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TWO

Ohio at the Head of the Flock

In the late stages of the 2012 presidential campaign, a disconnect emerged between national horse-race polls for the presidential race and those at the state level. Republican Mitt Romney thoroughly outperformed Democratic incumbent Barack Obama in the first presidential debate, held about a month before Election Day, and surged in national polls. Romney took a small lead immediately after the debate and then held within one point of Obama in averages of national polls for the remainder of the campaign, according to the widely cited RealClearPolitics website’s average of national polls.¹ The Gallup daily presidential tracker, posted promptly at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time every day and immediately dissected by political journalists and junkies, proved particularly favorable for Romney, showing him with leads in the mid-single digits for much of the rest of the campaign before narrowing to a final prediction of Romney 49 percent, Obama 48 percent.²

Yet, while the national polls were showing a race that was effectively a tie, the state-level polls in one key state were telling a different story. In Ohio, Obama consistently led Romney for the entirety of the race in nearly every poll, including those conducted at the high-water mark for Romney after the first debate. Of 85 polls conducted in the state during the 2012 calendar year, just nine ever showed Romney leading. Eight showed ties, and Obama led the rest.³

The incumbent’s lead in the state proved durable, and the polls almost exactly nailed his victory margin. The final RealClearPolitics average showed Obama with a lead of 2.9 percentage points, and he would win the state by three points. The accurate Ohio polling was an exception in 2012, though: Obama led on Election Day in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls by less than a point while winning nationally by four, and the averaged polls of many of the other swing states generally undershot Obama’s final margin by roughly three to four points. There was no way to know before the election with certainty that Ohio’s polls would be correct and so many of the national and other state polls would be off. But in hindsight they were a strong sign Obama would win not just Ohio, but nationally as well. Overall, the winning presidential candidate has carried Ohio in 28 of the last 30 elections, so the Ohio polling suggested an Obama win.

While Obama could have won the White House without Ohio, the president’s victory kept alive a dubious streak for Republicans: they still have never won a presidential election without Ohio, going back to the party’s first presidential election in 1856, when Republican John C. Frémont captured the state but lost the election to Democrat James Buchanan.

Not only has no Republican ever won the White House without carrying Ohio, but the state is typically more Republican than the nation as a whole. In the last 30 elections, the Democratic presidential candidate has outperformed his national average in Ohio only six times. This alone should have suggested that either the national polls showing what was basically a tied race, or the Ohio polls indicating a small lead for Obama, were wrong in 2012: it would be historically out of step for a Democrat to significantly outperform his national performance in the Buckeye State.

So the Ohio polling suggested not just an Obama win, but a national victory of more than three points—but not by much more than three points. Ohio’s two-party presidential vote has not deviated more than three points from the national average in any election since the conclusion of World War II. Thus, the Ohio polling would have suggested an Obama win of more than three points but less than six points. Obama won by four.

The long historical record suggests that, with just a few exceptions, Ohio has long mimicked the national voting, and that it has done so better than any other state. The case for Ohio as the nation’s top bellwether state is therefore threefold:

1. Ohio has the best record of any state in voting for the winning candidate.

2. Ohio’s results most often reflect the national voting average.

3. Ohio has provided the decisive electoral votes to the winning candidate more times than any other state.

WINS AND LOSSES

This book focuses on the presidential elections from 1896 through 2012. Why begin there?

The 1896 election began a 30-cycle span, running through 2012, during which Ohio voted for the winning presidential candidate in all but two elections: 1944 and 1960. By percentage, that’s the best record for any state over those 116 years. While Ohio’s voting consistently came close to the national average prior to 1896, a logical place to begin this study is at the beginning of its long and rarely broken streak of voting for presidential winners.

Beyond that, historical and ideological reasons urge starting in 1896. Political scientists have long regarded 1896 as a seminal, realigning election.⁴ It ended a post-Reconstruction electoral era, from 1876 to 1892, of extremely close presidential elections that featured not one, but two, Electoral College “misfires,” where the winner of the national popular vote lost the presidency (Democrats Samuel Tilden in 1876 and incumbent President Grover Cleveland in 1888). Ohio Republican William McKinley’s more than four-point margin in 1896 was the biggest victory since Republican Ulysses S. Grant’s 12-point reelection triumph in 1872.

