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Is Ohio Still a Swing State? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-30

Is Ohio still a swing state? No, it is not. I know what you’re thinking. That’s a terrible way to start a long article. I’m not supposed to answer the headline question until the end to keep you hooked and reading. But Ohio’s current swing state status isn’t of interest to me. It’s the fact that Ohio could be a swing state again in the next 8 to 12 years that interests me. And it should interest you, too. Read on to learn why Ohio used to be so important, why its no longer a swing state, why it could be again, and a little something you can do to help it along.

Oh… and make sure to read the disclaimer at the end before commenting.

Why was Ohio so important anyway?

For over 50 years Ohio was the premiere swing state. No party has won the Whitehouse without also winning Ohio since 1964. Even before that, it only voted for the losing party twice since 1896. Until 2020, you could go to bed on election night knowing who was going to be President as soon as Ohio was called. This earned Ohio the reputation of being the ultimate “Bellwether State”.

You might ask why. While I never discount the role of chance when it comes to history. A more knowledgeable person than me wrote a book about why Ohio was a Bellwether. The summary is that Ohio just kept experiencing the same large trends in the state as the country as a whole. Even from the start. The northern part of the state was settled by Northerners while the Southern part of the state was settled by Southerners and Appalachian settlers and reflected the early divide of the U.S. It was in the middle of the big northern migration of former slaves that diversified the state. It experienced both 19th century industrialization and late 20th century de-industrialization. It just kept reflecting the country in a microcosm.

Then, 2020 happened. Joe Biden won the presidency without winning Ohio. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Biden lost it by 8%. Biden did better in North Carolina, Texas, and Florida. Combine that with the fact that Ohio Democrats have been struggling statewide for a decade, and it looks like Ohio has not only lost its bellwether status, but even its Swing state status.

Why isn’t Ohio a Swing State anymore?

The reason Ohio lost its bellwether status is because it finally missed out on a large nationwide trend. The story of 21st century America is a country that has continued to get more diverse and more educated. Ohio largely missed out on the former. From the year 2000 to 2020, the country dropped from 75.1% White non-Hispanic to only 57.8% White non-Hispanic. During that same time Ohio only dropped from 84.9% to 75.9% White non-Hispanic. So it started higher and didn't drop nearly as fast as the rest of the country. You can see the wide divergence starting around 2000.

White Non-Hispanics as percentage of the population

While the rest of the country’s Hispanic, Asian, and multi-racial percentages took off, Ohio’s only gently went up. During the Obama years this divergence didn’t matter yet. Democrats were still winning majorities of non-college educated voters and still winning over large portions of White voters. It masked the fact that Ohio missed out on the Asian, Hispanic, and multi-ethnic growth of the country as a whole. Then, 2016 and MAGA happened.

As I keep writing in all of my #10YearSwing articles, Trump shifted the electoral coalition in 2 ways. First, he completed the education shift that had been happening. Now, the majority of college grads vote Democratic and the majority of non-college educated vote Republican. He also shifted White voters towards Republicans. Ohio is in the bottom 30% of states for diversity, and the bottom 30% of states for college-grads. It should be no surprise that a state that is both far Whiter and much less college-educated than the country as a whole voted Trump.

Is there any hope for Ohio?

Ohio in 2024 is extremely unlikely to be winnable by Biden. But a future Democratic President may have a shot as early as 2032. Here’s why: Ohio didn’t completely miss out on the nationwide trends, and it is still trending. Those trends are starting to accelerate and affect Ohio.

Between 2010 and 2020, some large demographic shifts happened in Ohio. The White non-Hispanic population declined by 410k people(9.36 million to 8.95 million). While at the same time it added about 100k Asian, 165k Hispanic, 65k Black, and a whopping 300k who identify as more than one race. Taken together that is a million person swing from unfavorable to favorable democratic electorate. If that happens again in the 2020s, we’ll definitely be back to swing state territory for Ohio.

That isn’t the only trend. The state is getting more educated too. Even though it has a small percentage of college-educated folks compared to other states, it rose quickly between 2010 and 2020 from 24.1% to almost 30%. That can make the population even more friendly to democrats.

