<font size="5"><center>
Why Ohio is still up for grabs</font size></center>
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By James O'Toole
Sunday, September 21, 2008
VIENNA, Ohio -- Election night, 1960. The Buckeye State is slipping into the column of Richard M. Nixon. John F. Kennedy, watching the returns in his Hyannis Port home, displayed a hand and forearm scratched and swollen from countless handshakes.
"Ohio did this to me,'' he said.
The episode, recounted in Theodore H. White seminal campaign chronicle, "The Making of the President 1960," would not be the last time that Ohio's voters frustrated a Democratic candidate.
Four years ago, Sen. John F. Kerry rolled up big early margins in Cuyahoga County and Franklin County, the counties that surround Cleveland and Columbus, and down through the Mahoning Valley, the product of one of the most effective turnout operations in the state's history.
"If you had told me the day before the election the kind of margins Kerry would get [in Democratic areas], I'd have been celebrating," said Jim Ruvalo, a veteran Democratic consultant and former chairman of the state Democratic Party.
But President Bush benefited from an even more potent get-out-the-vote drive elsewhere in the state. After a long night of counting, the Republican ticket was ahead, 51 percent to 49 percent, enough to deliver the state, the nation and a delayed concession speech from Mr. Kerry.
A state that has been part of the electoral vote majority for every successful Republican presidential candidate would seem ripe for a Democratic candidate this year. Its unemployment rate is 7.2 percent, well ahead of the national rate of 5.5 percent after years of losses of manufacturing jobs. The faltering economy has forced the new Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, to cut nearly $1.3 billion from the state's budget this year. Mr. Strickland led a political resurgence for his party in 2006, as Democrats captured the governor's mansion, a Senate seat and a U.S. House seat.
But Ohio is again a bellwether for the nation as the site of an extraordinarily close battle between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, one that has the potential to again determine the next occupant of the White House. Reflecting that status, both sides have poured money and candidate time into the state.
And in their no-stone-unturned competition, both hope to prevail in part by poaching votes from regions within the state that normally favor the other party.
The Mahoning Valley is one of them. With his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, Mr. McCain appeared here again this week, lavishing his attention on a working class corner of the state that's normally a reliable cache of Democratic votes.
"He's been here as many times as he's been any place in Ohio,'' former Sen. Mike DeWine, Mr. McCain's Ohio chairman, said over the din of workmen clearing away the debris from his candidate's rally Tuesday. "John McCain believes he is competitive in the Mahoning Valley. I don't think there's any place else he's been three times.''
Counting this week's appearance, Mr. McCain has spent all or part of 18 campaign days in Ohio since securing his nomination. According to his campaign, Sen. Barack Obama has visited the state eight times since he locked up the Democratic spot.
The imbalance is a little deceptive, however, since Mr. Obama campaigned in the state extensively before its March 3 primary. But it's clear that few states have had so much collective attention from the campaigns. On Thursday, hot on the heels of the opposing ticket, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in Youngstown, at the end of a cross-state bus tour.
<font size="4">
Edge in polls to McCain</font size>
In the weeks since their nominating conventions wrapped up, the two campaigns have spent roughly $800,000 each on Ohio television, according to the nonpartisan Wisconsin Advertising Project. For the McCain campaign, that spending trailed only Pennsylvania and Florida. In the same period, Mr. Obama spent more only in Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan and Virginia.
The result, according to a variety of polls, is a state very much up for grabs less than seven weeks before the election. Here, as nationally, the McCain-Palin team bounced up in the days following the Republican National Convention. But in recent days, the numbers moved back to near even.
Just last week, a CNN/Time survey put Mr. Obama ahead, 49 percent to 47 percent. A Fox/Rasmussen survey had it the other way, 48 percent for Mr. McCain and 45 percent for the Democrat. The common denominator in almost every one of the slew of surveys this past week was that the difference between the candidates was within the polls' margins of error.
Aggregating the results, the web site Pollster.com saw a McCain lead of 47 percent to 44.6 percent. Realclearpolitics.com sees a similarly close race, with Mr. McCain up in its polling average by 1.2 percent.
Mr. Strickland, who represented a congressional district that covers part of the Mahoning Valley and the state's traditional manufacturing communities has expressed incredulity that Mr. McCain would even seek votes in the area. These communities, he argues, were battered by the trade policies of the Bush administration.
Four years ago, Mr. Kerry carried Trumbull and Mahoning counties, the sites of the unusual attention from the McCain campaign, with more than 60 percent of the vote.