More important, 1896 represented an ideological shift in one of the parties. Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan pushed for the free coinage of silver, co-opting the agrarian Populist movement that had supported James Weaver’s third-party candidacy in 1892, when Weaver received close to 9 percent of the vote and carried five states. Bryan’s silver stance alienated the Democrats’ business wing. The sitting Democratic president, Cleveland, had little use for Bryan, and many Cleveland Democrats deserted the party (including the president, who supported McKinley).

The Democratic Party changed in 1896, even if the voter coalition that supported Bryan looked a lot like the old Democratic coalition (the party’s base would change over time). The political scientist John Gerring, in his study of party ideology in American presidential politics, characterizes the pre-1896 Democrats as a party aligned with the principles of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, such as promoting “liberty versus tyranny” and opposing the growth of the state. The post-1896 Democrats are a populist party, he argued, concerned with “the people versus the interests.” The Republican Party’s ideological shift from a nationalist party of promoting “order versus anarchy” to a party defined by “the state versus the individual” came later, in the 1920s, likely as a result of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s growing of government during his term (cemented by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s liberalism during his more than a decade in office).⁵ In effect, Bryan—who was also the Populist Party nominee—brought the populists into the Democratic Party, but the Democrats lost more than they gained and remained in the presidential wilderness for 16 years, until a Republican Party split allowed the Democrats to win the presidency in 1912 (and then hold it against a unified GOP in 1916).

There’s something symbolic, too, about 1896 from an Ohio perspective. The country in 1896 came to where Ohio already was. Since the founding of the Republican Party in the early 1850s—the party first produced a presidential candidate, Frémont, in 1856—the GOP carried Ohio in every election through 1896.

That coincided with a golden age for Ohio in national politics. McKinley’s victory in 1896 marked the sixth time in eight elections that a native Ohioan was elected to the White House—Grant twice (in 1868 and 1872), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), James A. Garfield (1880), Benjamin Harrison (1888), and McKinley. Four years later, McKinley would make it seven Ohio victories in nine tries, before he, like Garfield before him, fell victim to an assassin’s bullet shortly after the beginning of his second term.

Ohio would vote Republican in every election from 1856 to 1912, and so would the nation, save for just two elections: Cleveland’s victories in 1884 and 1892. Into the 1910s and throughout the rest of the 20th century into the 21st, the nation would swing back and forth between the parties, with Ohio almost always close to the national average. More narrowly, given that McKinley was an Ohioan—as was his political Svengali, Mark Hanna—that’s also a reason to start with 1896 here.

Table 2.1 shows how many times each state voted for the presidential winner over the 30 elections from 1896 through 2012.⁶ Some of the states did not exist in 1896, so their record of voting with winners begins in the first election in which they participated. For instance, New Mexico became a state in time for the 1912 election, so it voted in 26 elections over this time frame instead of 30, like Ohio.

Table 2.1. Electoral record of the states over the last 30 elections, 1896–2012

The most Democratic region in the first half of this 30-election time frame was the South, which voted almost uniformly Democratic from Reconstruction through the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. A confluence of factors, including the Democratic Party’s increasing policy liberalism, its post–World War II embrace of civil rights activism on behalf of blacks (who began to vote heavily Democratic during Roosevelt’s term in response to the New Deal), and increasing migration of northern Republicans to growing southern cities like Charlotte, Atlanta, and others, pushed the historically conservative South to align itself with what was becoming the clearly more conservative party, the Republicans.⁷

But, for the first half of this period, the South voted Democratic almost all the time, and given that the Republicans won the White House in seven of nine elections from 1896 to 1928, many of the southern states racked up a lot of presidential campaign losses by voting for Democrats. By the 2010s, Republicans dominated eight of the 11 states of the old Confederacy—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—and thus they all comfortably supported Republicans John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 while the nation was voting for Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, the remaining three ex-Confederate states—Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia—all eventually became swing states, with Virginia moving from rock-solid Republicanism in presidential elections (it was the only southern state to vote against evangelical Christian Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976) to the nation’s political center, closely mirroring the national vote in both 2008 and 2012.

Florida and North Carolina retain slight GOP leans but are battleground states (the Sunshine State) or are trending in that direction (the Tar Heel State). In any event, bloc voting first for Democrats and then for Republicans in the South makes it hard to argue that any of these states are historic bellwethers, even though demographic changes might make those latter three states along the Atlantic Coast among the most reliable bellwethers going forward, perhaps surpassing even a state like Ohio.

