CLEVELAND — The Republicans dropped anchor in Ohio Thursday, casting their hopes for 2016, and beyond, with the voters of America’s ultimate consumer-products test market.
Ohio is the quintessential swing state — one the Republican Party has never lost and still gone on to win the White House.
But choosing this Midwestern metropolis as the site of its first presidential primary debate and 2016 nominating convention is about more than winning the Buckeye State’s 18 electoral votes. Reeling from successive presidential defeats and five popular-vote losses in six tries, plus national demographic and cultural shifts toward the Democrats, the GOP figures that, like soap, soda or cereal, if it can fine tune its political product and sell it here, it can sell it anywhere.
“Coming to Cleveland is an indicator that we are going to concentrate on every voter, no matter who they are, what their background is, or where they come from. That is our commitment, and Cleveland is part of it,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told the Washington Examiner.
“If you appeal to people in Ohio, you appeal to people in the U.S.,” added Paul Sracic, chairman of the politics department at Youngstown State University, near Cleveland.
The Republicans’ 15-month drive to revive their political fortunes began Wednesday along Lake Erie with the kickoff of the GOP’s annual summer meeting to consult on operational planning and hash out party business. On Thursday, Fox News will broadcast the first presidential debate of the 2016 campaign, with the Republican candidates polling in the top 10 featured in prime time, and the other seven contenders facing off separately earlier the same evening.
The Ohio that the Republican presidential contenders found as they arrived was in better shape than it was four years ago but still insecure about the future, hungry for better leadership from Washington and more jobs that pay higher wages.
In both the main event and undercard debates, the Republican hopefuls are likely to be peppered with questions covering a range of subjects important to GOP primary voters: President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran; the Obamacare health reform law; the uproar over Planned Parenthood’s sale of organs and body parts that come from fetuses aborted by health clinic doctors; and immigration, to name a few.
But to really connect with Ohio voters and build a foundation for success against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the issues they need to focus on — relentlessly — are jobs and the economy. It was Mitt Romney’s failure to convince Buckeye State voters that he cared about their economic struggles and would improve their bottom line that contributed the Republican’s defeat here in 2012 at the hands of Obama.
Sen. Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican who is up for re-election next year, said Republicans shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking that 2016 is going to revolve around Obamacare, hot button social issues or, barring some international or domestic incident, foreign policy or national security. “It’s about jobs,” Portman said flatly. “It’ll be essentially about what kind of future my kids and grandkids are going to have, based on jobs and the economy.” So far, polls support Portman’s analysis.
Portman, who is from Cincinnati and has spent his professional life in Republican politics, lamented that “one of our great failings, in my view as Republicans — sometimes we forget to connect those dots that what we’re talking about in terms of policies actually affect these kitchen table conversations.”
Ohio is like an electoral pendulum, swinging back and forth with the changing political winds that have swept the U.S. in recent years. The Republicans won big victories there, in state and federal races, in 2004, 2010 and 2014, reflecting the conservative tide that swept through most of the rest of the country in each of those elections. The Democrats were similarly successful here in 2006, 2008 and 2012, mirroring the accomplishments of the liberal slate nationally.
Veteran Buckeye political operatives credit their state’s perennial competitiveness to a demographic, geographic and political mixture that is equal parts conservative and liberal; urban and rural; working class and white collar. Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown joked that Ohio is more like several states in one — so different from one region to the next that rivalries between the National Football League and Major League Baseball franchises in Cleveland and Cincinnati never developed in this otherwise sports crazy state.
“One reason they can’t build an Indians-Reds or Browns-Bengals rivalry is the cities are kind of in different states to a lot of people,” Brown said. “It’s a demographic microcosm.”
Recent census figures bear this out. Broken down by percentage, the age, ethnicity, income and home ownership rates for Ohioans track closely with the national numbers. The difference in Hispanic residents in Ohio, versus nationally, is the lone glaring exception and the one statistic preventing it from perfectly mirroring of the rest of the country. Hispanics make up 17 percent of the U.S. population, but comprise only 3.4 percent of Ohioans.
The state’s near alignment with national demographics has made it the preferred market for corporations looking to test the consumers’ responses and willingness to purchase newly developed products. Republicans here say the same can be applied to politics. Find a candidate and a message that can win over Ohioans, and you’ve likely found a candidate and a message that can win across the U.S. Do the opposite, and it’s Romney losing handily to Obama all over again.
“Ohio is really good cross section of America; it’s a valid testing ground,” said John Eklund, a Republican state senator who represents a legislative district situated just east of Cleveland.
The target Democrats and Republicans plaster on Ohio every two years has placed a premium on technologically advanced voter turnout operations and sophisticated advertising.
President George W. Bush won re-election here in 2004 because his get-out-the-vote machine was more effective than that of Democratic nominee John Kerry. The Bush campaign identified and turned low propensity voters who were highly likely to vote Republican if only they’d show up at the polls. Obama’s strategic operation and Democratic turnout advantage over the GOP four years later was even more pronounced. Similar advantages over Romney helped him defy the odds of high unemployment and minimal support from independents.
For Republicans in 2016, the challenge is to drum up as much of the vote as they can in southwest Ohio and hold down their losses in Cleveland, while simultaneously motivating rural conservatives and less partisan swing voters. It’s hardly a secret sauce, and after all these years the voters here are used to the attention. Their overhauled voter turnout machine, rolled out in the 2014 elections and refined again this year, will also have to deliver.
Grabbing Ohioans before they tune out, especially once the political season is underway and the airwaves become wall-to-wall campaigns, requires some creativity and an outside-the-box approach. That means no cookie cutter ads that have been popular with national party committees who have to advertise in sometimes hundreds of media markets; that means no stock video footage with cartoonish pictures of the politician they’re criticizing.
“Ohio general election voters are somewhat sophisticated if for no other reason than they’re bombarded with candidates and ads every four years,” said Al Weaver, a Republican consultant based in Columbus. “So what works in non-battleground state wouldn’t work so well in Ohio.”
Disclosure: The author’s wife works as an adviser to Scott Walker.