So the question is, can it happen again? Should we expect these trends to slow down, keep going, or maybe could they accelerate?

Will Those Trends Continue?

This is trickier to say. For the trends to continue, we’d have to expect that the White rural population is older, and that the non-white population still has potential to keep growing at a faster rate. Finally, we’d need to establish industry was still attracting college-educated citizens.

First, let’s look at the Median age. The US median age is 38. In Ohio as of 2021, the White Median age was 42.9. Compare that to 35.3 Black, 38.4 Asian, 30.5 Hispanic, and 29.5 for two or more races. So… yeah… the decline of White Americans as a percentage of Ohio is likely to continue.

Growth is not just who is young and who is old. It is also about immigration. Is there any growing cities that might attract young, diverse, and educated. Ohio has a surprising number of large metropolitan areas that are more diverse than the rest of the state. In the Northwest, the city of Toledo. In the Northeast, Cleveland. Just south of Cleveland is Akron. In the far southwest corner of the state is Cincinnati. A little north of that is Dayton. And finally, in the center is Columbus. Let’s look where the population grew last decade.

As you can see, it looks like only the suburbs of the northern cities grew a little bit, not the cities themselves. But.. what’s this going on in Columbus and -to a lesser extent- in Cincinnati? Columbus has had some explosive growth in the city and its Northern suburbs. Even east of it has grown. That amount of growth is significant. Its the kind of growth Atlanta experienced before Georgia turned blue.

Columbus and its metro area is nowhere near as large as Atlanta’s was even 10 years ago. But the point is, its growing, and it is growing fast. It has a lot of things going for it. It’s a great area for distribution centers: It’s already got 2 major freeways going through it, its close to several more, and is centrally located to move goods between the Northeast and the South or rest of the Midwest. The land around Columbus is flat which makes for easy expansion. Its got several company headquarters already(see here). That’s important to create a base of knowledge workers that in turn attracts more companies to create a virtuous cycle of growing high wage jobs. That’s the kind of growth that attracts the young, diverse, and college educated workforce. That growth is expected to continue and is being planned for by state and city governments.

One last picture to check out. This is a map of just the change in the White population. As you can see, the only counties adding White People are in and around Columbus. The raw numbers show the same thing.

This is a triple whammy against MAGA’s temporary hold on Ohio. Not only is the white population going to continue declining(1 whammy), the non-white population is growing fast(2nd whammy) the only non-white population that’s growing is in and around Columbus which means its likely more urban and, according to the census, is more likely college educated(3rd whammy).

What about Religion?

Now seems a good time to mention religion. White Evangelicals are the base of MAGA. While we don’t have good state-by-state, we do know White Christians dropped 6 points in Ohio from 2007 to 2014 and is continuing to drop. We also know that the Evangelical base runs highest on the Southeast part of the state. This is the part of the state settled by Appalachians. As you can see on the maps, its also the parts of Ohio shrinking the fastest. Its like no matter which demographic you look at it in Ohio, its changing to better favor democrats.

How could this go wrong?

One thing that concerns me is that Trump did about as good in Ohio in 2020 as he did in 2016. It is the original reason that I figured Ohio was lost to MAGA for a generation or more. If there are rapidly changing demographics in Ohio, why didn’t Trump do worse in 2020 than in 2016 like in other states(e.g. Georgia, Kansas, North Carolina)? I have a few theories.

1st theory: Voter Suppression. In a Republican controlled state, this should always be the first suspicion. Republicans know they have lost the majority and are constantly trying to keep all voters from showing up. They can only do so much though, so expect to start seeing movement again.

2nd Theory: Voter Registration. The new Democratic friendly voters are still young and transient, making it harder to get them to turn out. If that’s the case, Democrats need to concentrate on huge voter registration drives — especially in and around Columbus.

3rd theory: Trump hadn’t consolidated the evangelical vote in Ohio in 2016. According to this report, Trump only got 76% of White Evangelical Christians in 2016 with Biden getting the remaining 24%. In 2020 he increased that to 81% and only 18% Biden. So what could’ve happened is that Ohio did shift, but with the huge turnout and Ohio’s Evangelical Christians moving more towards Trump it merely looked like the vote was a standstill, there were just equal waves that cancelled each other out. This would be good news. Trump has about run out of the ability to consolidate White Evangelicals. But Ohio demographics are still rapidly changing. Which means if this is true, we’d expect to see movement towards Dems in 2024.