In the Northeast, the poor records of Maine and Vermont stand out, primarily because they are the only two states to never vote for FDR, fighting off the eventual four-term president’s advances even in his landslide reelection triumph of 1936.

New England Republicanism, like the South’s Democratic tradition, was a feature of a political system where presidential elections were effectively reruns of the Civil War held every four years, with the North Republican, the South Democratic, and the battlegrounds of the Midwest and Border States oscillating in competitive years. Modern party labels tell us little about the ideology of the time. Just because Maine and Vermont never voted for Roosevelt, while Alabama and Mississippi provided him with such towering totals that the results seem to resemble sham elections held in dictatorships, didn’t necessarily make the former pair “conservative” and the latter pair “liberal” by the 21st-century definitions of the terms.

There’s a saying that “As goes Maine, so goes the nation.” That wasn’t because it was a bellwether; as shown above, Maine was a reliably Republican state in presidential elections for much of its history. The saying comes from the fact that until 1958 the state voted in September as opposed to November for nonpresidential offices, which most states adopted as a national election date following the Civil War. RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende noted in 2010 that “this enabled prognosticators to get a good sense of which way the winds were blowing. If Republicans did well, they could expect a decent year nationally. If the races were close, it was probably not going to be a good year. And if Democrats actually won a few races, Republicans knew to run for cover nationwide.”⁸ In 1936, Maine’s early vote backed the GOP in multiple statewide offices and the Pine Tree State’s three US House districts, suggesting a Republican turn nationally. Instead, FDR won a smashing reelection, losing only two states (Maine and Vermont, noted above). That led to a revision: “As goes Maine, so goes Vermont.”⁹

Massachusetts and Rhode Island have better records in part because they turned reliably Democratic much earlier than some of their New England neighbors. Both states voted for Catholic Democrat Al Smith, the governor of New York, in 1928. While Smith was soundly defeated by Republican Herbert Hoover—losing even some states in the South, thanks in part to his religion and his urban politics—his nomination excited his coreligionists and immigrants in big cities, stirring a new base that Roosevelt would bring solidly into the Democratic Party during his presidency.

OHIO’S MIDWESTERN COMPETITION

The Midwest features three states that election watchers have cited at various times as bellwethers: Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio. But while the bellwether label has fit at certain points, developments in Illinois and Missouri, and also nationally, made both these states less reliable presidential predictors in the 21st century.

A growing political separation between urban and rural America—cities becoming ever more Democratic while rural areas have become increasingly Republican—has tilted Illinois strongly to the Democrats thanks to the increasingly Democratic lean of Cook County, home of Chicago, the Midwest’s biggest city.

Illinois gave up its bellwether status by voting comfortably for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, and no one expected it to go Republican in 2016 unless the GOP ran up a national margin of Ronald Reaganesque proportions. It just isn’t really winnable for Republicans anymore in a close national election.

In the midst of the 2004 presidential campaign, the Economist declared, not inaccurately at the time, that “Missouri has an almost mythical reputation in American presidential politics.”¹⁰ The state had voted for the presidential victor in every election but one since 1904, and it was poised once again to play an outsized role in another close race. Indeed, Missouri ended up voting with the winner—Republican George W. Bush—but Bush did about two and a half points better in the Show-Me State than he did nationally, while Democrat John Kerry did about two points worse. It was the third election in a row that Missouri had voted slightly more Republican than the nation, a tiny lean that would become more pronounced.

Missouri has of late tilted away from the Midwest and toward the South, and there are not enough Democratic votes in the state’s two major cities, St. Louis and Kansas City, to make up for the rest of the state becoming reliably Republican.¹¹ After fulfilling its bellwether role for the 25th time in 26 elections in 2004, Missouri resisted the country’s clear Democratic swing to Obama in 2008, voting narrowly for John McCain. By 2012, Missouri voted seven points more Republican than the nation as a whole—the GOP’s best performance in the state relative to the national results since the Civil War. Missouri often leaned toward its southern neighbors throughout its history, including in 1956, when it was the only non-Confederate state to back Democrat Adlai Stevenson against Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.

Only 10 states voted for both parties at least once in the four elections from 2000 to 2012. Illinois and Missouri were not among them; one uniformly backed the Democrats (the Land of Lincoln), the other, Republicans (the Show-Me State). Ohio, meanwhile, voted with the winner in all four elections and mirrored the national vote in each election.

