This State’s Presidential Winning Streak is Coming to an End
With absentee / mail-in ballots still being counted by heroic county officials in states like Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, one state’s grant of its electoral college votes marks the end of an unusually long winning streak.
In every Presidential election since 1964, the State of Ohio has casts its electoral college votes for the eventual president. And the consummate swing state has been a bell-weather favoring both Democrats and Republicans alike. According to 270toWin.com, over the past almost 60 years Ohio has voted for Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.
That’s the best winning streak by far with the next closest being Florida (missing the mark by giving its then 25 Electoral College votes to former President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election that went to former President Clinton).
This year, however, if the projections turn out to be true and there is no Supreme Court case that ultimately decides the outcome, both Ohio and Florida will have selected President Donald Trump as their candidate, thus ruining Ohio’s winning streak and adding another miss to Florida’s record. While it is still early, there are likely several reasons for this, the reason may seem like changing demographics, but it actually may just be politics as usual.
In 1964, the year it elected LBJ, Ohio had 26 electoral votes. Today, however, the state only has 18, which is the least its had since Andrew Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams in 1828. This means that with the passage of each decennial census since 1964 (there have been 5 in that span with another one going on this year) Ohio has lost its overall population by close to one-third. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Ohio’s population grew by only 2.9% from 2000 to 2019, 13.4% less than the national average.
Does this mean that Ohio is getting older and whiter leading it to vote more with the Republican party? Perhaps not, according to research conducted by the state’s Development Services Agency in 2018, the minority population in Ohio increased 38% since 2000 with major gains in the hispanic and Asian-American population while the white, non-Hispanic population decreased 4%.
This is on pace with national population rates, so why the change? Perhaps Ohio has been a “red state” all along. Aside from Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrats are unable to win a statewide races in Ohio. They have not held the Governor’s mansion in Columbus since 1991. So, while Ohioans are great at picking Presidents, regardless of party, Ohio Democrats seem to turn out only for national elections.
So while Ohio’s streak may be coming to an end as far as the Presidency is concerned, most Ohioans will likely tell you that they are not surprised its no longer considered a swing state.