<font size="4">
The race issue</font size>
But the governor is also among a handful of Ohio Democrats who have spoken out in recent weeks expressing concern that some traditional Democrats in these and other Ohio comminutes will balk at voting for Mr. Obama because of his race.
In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer earlier this summer, the governor referred to the racial issue as "the elephant in the room,'' that many voters and commentators would rather ignore.
"There are good people, who won't vote for Obama, because he's a black man,'' Mr. Strickland said at another point.
"Anyone who doesn't think race is an issue has their head in the sand," said Mr. Ruvalo. "Is it an issue that will be determinative? I don't know."
Mr. DeWine eagerly anticipates McCain making inroads with working-class white voters, but he dismisses the suggestion that race is the motivator.
"I think people are mistaking the race issue for other things,'' he said. "Obama is too much like John Kerry. People have a hard time relating to him. And like Kerry, he has a hard time relating to the average person, the average guy."
Of his own candidate, the former Republican senator said, "I think on some gut issues, he's much closer to where people are in the Mahoning Valley, someone along the Ohio River, someone in Parma. I think on some gut issues, he's much closer to where people are ... guns, abortion, marriage, the things commonly referred to as the social issues. I think you'll find that's true for much of the state."
Every Ohio survey, however, finds the economy as the prime issue in the race. David Leland, another former state Democratic chairman, sees that as the key to an Obama victory.
"Ohio is ground zero in terms of what's been happening to the national economy," he said. "[Mr. Obama] needs to connect with the Mahoning Valley, with southern Ohio ... on an economic message. But you do have people who have never voted for an African-American. ... That's a challenge not just for Barack but for every Ohio Democrat.''
Mr. Obama has one key asset that neither Mr. Kerry nor former Vice President Al Gore enjoyed in their close but unsuccessful attempts to capture the state's 20 electoral votes. That's the support of an incumbent governor.
Pennsylvania shares more than a border with Ohio. Among their demographic similarities are their ethnic mix, with German the most common ancestry followed by Irish. African-Americans represent about 11 percent of Ohio, just about 10 percent of Pennsylvanians. Their urban-rural proportions are an almost identical -- 77 percent to 23 percent. But their political characters are different. Republicans have traditionally been stronger in Ohio compared to the more seesaw relationship of the parties in Pennsylvania.
<font size="4">
Democratic surge</font size>
The recent past has been tough on Ohio Republicans. The economy, opposition to the Iraq War and financial scandals battered the GOP prior to the 2006 elections, which brought major gains to the state's Democrats, Mr. Strickland's landslide victory for governor chief among them.
Mr. Strickland was firmly in the camp of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primary that she won handily over Mr. Obama. By then, Mr. McCain had already wrapped up the GOP race.
Now, Mr. Strickland is lined up behind Mr. Obama. His former campaign manager, Aaron Pickrell, directs the Obama effort in the state, one that Democrats describe as potentially the most robust ground game in the state's history. Mr. Pickrell was also the political director of former Sen. John Edwards's Iowa organization, an effort that produced a strong second-place showing against Mr. Obama.
Throughout the primaries, the Obama campaign cultivated a reputation for their grass-roots prowess in states across the country. In Ohio, that's melded to the homegrown apparatus that produced for Mr. Strickland.
"I think it has an impact that we finally have a Democratic governor,'' Mr. Ruvalo said. "He has an organization; he knows how to win. We haven't had that in 16 years.''
The operation includes a network of offices across the state.
Pointing to the unprecedented turnout that the Bush campaign produced in the state's rural and exurban communities, Mr. Ruvalo said, "Democrats have learned that we can't concentrate on the same eight or 12 counties. The Obama campaign has opened offices everywhere, not that you are going to win everywhere, but you can get votes everywhere; you can hold down the margins."
Mr. DeWine dismisses the suggestion that the GOP will be out-organized in the state.
"What is true is that they have a more extensive paid organization,'' he said. "I think we have the better organization, and we've done it before. We're building on what we did four years ago and eight years ago."
The Republican campaign, in Ohio and Pennsylvania, is quarterbacked by Jon Seaton. A veteran of the White House office of political affairs, Mr. Seaton was national field director of the McCain campaign last year before the financial implosion that nearly ended the senator's White House bid. He went on to head Mr. McCain's Iowa operation before signing on as regional campaign manager for Ohio and Pennsylvania.
"We had a late start," Mr. DeWine acknowledged, "but it's kicked in hard in the last month. ... I can tell you we're ahead in phone calls from where we were four years ago. They may have more paid people but we have more Ohioans on the ground."
Post-Gazette politics editor James O'Toole can be reached at
jotoole@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1562.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08265/913867-470.stm