THE WESTERN BELLWETHERS

Out west, California, Nevada, and New Mexico have strong histories of voting for presidential winners, although there is increasing evidence that two of the three—the Golden State and the Land of Enchantment—are, like Illinois, moving more reliably into the Democratic column.

Shocking as it may seem to those familiar with only 21st-century results, California went Republican in all but one election—the Lyndon Johnson 1964 landslide—from 1952 through 1988. However, a Californian was on the Republican ticket in all but three of those 10 elections: Richard Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952 and 1956, and the GOP nominee in his own right in 1960, 1968, and 1972, while former California Governor Ronald Reagan was the Republican nominee in 1980 and 1984. Throughout this period, California was not noticeably more Republican than the nation as a whole, and its failure to vote for Carter in the very close 1976 election was part of a broader problem for the Democrat that year: he proved to have very little appeal west of the Mississippi River (the farthest west state he carried was Texas, which has voted more often with the South than the West throughout its history). No one would have called California a bellwether in the 2010s, given how reliably Democratic it became, thanks to the dominance of its big, urban centers along the coast and growing population of Democratic-leaning nonwhite voters.

If one just went back over the last hundred years of elections (it didn’t become a state until 1912), New Mexico would match Ohio as having the best record in voting with the winning presidential candidate. But the Land of Enchantment—where about two in five voters were Hispanic in 2012¹²—might also be shifting more reliably into the Democratic column. It was more Democratic in 2008 and 2012 than it had been since Harry Truman’s victory in 1948. Both presidential campaigns largely ignored the state in 2012, and Obama won it by 10 points.

With its historically large Hispanic population, New Mexico doesn’t look much like the nation. John Petrocik commenting in 1996 on New Mexico’s history of backing winners in presidential elections, noted, “The problem is that New Mexico doesn’t look like anyplace else. It’s too atypical and out of the way for people to take its bellwether status as anything but luck or accident, even though that might not be the case.”¹³ If Hispanics continue to vote for Democrats at a rate of two-thirds or better—a big if, because such voting patterns are not necessarily set in stone—New Mexico may move to the Democrats as Missouri has shifted toward the Republicans.

Nevada is a different story. From 1912 to 2012, Nevada voted against the winner just once, when it narrowly supported unelected incumbent Ford over Carter in 1976. Its modern bellwether role can be attributed to being “representative of America,” according to Nevada political reporter and analyst Jon Ralston.

Urban and rural, growing Hispanic population, a fast-growing melting pot until the recession slowed us down. Nevada really is three states, which put together form a whole that would reflect the nation’s sentiments. Super-urban Clark County, with the biggest city and all the concomitant problems, issues of a big city, and heavily Democratic; urban Reno, a small-town feel, the swing county that has liberals more liberal than Clark and conservatives more conservative; the other 15 counties, all rural, very conservative, a picture of red America. . . . Why wouldn’t we be representative?¹⁴

Demographically, Nevada provides what could be a vision of the nation’s future. According to the 2012 general election exit poll (a survey taken of voters at polling places after they voted), Nevada’s voters were eight points more diverse than the nation’s: 64 percent White (compared to 72 percent nationally), 19 percent Hispanic/Latino, 9 percent Black, 5 percent Asian American, 4 percent Other.¹⁵

All in all, there’s a good argument for Nevada as a premier bellwether going forward. But there’s more to determining a bellwether than just whether a state votes with the winners.

OHIO: ALWAYS IN THE MIDDLE

Another way to measure how much a state’s results reflect the national average is looking at how far the state deviates from the national results. For this, let’s return to the presidential deviations explained in the first chapter. As a refresher, the presidential deviation shows how far away from the national vote a state’s results were in a given year, using just the two-party vote. In a 50–50 national election, a state that voted 55 percent to 45 percent for the Democrat would be D +5, and a state that voted 55 percent to 45 percent for the Republican would be R +5. The bigger the deviation, the further a state’s results are from the national popular vote.

Table 2.2 shows how many times from 1896 through 2012 each state had a presidential deviation that was less than five. States that are generally close to the national voting can be considered bellwethers; states that are not are outliers.

