For decades, the notion that Ohio is a bellwether state that decides the outcome of this nation’s presidential elections has persisted. Even today, many Democrats cling to the notion that their party cannot win an Electoral College victory without claiming Ohio’s electoral votes.
This theory is bunk.
Ohio has gained its unearned reputation as an election-deciding bellwether largely due to sheer luck and the fact that its polls close at 7:30 Eastern time. As a result, it is perfectly positioned to be the state that appears to put the Democrats over the top in the Electoral College, but that is merely a function of Ohio usually being called sometime between 10 and 11 p.m. Eastern time, when one candidate or the other is within striking distance of hitting the magic 270 electoral vote threshold.
But Ohio has as much to do with electing presidents as crowing roosters have to do with causing the sun to rise.
In truth, Ohio has not played a decisive role in the election of any Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson narrowly won reelection in 1916. Even in that election, it was not the tipping-point state; the tipping-point state that decided the election was California. (A “tipping point state” is the closest state that gives the winning candidate an electoral college majority.)
It is an arithmetical fact that every Democrat who has won the presidency in the last 100 years would have won an Electoral College majority even if he had lost Ohio. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy did just that, in 1944 and 1960 respectively.
In fact, Ohio has only been the decisive, tipping-point state in two presidential elections since the Civil War, and in both of those elections (1876 and 2004), Ohio tipped the election to a Republican.
An examination of Ohio’s electoral history demonstrates that Ohio is a Republican-leaning state that almost always votes a few points more Republican than the nation as a whole. Since the Republican Party’s founding in 1854, 41 presidential elections have taken place. Ohio has given Republican presidential candidates greater margins than the national electorate at large has in 33 of those 41 elections, slightly more than 80% of the time. In the 24 presidential elections held in the last century, the Republican margin in Ohio has exceeded the Republican margin in the national popular vote 21 times, exactly 87.5% of the time. In short, Ohio leans to the right of the nation in more than four out of every five presidential elections, and its Republican lean has only become more pronounced with time.
In the 41 elections conducted since the GOP was founded in 1854, Republicans have outperformed their national margin in Ohio by an average of 3.07%. In the last century, the average GOP margin in Ohio has grown to 4.185%. While there are some clear outliers in the data that skew the margin a bit, it is nonetheless clear that Ohio does lean to the right of the national average. In short, if a presidential election is dead-even, or the Democratic nominee wins the national popular vote by roughly a point or less, Ohio will go Republican.
Arithmetically, Democrats simply do not need to win Ohio to win the presidency. By the time Ohio falls into the Democratic column, the election has already been won in other states (even if their polls haven’t closed yet, or there hasn’t been enough of a count in those states to call them for the Democrat by the time that Ohio, an early-closing state, has been largely tabulated).
The implications are simple: Ohio should only be contested if Democrats have plenty of money to spend in other, more crucial states. History conclusively demonstrates that Ohio has never been the tipping-point state in a Democratic victory. To the degree that it ever has been a tipping-point state, it has tipped the election to the Republicans both times.
This is not to suggest that Democrats should give up entirely on Ohio. As long as its major cities provide a treasure trove of votes to the Democratic Party, there will always be a chance to win it, even if that chance is less than 50/50. And just as history shows us that Democrats can win without Ohio (and have done so), history also shows us that Republicans must win Ohio to win the election. They’ve never won nationally without winning Ohio.
But in the later stages of a close presidential race in which tough decisions must be made about resources, Democrats should pull the plug on Ohio without a moment’s hesitation and turn their focus to more fertile ground. Because to put it bluntly: If Democrats find themselves counting on Ohio to win an election, they’re going to lose.