Why Trump Will Do Better in Ohio Than He Does Nati

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Why Trump Will Do Better in Ohio Than He Does Nationally

And why that doesn’t guarantee he’ll win the state

Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor, Sabato's Crystal Ball October 2nd, 2016

http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/

“There is no city in the United States in which I get a warmer welcome and fewer votes than Columbus, Ohio.” – John F. Kennedy

So is the sun setting on the Ohio bellwether?

The quote at the top of this article is a funny quip from JFK about his troubles in Franklin County. Kennedy did in fact lose Franklin County handily — Nixon won it by nearly 20 points. That was a peculiar election, and not just because Ohio voted for the loser. It’s also because the electorate changed that year quite dramatically on account of Kennedy’s religion.

JFK was just the second Catholic major party presidential nominee. Al Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, was the first, losing in a landslide to Herbert Hoover (R) in 1928.

The 1960 election was defined by a Catholic vs. Protestant split. Kennedy narrowly won the election by improving on 1956 Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson’s performance with Catholics by 27 percentage points, according to Gallup, while hardly moving the numbers at all from four years prior with Protestants.

This pattern jumps off the page in Ohio when looking at county-level election statistics. Nowhere in the state did Kennedy improve his performance over Stevenson more than in two northwest Ohio counties, Mercer and Putnam.

Both counties are, to this day, the only two majority Catholic counties in Ohio. Franklin County, on the other hand, is and was less Catholic than the state, and thus Kennedy’s improvement there from 1956 was comparatively mild.

Kennedy’s problem was that in the 1950s and 1960s Ohio had a slightly bigger Republican lean than it does now, and that Ohio wasn’t as Catholic as it needed to be to overcome that lean back then.

The reason I bring up this point is merely to say that the Catholic vs. Protestant split in 1960 was not permanent. Counties like Mercer and Putnam remain heavily Catholic but have been voting overwhelmingly Republican for decades, while a county that is less Catholic than the statewide average, Franklin, has trended very Democratic over the last two decades.

So too has a fairly Catholic county, Hamilton. How Catholic or not Catholic a place was meant a whole lot in 1960, but it doesn’t mean much of anything, politically, nowadays.

The relevant question today, as it pertains to both Trump’s chances in Ohio in this election, as well as whether Ohio remains a bellwether of national political opinion going forward, is how much does Trump truly improve on typical GOP performance among whites who do not have a college degree, how much does he fall off with whites who do have a college degree, and how much do those changes persist over time?

If the answer to those questions are, respectively, a lot, not much, and yes, then Ohio very well could go the way of Missouri: A one-time bellwether that wandered away from the flock. But if the changes are minor, or if they are ones that do not persist past Trump, then the Ohio bellwether may very well endure, even if — as in 1960 — the state doesn’t actually vote for the winner this year.

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