Did the Ohio primaries tell us anything useful about what will happen in the pivotal swing state in November? John Kasich hopes so.
“Ohio’s status as the national bellwether is not a reputation. It’s a fact,” his campaign website declares. “No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. Ever.”
It’s a convenient argument for Kasich to make. He’s the state’s Republican governor, in his second term. Ohio is the only state he has won in 29 GOP nominating contests so far. His ability to win it in the general is central to his case for becoming the nominee. That might be more persuasive to party insiders than voters, but as it happens his only path to the top of the ticket is through a contested convention.
But Ohio’s status isn’t a fluke. Its 18 electoral votes make it one of the bigger prizes among closely divided states, and its demographics match the rest of the country well.
If winning Ohio is a feather in Kasich’s cap, it’s a check mark against Republican front-runner Donald Trump. He lost the primary by a somewhat bigger margin than the polls predicted, as anti-Trump Republicans coalesced around Kasich to stop him.
Trump has argued that his presence on the ballot is boosting Republican turnout. “We have something happening that actually makes the Republican Party probably the biggest political story in the world,” he declared after winning Florida. “Millions of people are coming in to vote.”
In Ohio, however, the crossover vote mainly went against Trump. More than one in four Republican ballots were cast by self-described independents, according to the exit polls, and they broke for Kasich 44-35 percent.
The Democratic vote for Kasich was even more lopsided, as he beat the businessman 56 -37 percent. No one else was even in the mid-single digits. Supporters of both Democratic presidential candidates worried the crossover vote would hurt their candidates, but only 8 percent of GOP primary voters described themselves as Democrats.
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, won Ohio. Some of her backers were concerned that after Bernie Sanders beat her in Michigan, the state might be in play. Instead she won by nearly 14 points. A big difference is that Clinton actually won the white vote with 53 percent while beating Sanders 71-28 percent among blacks.
In Michigan, Sanders carried 56 percent of whites and held Clinton below 70 percent among black voters, one of her lower showings with African-Americans this year. The minority vote has been the key for Clinton turning things around since losing the nomination to Barack Obama in 2008.
If it’s Trump versus Clinton in Ohio in November, one thing to watch will be how the billionaire’s campaign themes play with working-class white voters in the state. Trump ran hard on immigration and trade in the primary. He can be expected to do so again if he is running against Clinton.
“The Kasich campaign is running some nice ads touting his record about turning an $8 billion deficit into a surplus,” former Cuyahoga County GOP chairman Jim Trakas told the Washington Examiner before the primary. “Trump is running an ad featuring an African-American father whose son was killed by an illegal alien and pledging to stop it.”
Trump won the working-class white vote in the primary, but it wasn’t enough to win the state. Would his message work better against Clinton in the general?
He had better hope so. The winner of Ohio has gone on to the White House in every election dating back to 1964.
