Cuyahoga County has long been important to Democrats statewide. At a Sherrod Brown rally featuring Bill Clinton before Election Day, U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown put it this way: “President Clinton has always known the path to victory runs through Cuyahoga County.”
That’s not as true today as it was in 1996, the last time Bill Clinton was on the ballot. Cuyahoga is losing vote share to Franklin County, and Ohio is turning more deeply Republican.
But Cuyahoga County still has a story to tell about the country’s political preferences have changed. Let’s take a look.
Cuyahoga County, realigned
Last week’s presidential election results showed how much has changed politically in Ohio and Cuyahoga County since the state helped Barack Obama win a second term in 2012.
The county that includes Cleveland may still be one of Ohio’s most Democratic. But there’s been a political realignment here – one that illustrates shifting party loyalties nationwide.
Take a look at the map below. Note, it doesn’t tell you who won each city. It shows Kamala Harris’ performance compared to Obama’s. The more blue a city, the better Harris did over Obama. Vice versa for red-shaded cities.
Back in 2012, Obama won Ohio with help from about 421,000 votes in Cuyahoga County. (That was his vote total on Election Night, before provisional ballots and late-arriving absentees brought his final tally up to 447,000. I’m using the initial, unofficial numbers for 2012 in order to have an apples-to-apples comparison with what we know so far about 2024.)
In the suburbs, Mitt Romney won then-Republican-leaning places such as Bay Village and Gates Mills. Obama carried the middle-class, majority white and vote-rich city of Parma, as just one example.
A dozen years later, the electoral map has flipped. Harris tipped Gates Mills her way and won almost 60% in Bay. But she lost Parma to Donald Trump, even though Democrat Sherrod Brown won just above 50% in the city in the U.S. Senate contest. Countywide, Harris won around 55,000 fewer votes than Obama did.
What changed? Plenty of people have plenty of opinions, particularly in this post-election time of soul-searching and finger-pointing. Here’s one factor to consider: higher education.
Trump’s Republican Party has increasingly been doing better than Democrats among voters without college degrees, particularly white voters. Trump won 55% of non-college voters this year, improving on his 2020 performance, according to the Associated Press’ VoteCast survey.
In Bay Village, 67% of people 25 and older have at least a bachelor’s degree, 2022 census estimates say. In Parma, that number is around 26%. That isn’t a knock on people without college diplomas – or on those with them, for that matter. As a Democratic strategist put it to CNN, education is now the “fault line in American politics” – telling us something about who feels left behind.
Not picking on these two suburbs here, either. I’ve been following Bay Village’s and Parma’s political transitions for years because they’re local examples of a national trend.
What about Cleveland?
In Cleveland proper, Obama beat Romney 88% to 11%. Harris also won the city overwhelmingly. But less so. She beat Trump here 77% to 21%.
There are a couple of things going on here. For one, Trump won around 6,900 more votes in Cleveland than Romney did in the unofficial tallies.
Second, Harris won around 91,000 votes to Obama’s 141,000 in the initial, unofficial count. In the last dozen years, Cleveland lost roughly 50,000 Democratic votes. Some number of people – I don’t know how many – may have flipped to Trump. Many others either moved away, died or just didn’t vote. Cleveland’s population and registered voter base have been declining, after all.
If you’re a Clevelander, you probably want to know whether Trump’s gains were in East Side wards or West Side ones. A detailed comparison is difficult, because Cleveland redrew its political boundaries and cut two wards in 2014.
Here are some numbers that help answer the question. This year, Trump performed better on the West Side than on the East Side. He won 42% in Ward 13, which covers part of the largely white Old Brooklyn neighborhood. In Ward 1, the majority-Black East Side neighborhood of Lee-Harvard, he won just 5.5%.
That’s a better performance on both counts than Romney’s in the old versions of Wards 13 and 1. The boundaries weren’t exactly the same then as they are now. But they’re pretty close, so they make for good comparisons.
Romney won 31% in the old Ward 13, or about 2,700 votes. In the new Ward 13, Trump won 3,500 votes this year. In the old Ward 1, Romney won just 0.7%, or 95 votes. But in the new Ward 1, Trump won 458 votes.
So we’re not talking about Trump winning Cleveland wards outright. He’s just losing by less than Romney did.
That’s a lot of numbers and ideas to digest, I know. So here’s my takeaway – one without any math.
A lot of things can be true about Cleveland at once. The city is predominantly Democratic and strongly backed Harris. But it’s also a place where Democratic vote totals are declining, while Republicans have made some gains – helped along the way by population decline.
Signal Cleveland’s Director of Research + Impact April Urban contributed to this analysis.