Table 2.2. States with presidential deviations less than five in presidential elections, 1896–2012

Amazingly, Ohio’s presidential deviation has been five points or more only three times in the last 30 elections, by far the lowest of any states. New Mexico comes in second, at six of the last 26 (it first voted for president in 1912). Other than those two states, no other has been near the national average in more than 75 percent of the presidential elections over this 116-year time period. In fact, 29 of the 51 states (including the District of Columbia) have more often than not had presidential results that have been significantly outside the national mainstream.

The District of Columbia, with its heavy Democratic lean, has never been within five points of the national voting (it first voted for president in 1964). The formerly Democratic Solid South, which is now staunchly Republican, is almost a perfect anti-bellwether: Alabama and South Carolina have had deviations less than five points in only two of the last 30 elections, and Mississippi only did twice.

Table 2.3 shows the average presidential deviation for each state over the past 30 elections. For each election, it doesn’t matter whether a state deviated in a Democratic or a Republican direction—the average deviation in either direction over the 30 elections is what’s expressed here.

Table 2.3. States’ average deviation from two-party presidential vote, 1896–2012

The results of these calculations offer another strong argument for Ohio as the most accurate bellwether over the last 30 elections. On average, Ohio’s presidential vote deviated just 2.2 points from the national results. New Mexico, noted above as a historic bellwether, was second at 2.8 points.

The deviations calculated above track fairly well with the presidential win totals discussed above, with one major exception. While states like Ohio, New Mexico, Illinois, and Missouri lead this list—just as they do above—bellwether Nevada’s vote has historically deviated much more strikingly over the last 30 elections, placing it in the middle of the pack of both tables 2.2 and 2.3.

Again, Nevada’s strong support of silver bug Bryan, particularly in 1896 and 1900 at the start of this analysis, skews the numbers. Based on two-party vote, the Silver State was 33 points more Democratic than the nation in 1896, and 15 points more Democratic four years later. More recently, though, Nevada had presidential deviations of R +15, R +8, and R +7 in 1980, 1984, and 1988, respectively, before settling into a deviation near the national average moving into the 21st century.

If we narrow the time frame, Ohio’s position as the leading bellwether becomes even more striking. Since 1964, Ohio has been at most just two points from the middle of the country either way, voting with the winner every time. Meanwhile, Illinois, the one-time battleground turned Democratic stronghold, has been at least five points more Democratic than the nation in every election since 1992. Missouri was four and seven points more Republican than the nation in 2008 and 2012, respectively, and was slightly more Republican in the three elections prior to that.

Using two-party presidential deviations can skew some state results. For instance, this method shows Alabama with a whopping R +52 deviation in 1948. Why? Because Truman was not even on the ballot there: conservative Democrat Strom Thurmond was on the ballot instead, so Truman got zero votes in Alabama. Thurmond won the all-party vote with nearly 80 percent, but Republican nominee Thomas Dewey got 100 percent of the two-party votes, or 52 points better than his national share of roughly 48 percent of the two-party tally. As is obvious, the two-party vote is not perfect, but when it performs poorly it is generally in the states of the South, which supported third-party candidates such as Thurmond in 1948 and Wallace in 1968. Nobody would consider those places bellwether states.

The District of Columbia, meanwhile, has never been less than 24 points more Democratic than the nation in its entire electoral history, which began in 1964. That gives it the highest average deviation from the nation’s results of any place with electoral votes, by a significant margin.

Of all the other states (and DC), only two states besides Ohio have never been more than 10 points from the national voting since 1896: Ohio’s neighbor to the west, Indiana, which is currently the most Republican state in the Midwest (and has been more Republican than the nation in every election since 1928), and historic bellwether Illinois, which is now the Midwest’s consistently most Democratic state.

Averaging the presidential deviation over the last 30 elections helps confirm what Ohio’s nearly flawless record in picking presidential winners suggests: Ohio is almost always reflective of the national popular vote. Its place in the middle of the national voting leads to a third argument for its importance as a presidential bellwether state. More often than any other state, Ohio puts the winning candidate over the finish line in the Electoral College.

OHIO: THE DECIDER

Technically, in 27 of the 30 elections from 1896 to 2012, the winning candidate still would have won without Ohio’s electoral votes. The exceptions are 1916, 2000, and 2004. However, that statistic doesn’t tell the full tale of how often Ohio votes close to the national average and how often it casts the decisive vote for the winner in both competitive and uncompetitive elections.

