Theodore Roosevelt, a well-known political animal and scholar, once said, “I think there’s only one thing in the world I can’t understand, and that’s Ohio politics.
It is truly a complex place shaped by its history as America’s first frontier state. Since the founding of the country, Ohio has been populated over the years by various ethnic groups seeking prosperity west of the Appalachians. Once a leader in American politics, Ohio lost that status as its population grew older, whiter, and more culturally conservative. But its combination of extremely different regions makes it a fascinating state to watch independently.
“Ohio is one of those places whose story is told more often from the outside than from the inside,” said David Giffels, author of Barnstorming Ohio, a book on the state’s political and cultural geography.
“We are the boring environment of American politics,” Giffels added. “And I really mean it in a loving way.”
Ohio’s main settlements form a diagonal axis that crosses the state from Cleveland in the northeast through Columbus down to Cincinnati in the southwest, along Corridor I-71. There are up to 12 media markets in the state, with a population of 11.8 million covering almost 45,000 square miles.
As a result, said Kyle Kondick, an election forecaster and author of a book on Ohio politics, “there is no really strong voting center in the state.”
Ohio is holding primary elections on Tuesday, which will give us the first major election test of Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party since he left office. Supporting JD Vance in the Republican Senate election, Trump himself brought Mr. Vance, the venture capitalist and celebrity, to the forefront of a crowded field.
Forecast for low voter turnout
But Vance’s victory in the primary is not certain. Although the candidates have spent nearly $ 70 million beating each other on television, voters do not seem particularly motivated by the chance to elect a retired Senator’s deputy, Port Portman. The turnout in the race is expected to be low.
“Since Trump is not on the ballot, I don’t think this race is in the first place for most voters,” said Thomas Sutton, director of the Baldwin Wallace University Institute for Community Studies, which is conducting polls in Ohio.
This could help Matt Dolan, a traditional Republican who is likely to receive support from regular parties and higher-income voters in the suburbs. According to this theory, random voters are less likely to be influenced by Trump’s late approval of Vance.
Dolan’s allies also speculate that as other candidates split the hard vote for Trump, Dolan, a U.S. senator whose family owns the Cleveland Gardens, has the potential to win more votes by snatching more careless Trump fans. . They also speculate that the strength of Gov. Mike DeWain in the primary gubernatorial election may elevate Dolan to the rank and file.
Mike Murphy, a former Republican consultant, said that because Dolan had not been the subject of much publicity for the attack, “he became the new face in the closing moments after others suffered a lot of damage, both on their own and from paid media.”
Trump held a rally last month in Delaware, Ohio, a city north of Columbus. Credit … Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
The five states of Ohio
Most Ohio analysts divide the state into five regions: Northeast, around Cleveland; Northwest, including Toledo and the prosperous agricultural lands around it; Central, thriving areas in and around Columbus; Southeast, Appalachian state; and the southwest, dominated by Cincinnati and its suburbs.
The Northeast is Ohio’s Democratic Fort, the most populous, most industrialized, and most diverse part of the state. But it is also home to tens of thousands of Republican voters, so all candidates have campaigned and advertised heavily in the region.
Southwest, which includes Vance’s hometown of Middletown, is the traditional center of Republican politics in Ohio. Further south in perspective, it is full of indigenous Republican voters: conventional in their cultural views, they tend to support free enterprise and worry about issues such as crime, drugs and immigration. Vance, who now lives in Cincinnati, is holding his party on election night in the city.
The Southeast is a swinging zone in Ohio politics, though it is the least diverse – almost 95 percent white. Overwhelmed by job losses and hit by the forces of globalization and economic modernization, with a lower percentage of people with higher education, the Ohio Appalachian region is full of “people who are angry at the world,” said John K. Green. honorary director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron.
As a result, Green said, the region has “a much higher tolerance for political rudeness” – and could gravitate to Josh Mandel, who is campaigning for attitudes as well as any specific conservative ideas. The super-PAC, which supports Mandel, ran commercials on rural radio stations in the area, attacking Vance as a “scam.”
