Ohio, Ever the Bellwether: Is Midterm Test Run for 2012?

While President Ronald Reagan's whistlestop train rolled through western Ohio in 1984, taking the same route President Truman traveled 36 years earlier, a strategy for the closing weeks of the campaign was being finalized in one of the club cars.

The game plan was so simple: win Ohio and victory is assured. Reagan's braintrust conceded to Walter F. Mondale -- for the sake of argument -- all of the states that the Democratic nominee had any hope of winning. Give the former vice president all of them and their Electoral College votes, but capture Ohio for Reagan, they reasoned, and the president will be re-elected.

At one of the stops south of Toledo, Roger Stone, Reagan's man that year in Ohio and several eastern states, took me by the arm and squired me into the car where campaign manager Ed Rollins and several of his colleagues were huddled. "Ohio is the key state for us," they said. So certain were they of their strategic plan, that they shared it with a reporter, knowing it would be in a newspaper the next day.

The idea came from none other than Richard M. Nixon, who advised Reagan to "take Ohio off the table." "Rollins gave me substantial money for television, substantial money for mailing, substantial money for radio -- especially radio," Stone said in an interview Friday. Nothing would be left to chance: Ohio would be Reagan's.

If I had ever doubted its importance as the swing state supreme -- The Ultimate Bellwether -- the incident aboard the Reagan train that windy mid-October day on the plains of Ohio burned the political maxim in memory once and for all.

(Watch a video of a Reagan campaign ad featuring the train tour)




It turned out Reagan didn't need Ohio that year. He won 49 states in November, losing only Minnesota, Mondale's home turf, and the District of Columbia. But Al Gore needed Ohio in 2000 when he unwisely abandoned it in the closing weeks of his race against George W. Bush and shifted resources to Florida. He lost Florida after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to permit a recount in the state. But up north in Ohio, with no advertising or candidate appearances during the stretch run of the race, Gore was edged out by a mere 3.5 percentage points. Had he stayed and fought and won Ohio, along with his home state of Tennessee, Florida would not have mattered. Someone should have reminded Gore: no Democrat has been elected president without carrying the Buckeye State since 1960 when Jack Kennedy lost Ohio to Nixon, yet narrowly won the presidency. Ever since, Ohio voters have been on the winning side in the race to the White House.

That was then. Ohio has changed in the 26 years since Reagan's train rumbled through its prairies. It is barely gaining population, its industries dying, its great northern cities shrinking. Once a magnet for immigrants, Ohio is not even part of the immigration debate as there are too few jobs available to attract many foreign workers. It was once seen as a microcosm of the country, a transportation hub and an ideal test market. Those characterizations are less true today, yet it remains the state most coveted by both parties. "Ohio was the most important," former AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told me after President Obama won a string of northern industrial states in his campaign against John McCain.

But why? Why did the New York Times recently reiterate that Ohio is the "quintessential swing state?" Some national pundits even see the campaign in Ohio as a test run for 2012. The president has visited the state 11 times since taking office and wraps up the midterm campaign with a final weekend appearance Sunday in Cleveland, accompanied by Vice President Biden. Obama's trip to Cleveland marks the third time since 2004 that a Democratic standard-bearer has chosen the lakeside city to close out the last weekend of the campaign, according to the Plain Dealer. But is the poor old battered, stubborn Ohio of 2010 still the critical battleground that the Democrats make it out to be?

"We will always make sense when we are in the top 10 states in Electoral College votes," said Cleveland-based Democratic consultant Jerry Austin. "Most of the other large states are reliable bastions of support for one of the parties." With the exceptions of Democratic-leaning Illinois and Pennsylvania (each with 21 electoral votes), Ohio with its 20 electoral votes is the largest authentic swing state. It is also a unique mix of large and medium-sized cities, with lots of farmland in between, Austin pointed out.

That means urban liberals, African-Americans and union members in the Democratic camp, God and Country Democrats (or Reagan Democrats if you prefer) in the old ethnic neighborhoods, and reliable Republican voters in rural areas and the affluent suburbs surrounding Cincinnati and Columbus -- the largest city.

Independents often make up the largest plurality, but Democrats have a registration edge over Republicans. The Democratic pool, however, includes many conservatives and moderates who are not a lock for their party's candidates. The state has strong Republican roots, after all. William McKinley built a coalition of businessman and farmers that endured deep into the 20th Century. Republican James A. Rhodes served as governor for 16 of 20 years between 1962 and 1982.

"It is very different than Michigan or Illinois because it has a larger Republican base," said Stone. "It has Democratic unions and urban centers, but it has (that) large Republican base. It is more balanced. It is a true swing state."

Even with its uniqueness, elections in Ohio tend to "mirror the country, the national results," according to Mike Dawson, who served as a political adviser to Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and to former Republican Sen. Mike DeWine. "When the numbers (approval rating) shifted for Obama, Ohio was mirroring what was happening nationally."