While Nevada and New Mexico have similar batting averages to Ohio’s when it comes to voting with the winning presidential candidate, the Buckeye State has an obvious but nonetheless important advantage: it’s always been much more populous than these far more sparsely populated western states. Ohio cast 18 electoral votes in 2012: while Ohio’s number of electoral votes has been declining because of slow population growth, it was still the seventh highest in the nation, and Ohio has always ranked among the Electoral College’s biggest prizes.

Nevada and New Mexico cast just six and five electoral votes, respectively, in 2012, and they’ve never cast more in any election. The small size of those two states means that they are not nearly as valuable to the candidates in terms of assembling a winning electoral coalition. They are too small, practically, to make the difference between winning and losing in all but the closest elections. Indeed, neither state has actually been decisive in the past 30 presidential elections.

Meanwhile, Ohio has produced the winning electoral vote for the victorious presidential candidate more times over the last 30 elections than any other state. In five of those elections, Ohio’s electoral vote put the winner over the finish line.

Here’s what that means: One can take the states that voted for the presidential winner and put them in order, from biggest margin to smallest, rather like Trende’s hypothetical pool cited in chapter 1. Under this model, the state that produced the biggest percentage-point margin for the winner casts the first votes. For instance, in 2012, the District of Columbia voted for President Obama by an 83.6 percentage-point margin, by far the biggest margin won by either candidate that year in any place that cast electoral votes. So Obama got his “first” three electoral votes from DC. Obama’s next four votes came from his birth state of Hawaii, which he won by 42.7 points. That put him at seven electoral votes. In that same election, Romney got his first six electoral votes from Utah, which he won by 47.9 points thanks to overwhelming support from his fellow Mormons (although Utah is frequently among the most Republican states in presidential elections). And so on. Once the winner gets to 270 electoral votes, the rest is gravy.

Table 2.4 lists the 30 elections from 1896 through 2012 and the “decisive” state in each election. In recent years, this means the 270th electoral vote in the current Electoral College, which has 538 electoral votes, a total reached in 1964 with the addition of the District of Columbia and its three electoral votes.

Table 2.4. States providing decisive electoral vote, 1896–2012

Ohio cast this decisive vote five times: 1896 for Ohioan William McKinley, 1936 for Franklin Roosevelt, 1968 and 1972 for Richard Nixon, and 2004 for George W. Bush. The most recent instance was the most important: if Bush had lost Ohio in that close 2004 election, John Kerry would have been elected president. The other elections were not very competitive, except for 1968, which Nixon won by less than a point in the two-party vote over Hubert Humphrey.

No other state has cast decisive votes in more than three elections in this period: Illinois, Michigan, and New York each have been decisive three times. In fact, just 16 of the 50 states have cast the winning electoral votes in this 116-year period.

Additionally, Ohio has been just one slot away from being the crucial state five other times: 1900, 1948, 1964, 1976, and 1984. Included are two of the most competitive elections of the past century, Harry S. Truman’s then-shocking upset of Thomas Dewey in 1948 and Jimmy Carter’s near theft of defeat from the jaws of victory against hard-charging, unelected incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976.

In 1948, Truman won the national popular vote by about four and a half percentage points over Dewey, but Truman’s victory was dependent on two very narrow escapes. One was in Ohio by a quarter of a point, and the other was in California by a little less than half a point. In 1976, Carter squeaked by in Ohio by about a quarter of a point, and in Wisconsin by less than two points. Later chapters will analyze these elections, and the candidates’ performances in Ohio, in more depth.

Two key points: First, these statistics illustrate how Ohio is almost always near the national presidential voting, whether in very close elections (1968 and 2004) or in those that are not close at all (1936 and 1972). Second, the data also suggest that Ohio, because of its size, is more valuable to win than many other states. For all Nevada’s and New Mexico’s success in supporting the winner of presidential races, those two states have never during this 30-election span cast the decisive vote.

WHY OHIO?

Through Ohio’s record of voting for the winning presidential nominee (28 times in the last 30 elections), its hewing to the national average (deviating an average of only 2.2 points from the country as a whole over those 30 elections), and its decisiveness in national elections (casting the winning votes more times than any other state), the Buckeye State has a strong claim as the most consistent and durable bellwether state over the last 30 presidential elections. The next logical question is: Why?