Editor’s Note: Paul Sracic is a professor of politics and international relations at Youngstown State University and the coauthor of “Ohio Politics and Government” (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2015). Follow him on Twitter at @pasracic. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
For over 50 years, from 1964 through 2016, no one was elected president without capturing Ohio. This all changed in 2020, when Ohio supported the loser, former President Donald Trump.
Does this mean candidates should stop thinking of Ohio as a presidential bellwether? And is Ohio now a state with electoral votes that can safely be put in the Republican column for 2024 and beyond?
The results of 2022 US Senate race in Ohio, pitting Democrat Tim Ryan against Republican J.D. Vance, will be a very significant data point when seeking to answer this question. And the answer to this question is not only important for Ohio but for the nation’s political future.
Among the so-called swing states, the Buckeye State is fourth in electoral heft behind only Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania. With Ohio in tow, and with the changes in assigned electoral votes after the 2020 reapportionment, a GOP candidate would only have to add Georgia and Pennsylvania to Trump’s tally in 2020 to win an electoral majority.
What should we be looking for when analyzing the Ohio vote on November 8? Political scientists like to divide Ohio up into five somewhat distinct regions: Northeast, Northwest, Central, Southeast and Southwest. Most of the change in Ohio’s political behavior after 2016 took place in only one of these regions: Northeast Ohio.
Northeast Ohio consists of 12 counties, includes the cities of Cleveland and Akron, and is the most populous region in the state. Historically, it was also the most Democratic, a legacy of the influence of organized labor when the area was a manufacturing powerhouse.
In 2012, then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama cruised to victory in Ohio – in part because he captured eight of these 12 counties. Everything changed four years later, when only four Northeast Ohio counties voted for the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. By 2020, that number dropped to two for Joe Biden.
In between 2016 and 2020, however, was the 2018 midterm election – featuring statewide races for governor and the US Senate. In the gubernatorial contest, former Republican Sen. and Lt. Gov. Mike DeWine won, nearly matching Trump by taking seven Northeast Ohio counties.
But also running that same year was incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who was re-elected while winning one more Northeast Ohio county than DeWine captured. In fact, with one exception (Stark County), Brown’s performance mirrored Obama’s 2012 victory. And Brown actually bested Obama by winning Lake County (East of Cleveland, along Lake Erie), which Obama lost by about 1,000 votes.
Now, Brown is a household name in Ohio, having first been elected to the state legislature nearly 50 years ago. Therefore, one must be careful about generalizing from an election involving such a well-known political figure. But one could say the same thing about the DeWine election. DeWine was first elected to the state legislature only six years after Brown.
On November 8, the winner of the Ohio’s hotly contested US Senate race will very likely be the candidate who captures a clear majority of those 12 Northeast Ohio counties. What makes this year’s race so potentially predictive of the future, however, is that neither candidate is all that well known.
While Ryan ran for president in 2020, he was among more than 20 candidates and withdrew in October of 2019, well before the first Democratic primary took place. And although he has represented parts of Northeast Ohio during his 20-year tenure in Congress, he has never run for a statewide office in the Buckeye State. Ryan’s Republican opponent, Vance, is something of a minor celebrity, having written a best-selling book that was later turned into a Netflix movie. Still, Vance is a political novice, and the title of his book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was likely better known than his name in Ohio before he decided to enter politics.
All of this means that the 2022 US Senate race in Ohio is more of a pure measure of whether Democrats have permanently ceded what was formerly the most Democratic part of the state. Given Ohio’s traditional role in picking presidents, this is a result that will have implications well beyond the Buckeye State’s borders.
