T
he 2016 election will almost certainly be a knock-down, drag-out fight between Democrats looking to maintain the presidency and the GOP, which now controls both houses of Congress. A large part of that battle will likely be fought right here.
Last week, Cincinnati was tapped for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples’ 2016 convention. Republicans announced in July they’ll have their national gathering, where they’ll officially choose their candidate for president, in Cleveland that summer. Meanwhile, Columbus is one of three finalists for the Democrats’ big get-together that year. They’ll also be choosing their candidate for president at that event.
But as the parties begin to wrangle for control of the White House and the country, partisan contests have become increasingly lopsided at the state level in Ohio. That could affect the national outcome in 2016, when the Dems’ likely nominee Hillary Clinton and one of a long line of conservative hopefuls, including Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, vie for the nation’s highest office.
As that happens, look for ground wars over abortion rights, health care, immigration, racial issues and other political hot buttons in Ohio and Hamilton County, one of the most contested counties in the nation’s quintessential purple state.
“By selecting Cincinnati, the NAACP is placing its most important annual event in one of the nation’s pivotal 2016 presidential election swing states,’’ Mayor John Cranley said in a Dec. 1 statement. The group, one of the nation’s oldest civil rights organizations, echoed those sentiments, citing the state’s political importance as a reason for its choice.
Hamilton County Democratic Party Chair Tim Burke says the NAACP’s announcement is a “great thing all around” and especially good news for his party.
“I would expect that having the NAACP Convention here in 2016 will help to energize Democrats,” Burke said in an email. “It certainly did in 2008 when President Obama appeared here during his initial Presidential campaign. [There was an] overflow audience at the event and thousands more watching his speech on the big screen on Fountain Square. I expect both candidates will attend [in 2016]. They should.”
Ohio is vital in the path to the presidency. No Republican candidate has ever taken the White House without the state. Not since Ohio went to Richard Nixon but the presidency went to John F. Kennedy in 1960 has a candidate won a presidential election without the Ohio’s electoral votes. And that only happened three other times previously: Franklin D. Roosevelt won without Ohio in 1944 and Grover Cleveland didn’t need it for his victories 1884 and 1892.
Ohio helped usher in President Barack Obama, voting for him in both 2008 and 2012. But those were different times for the Ohio Democratic Party. Two years before Obama’s first election, Ohio chose Democrat Ted Strickland for governor by a wide margin over his Republican challenger, and Democrats controlled the state House. Obama took Ohio by some 266,000 votes in 2008.
By 2012, Strickland was gone, swept out of office two years prior by Republican John Kasich, and Obama’s margin of victory in Ohio also looked 100,000 votes less healthy.
The change came in 2010. Democrats held many of the statewide offices up for election that year, including the governorship, the secretary of state, the state auditor, attorney general and state treasurer. They lost all these races in a rout that can partially be attributed to an anti-Obama Republican wave. Republicans also took control of the state House and picked up seats in the state Senate, which they already controlled. That wave elected lawmakers who have enacted or attempted to enact sweeping restrictions on abortion providers, attempts to curtail bargaining rights for state employees and other conservative measures.
“Clearly, the 2010 election saw a sea change in Ohio politics and dramatic contrast with the 2006 election,” says a report on the elections by the University of Akron Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.
That change had big consequences, allowing Republicans in the General Assembly to control 2011 congressional redistricting in Ohio, which gave the party a powerful advantage for the decade to come.
The still-weak Ohio Democratic Party is smarting from bruising defeats in this year’s gubernatorial race and other statewide contests. This year was so bad that Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern stepped down from his position after losing his state representative seat last month to a Republican candidate who has been very publicly accused of burglary.
Meanwhile, the Ohio GOP is only getting stronger, with a number of players on the national stage. Gov. Kasich’s name has been bandied about as a presidential contender, and there are signs he’s game for the ride. Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman was also thought to be a strong candidate, though he’s demurred on running. Rep. John Boehner coasted to an easy victory in November and looks to hold on to his ultra-powerful perch as speaker of the house.
Republicans will look to consolidate their advantages in the state at their convention in Cleveland. Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus has said the choice of convention site was about the city’s capacity to raise funds for the party and house and entertain visitors, but clearly being in the heart of it all politically was part of the equation. One of the other semifinalists for the party’s convention, after all, was Cincinnati.
With the focus of the 2016 election tightly zoomed in on Ohio and Republicans in a power position here, state Democrats have less than two years to right their ship. The next step for the state party is picking a new leader after Chairman Redfern’s resignation last month. Right now, it’s a contest between two otherwise promising candidates who are coming off losing elections. David Pepper, who ran against Republican Mike DeWine for attorney general, is contending with Sharen Neuhardt, who lost out to Republican Mary Taylor for the lieutenant governor job.
It’s a challenging electoral landscape for Democrats, to say the least. But don’t count them out just yet, local party leaders say.
Though 75 percent of the state’s 16 House seats went to Republicans in 2014, only 58 percent of the state’s population voted for a GOP candidate. Some of that margin could well swing back toward Democrats in a presidential election not bound by districts. Democratic voters often turn out in bigger numbers for presidential elections as well, while 2014 saw near record-low turnout. One turnout booster could be Cincinnati’s NAACP convention, which may well rally black voters who traditionally vote Democratic.
Cincinnati last hosted the convention in 2008, when both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain addressed crowds of thousands. A similar appearance by a Democratic candidate in 2016 could go a long way. Both parties, and the NAACP, recognize the significance of the area.
“Hamilton County is a critical county for any president to take,” said Republican Cincinnati City Councilman Christopher Smitherman after the announcement Dec. 1. “So I think the national office is being very strategic and understands the power of Hamilton County,.”
In 2008 and 2012, Hamilton County went for Obama and helped him win the state. In 2012, the county delivered more than 219,000 votes for the incumbent. Those turned out to be pivotal — he won the whole state by only 100,000.
“Ohio is a purple state … perhaps the most purple in the country,” Burke says. “And Hamilton County is even more purple. Sure, there was a red wave that swept the country last month, but this is all cyclical, and the pendulum swings. I am confident that Democrats will have an extremely strong presidential ticket, probably headed by Hillary, and that we can carry Ohio and Hamilton County for the third presidential election in a row.”
But even though the county has become bluer over time, it’s dangerous to assume it will go to the Democratic nominee without some serious effort. Before Obama’s victories, Hamilton County voters had cast more ballots for a Democratic presidential candidate only one other time; for Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
A Democratic convention in Columbus could bolster the party’s chances in the state as well, some say. Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman has touted the city’s “great electoral value” as a reason Democrats should meet there in 2016.
But there are caveats. There’s little evidence conventions move the needle when it comes to voters in the states where they are held. Consider 2012, when Republicans chose Tampa for their convention. Florida voted Democratic. Democrats had theirs in Charlotte that year and Mitt Romney narrowly won North Carolina. ©
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2014.