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The
Columbus Dispatch
Democrats watch their
base shrink
By Thomas Suddes
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Two grim dates confront Ohio Democrats. The first was Nov. 2, when
Republicans captured state government from top to bottom.
The other was last Wednesday, when newly released 2010 Census data
revealed two Ohios - one, shrinking, in traditionally Democratic
counties, and another Ohio, growing in population, and in traditionally
Republican counties, such as:
• Greater Cleveland’s growth champion, Medina County.
• A constellation of Columbus suburbs.
• A four-county wedge (Butler, Greene, Warren and Clermont counties)
between Dayton and Cincinnati.
Those numbers, plus GOP control of the board that will draw Ohio
General Assembly districts, plus the looming defeat of public-employee
unions by Statehouse Republicans, should suggest three plain facts to
Ohio Democrats:
• The GOP will likely run the Ohio House and state Senate through 2022.
• Next year, President Barack Obama (unless Republicans run a wacko
against him) and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown (ditto) may face a very
skeptical Ohio.
• Any General Assembly Democrat who tried to woo votes by appeasing
suburban Ohio’s old-white-guy gun-nuts and gay-bashers was living in a
political dream world.
You can’t ever satisfy those cranks, because to them - come what may -
a Democrat is still a Democrat. So Ohio Democrats might as well act
like meat-and-potato Democrats, not Ivy League “triangulators.” Even an
Ohio kook can spot a phony.
That said, yes, Ohio voters can be Election Day contrarians. In 1988,
Hamilton County, a reactionary swamp, backed re-election of liberal
Democratic U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum and rejected Metzenbaum’s GOP
challenger, future Gov. George V. Voinovich. The folk wisdom was that
Metzenbaum was seen as the little guy’s or gal’s protector in
Washington. Brown may fit that niche in many Ohioans’ eyes.
One rationalization by Ohio Democrats about the fix they’re in is that
Republican Gov. John Kasich, in unseating Democrat Ted Strickland last
November, drew 49 percent of the statewide vote, Strickland, 47
percent. So, hey, Kasich’s win was really just a fluke, right?
But Kasich, head to head, against Strickland, leaving out third parties
and write-ins, drew 51 percent of Ohio’s vote. In 2008, Barack Obama
drew 52 percent of Ohio’s vote, head to head, and no one seems to think
that was a fluke.
And in those Ohio counties where people are moving - aiming to buy
houses and raise kids - Kasich ran far more strongly than he did
statewide.
In Medina County, home of House Speaker William G. Batchelder, Kasich
drew 61 percent of the county’s vote, head to head, against Strickland.
Similarly, such central Ohio counties as Delaware, Fairfield
(Lancaster), Licking (Newark) and Union (Marysville) grew like weeds
from 2000 to 2010. Kasich’s head-to-head margins against Strickland in
those counties were 61 percent (Fairfield), 62 percent (Licking), 67
percent (Delaware) and 69 percent (Union).
And in the four-county Dayton-Cincinnati wedge, Kasich’s head-to-head
leads over Strickland were 62 percent in Greene, 65 percent in Butler
and 71 percent in Warren and Clermont.
In contrast, of six “fastest shrinking” counties listed in a Plain
Dealer tabulation, Strickland carried four - Cuyahoga, Mahoning
(Youngstown), Trumbull (Warren) and Jefferson (Steubenville). The
others: Hamilton and Crawford (Bucyrus). As noted, Hamilton,
politically, is a world all its own, a fact for which the rest of Ohio
can be thankful. Crawford, like its best- known politico, Republican
Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, is often a maverick.
Read it at the Columbus Dispatch
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