As Stone and the Reagan team understood, it's harder for a Democrat than a Republican to win in center-right Ohio. Gov. Ted Strickland, who is fighting for his political life in a race against former Rep. John Kasich, knows that fact of life all too well.

"It is susceptible to the kind of 'wave' elections," said Barry Bennett, a Republican consultant and transplanted Ohioan who lives in Washington. "Look at Gov. Strickland. This is the second time a wave is going to end his career." Strickland lost his congressional seat in 1994 -- the so-called Republican Revolution -- to the late Frank Cremeans, then won it back in 1996. He was elected governor by 23 percentage points in 2006, an excellent year for Democrats, and now is imperiled in 2010 as are many candidates with "Ds" after their names.

Part of it is cyclical, especially in a state, similar to Michigan and other industrial regions, that usually drops off more sharply in an economic slump, then comes back more slowly. Ohio is sensitive to economic downturns -- and a bad economy makes for a grumpy, fickle electorate. "They throw the bums out, then throw the bums back in again," Bennett said.

Strickland, an ordained Methodist minister, hails from one of the swingiest regions of the premier swing state -- the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, which includes some of the poorest counties. "If you look at the counties that switch in recent elections from one race to another, the vast majority are in Appalachian Ohio," Dawson said. "Their economic lot in life does not improve. They are always looking for a new guy." This year, he said, all of the state's 88 counties "feel the same as Appalachia."

That's bad news for Strickland, as well as for Ohio's Democratic congressional delegation. "Strickland is not disliked," said Fred Vierow, a retired lobbyist and Democratic wise man in Columbus. "They just don't know what he's done."

At least five House seats held by Democrats are believed to be in jeopardy of turning Republican, while former Bush budget director and U.S. Trade Rep. Rob Portman has a big lead in opinion polls over Democrat Lee Fisher in the contest to succeed Voinovich, who is retiring. House Minority Leader John Boehner will be easily re-elected in his southwestern Ohio district. And if his party wins a majority in the House of Representatives, he is likely to become the first Speaker from Ohio since Nicholas Longworth gave up the gavel in 1931, two years into the Great Depression.

Now comes the Great Recession. And with an unemployment rate at 10 percent, Ohio appears vulnerable to yet another "wave" election. "Ted Strickand's running mate is Barack Obama," Austin says. "Obama's numbers in Ohio are worse than they are nationally." ABC News reported last week that Ohio Democrats are bracing for a bloodbath. "Perhaps no state has swung more dramatically away from the Democratic Party over the past two years," correspondent Jonathan Karl said.

Even so, the consultants, lobbyists, former lawmakers that I interviewed strongly dispute the notion that a Republican blow-out in Ohio on Tuesday means the state is likely to go Republican again in the 2012 presidential election. On Friday, the New York Times reported that a defeat for Strickland could make Obama's "reelection to the presidency in 2012 that much more complicated" with a Republican in the Ohio governor's chair. "We can't wait until 2012 to start taking our country back," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told the newspaper. "We've got to start this November, and Ohio is the place that we start."

Obama was elected in 2008 with Strickland's aid in the fall campaign, but the governor had strongly supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries. And Bill Clinton won Ohio twice while a Republican governor promoted George H.W. Bush, and then Bob Dole. So while it is obvious that any presidential candidate would prefer to campaign in a state with a governor of his own party -- Obama isn't making all of those visits for the keilbasa and pierogis in Cleveland -- it's also true that two years can be a lifetime in politics, and Ohioans don't need a governor to tell them how to vote. Gov. Dick Celeste was a huge Mondale fan in 1984, and JFK had Ohio Gov. Mike DiSalle on his side in that historic election 50 years ago.

"The bigger myth that you hear is some national reporters saying it is important for Democrats to win in Ohio because that somehow helps Obama's chances of re-election," said Dawson. Whether Strickland is re-elected or Kasich's single-digit lead in the polls holds up on Election Day, the next governor will face an $8 billion gap in the state's budget that could force him to make some unpopular decisions. Tax hike anyone?

Former Ohio Rep. Deborah Pryce, who was part of Newt Gingrich's leadership team in the '90s, notes that "whoever holds the governor's office can control a lot of things politically" and can be of great assistance to a presidential candidate in terms of fundraising and providing an organization on the ground. No question. That's one reason why Obama will be stumping for Strickland on Sunday at Cleveland State University. But Pryce, a Columbus lawyer and head of the Value in Electing Women PAC, agreed that a big year for the GOP in 2010 does not necessarily portend victory in Ohio in 2012.

That campaign will start soon enough. And when the Gingrichs and Mitt Romneys, and Sarah Palins start making the rounds of the Lincoln-McKinley Day Republican dinners in Canton and Lima, Marietta and other GOP outposts, Debbie Pryce will be all too happy to remind them of the state's enduring legacy. You see, no Republican has ever been elected president of the United States without carrying Ohio.