding what tests your daughter must pass to graduate from high school. Pelosi’s a symbol.
GOP partisans still sometimes gripe about Ohio House Speaker Vern Riffe, a Democrat from Scioto County’s Wheelersburg. Riffe didn’t stay speaker for 20 years, an Ohio record, by being dogmatic. Ohio House Democrats were believed free to “vote their districts” on guns, abortion and capital punishment. Today, inside and outside Ohio, hot-button scorecards and checklists seem to rule.
And officeholders of both parties have supported “free trade agreements” (code for “cut Americans’ wages to boost corporate profits”).
Noted here before, but important to recall: Consider Trumbull County (Warren): “In 1970 Trumbull County boasted the highest proportion of manufacturing workers (49.1 percent) of any Ohio county,” William J. Shkurti and Fran Stewart reported in research published by Ohio State University’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs. “[But Trumbull] lost nearly 70 percent of its manufacturing jobs (30,000 out of 43,000) between 1970 and 2015.” And that was before General Motors closed its Lordstown plant.
Trumbull voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and 2016; it had last voted for a Republican for president in 1972 and 1956. Trump’s victories in Trumbull County surprised some bystanders. Why?
Thomas Suddes, a member of the editorial board, writes from Athens.
To reach Thomas Suddes: tsuddes@cleveland.com, 216-408-9474
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