4th Theory: Something else that I’m missing. If you have a better theory let me know in the comments. No matter how I look at the exit polls, I can’t say for certain how Trump managed to stay at the same level as 2016.

Being that Ohio had among the highest turnout in any state in 2020, Its hard to justify voter suppression or voter registration as the issue. I think it is my 3rd theory. We will know for certain after 2024. If Democrats do significantly better, we’ll know Ohio is trending back to Swing State status. If Democrats only do a little better or worse, we’ll know that my 4th theory is correct and Ohio could truly be lost.

I’m willing to bet that as the state keeps getting more educated and more diverse, you’re going to see Ohio move towards Democrats fast. If I’m right, we should see the Senate race will be very close, and Biden will lose by less than 6%.

How can I help?

My advice to Ohio Democrats is, first and foremost, don’t give up. Ohio Democrats have been battered and bruised for more than a decade. I understand how disheartening it can be to lose and still have to try again. I’m a Detroit Lions fan — I know the pain. But unlike football, these elections have real world consequences for everyone and is why we can’t give up.

Second piece of advice: Don’t “move to the center”. While a truly red state like Alabama, or Wyoming I would tell Democrats “moderate\do what you need to do” to win. I think that would be counter productive in Ohio. As the demographic changes accelerate in Ohio, the young, the transient, and the new voters are going to need motivation to get registered and get to the polls. Smart, selective, but unapologetic progressive campaigns will gain more new voters than “appeals to the middle” will gain “persuadable” voters.

Third piece of advice: Keep your democracy intact. This is where everyone can help . Ohio has a ballot initiative. Its how we can pass very popular democratic reforms such as ending gerrymandering and making it easier for all citizens to vote. But Ohio Republicans are trying to change it. They want the popular vote threshold raised from 50 to 60%. It would effectively kill almost any ballot initiatives. But to pass it, the people of Ohio get to vote.

The vote is going to be this August. Many organizations are coming together to defeat it. If you live in or near Ohio you can volunteer to get out the vote. If you can’t do that, you can help the One Person One Vote campaign which is organizing a huge votenoinaugust.org group. You can donate to them via ActBlue. Its going to be so much easier to bring Ohio back to the Democratic (and democratic) realm if we can keep citizen-initiated ballots in the Ohio constitution.

Conclusion

I hope you found this information interesting and helpful. I wrote this because no experts seemed to be asking the question “What other states could turn Blue in the next 10 years?” That sent me down a rabbit of statistics and demographic study that I have yet to emerge from. If you found the information helpful, I only ask that you share it: please recommend and share it on your favorite social media site.

If you want more content like this follow me or my tag: #10YearSwing You can check out my previous post on North Carolina, or my Original post about Future Swing States. If there’s a state you’d like to know more about its chances to become a future swing state let me know in the comments.

Disclaimer

It should be noted that the analysis provided here is assuming that the electoral coalitions discussed here hold. As long as Trump and MAGA dominate the Republican party, I expect that it will. However, politics is fickle, and just when you think you have it figured out along comes a candidate that upends and changes the electoral coalition. If that were to happen, nearly this entire analysis becomes moot.

Another thing to mention. This analysis based on demographics and on trends and tendencies. The cause is never certain. People are individuals. Just because a person is in a group that tends to vote democratic doesn’t mean all people in that group always vote democratic. Somewhere out there is Gay Black Woman with a PhD that votes Republican. Just like somewhere there is a straight white non-college educated man who regular votes Democratic. As much as demographic trends are real, they aren’t a person’s full story.



Finally, I want to say that this isn’t meant as an argument against the 50 state strategy. Upset victories are always possible. What I do believe is that while all states should have some resources, Democrats and Progressives might be better served targeting certain states over the next 10 years.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/30/2167633/-Is-Ohio-Still-a-Swing-State

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