In the Republican presidential primary in 2016, the Ohio map split sharply between John Kasic, who was the current governor at the time, and Trump, who would, of course, win the Republican nomination and the presidency. Kasic won Ohio’s most populous counties on his way to government while Trump cleaned up Appalachian communities along the Ohio River.
Balancing Vance
One question in the minds of many Ohio observers: How will college-educated Republicans respond to Vance?
Will they flock to the secular investor educated at Yale, who is hiding in the angry MAGA warrior that Vance has become? Or will they be repulsed by how much right he has moved into courtship based on Trump?
Vance’s schedule and advertising costs over the past few days of the race show a focus on suburban and small urban areas. From Saturday he visited Circleville, a town south of Columbus; Cuyahoga Falls, a city north of Akron; Westlake, a suburb west of Cleveland; Dublin, a northwestern suburb of Columbus; and Mason, a northeastern suburb of Cincinnati.
Super PAC, which supports Vance, Protect American Values, has spent heavily on television commercials in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, as well as Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown.
“On the surface, the campaign seems to be haunting Republican voters in the middle of the road,” Green said.
This is a deceptively conventional strategy that you would hardly expect from the protagonist of Hillbilly Elegy, a story of rural communities afflicted by poverty, drug addiction, and what he called “learned helplessness.” As early as 2016, Vance called on Americans to hold on to their own destiny, as he did by overcoming his troubled childhood.
“We are no longer a country that believes in human freedom, and as a poor person before, I find it incredibly offensive,” he said in an interview.
In this campaign, Vance is courting the support of far-right characters who trade in conspiracy theories and insults such as Steve Bannon and representatives Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Green. In recent days, he has accused President Biden of deliberately flooding Ohio with fentanyl, an absurd accusation without evidence.
“In a way,” Giffels said, “he’s somehow selling the victim he’s criticizing in the book.”
What to read
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From Columbus, Ohio, our colleague Trip Gabriel reports on Josh Mandel, a Republican whose Senate campaign is determined by his support for Donald Trump, now that Trump supports someone else.
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A second woman has publicly accused Charles Herbster, a Republican candidate for governor of Nebraska who has Trump’s support, of touching her.
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Although Biden enjoyed high approval ratings at the beginning of his presidency, his leading sociologist warned that immigration and inflation could support him.
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Six months before the midterm term, Democrats are deeply divided on how to connect with voters and improve the party’s prospects, Katie Gluck said.
how to run
Senator Joe Manchin, left, with representative David McKinley last year in Morgantown, W.Va.Credit … Michael Swensen / Getty Images
Manchin enters the Republican primary in West Virginia
It is not often that you see a Democrat supporting a Republican candidate. But the usual political betting is ruled out in West Virginia.
Republicans hold all three seats in the State House. But after West Virginia lost a county in the redistribution process once a decade, there is room for only two of them at the next Congress. That left two Republican congressmen, Alex Mooney and David McKinley, fighting for the new Second District.
Over the weekend, Senator Joe Manchin, the country’s most prominent right-wing Democrat, said in an ad that he supported McKinley, a longtime West Virginia politician and engineer who was first elected to Congress in 2010. The primary is scheduled for May 10.
Confirmation adds another layer to the rivalry race, which has already turned into a kind of proxy war. Donald Trump backed Mooney, while his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo backed McKinley. Manchin joins Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican who left the Democratic Party after Trump was elected, in support of McKinley. In particular, Mooney is seen as a potential Senate contender against Manchin in 2024.
Mooney has a similar summary as McKinley’s, albeit outside the state. He spent a decade in the Maryland legislature before leading the Republican State Party, a story that provided McKinley with alliterative food in his ads for the attack on the Maryland Moons.
Both are campaigning on typical Republican topics, such as immigration and gun rights. But they have dedicated most of their TV commercials to attacking each other, exchanging accusations that they are working with …
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