About a week after President Joe Biden stepped aside and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to run for president as the Democratic Party’s nominee, her campaign announced 25 events in 10 states. Ohio was not on the list. That’s a clear sign that Harris’ team expects Donald Trump to win the state, as he did in 2020 and 2016. Various polls at that time showed Trump with around a 10-point lead.
But the same polls were showing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, leading Republican challenger Bernie Moreno, who’s endorsed by Trump, by 4 to 5 points.
The term “red state” — meaning reliably Republican — is most often used in the context of presidential races. But that’s the view from 35,000 feet. On the ground, it’s more complicated.
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What does Ohio voter affiliation data show?
Ohio does not require people to choose a party affiliation when registering to vote. Instead, the Ohio Secretary of State, who’s in charge of elections, tallies affiliation data after the fact, mostly from vote totals from primary elections over the previous two years. (This data is anonymous. No one in state or county government can see your votes.)
According to figures released in May, there are:
• 817,063 Democratic voters
• 1,508,641 Republican voters
But both of those totals are dwarfed by the number of “unaffiliated” voters, people who did not vote in a Democratic or Republican primary in the previous two elections: 5,734,850. Were they unhappy with the choices in the primaries? Were they just not paying attention to politics at the time? (Ohio’s primary election is held in March.) It’s hard to say.
In 2021, there were even more unaffiliated voters (6,196,547), and Democrats outnumbered Republicans (947,027 to 836,080).
But in both years, the numbers were influenced by the parties themselves. In 2020, Democrats had a hotly contested primary, which Biden eventually won, and Trump was essentially unopposed. In 2024, that was reversed.
But nothing shows the complexity of Ohio voters’ views better than ballot initiatives.
When issues are on the ballot
In Ohio, citizens can bypass the state legislature and give all voters the chance to amend the state constitution or create or repeal a law. These are commonly called ballot initiatives. It’s a complicated process, and in 2023 Republicans tried to make it even harder, apparently because they knew that when issues are on the ballot instead of candidates, voters are a lot less reliably “red.”
And sure enough, later that year, Ohio voters passed two ballot measures — a constitutional amendment ensuring reproductive rights, including abortion, and a new law legalizing recreational marijuana use — that were strongly opposed by the entire Ohio Republican Party and many of its allies.
Those outcomes nearly matched the results of a 2022 survey of Ohio voters conducted by the Baldwin Wallace University Community Research Institute. The results of that survey showed that voters are not in lockstep with the Republicans who win most statewide races and control the legislature.
Among the findings:
• Abortion: 59% of voters said they would amend Ohio’s constitution to make access to abortion a fundamental right. (And they did.)
• Recreational marijuana: 58% believed recreational use of marijuana should be legalized. (Did that too.)
• Gun control: Majorities of all demographic groups, including conservatives and gun owners, supported additional restrictions on guns, including background checks.
• Teaching racism and sexual orientation: Three-quarters of Ohioans surveyed supported teaching both the history and impact of racism to public school students, while 57% supported teaching middle and high schoolers about sexual orientation.
• Climate change: A majority of respondents supported steps to mitigate the impact of climate change.
🗳️For more on this year’s November election, visit our Election Signals 2024 page.
Republicans still dominate state government
“At the end of Gov. DeWine’s term [in 2027], Republicans will have held the governorship for 32 of 36 years” and other statewide elected offices for similar periods, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the politics newsletter Sabato’s Crystal Ball and author of “The Bellwether,” a book on Ohio’s historical role in presidential elections.
And in the Ohio House of Representatives and Ohio Senate, where the races are not statewide but by district, Republicans hold supermajorities (68% of the seats in the House and 78% in the Senate).
Kondik said he believes Republicans would still hold majorities if they didn’t also control the process of drawing district boundaries, but smaller ones. And, he added, “Perhaps Democrats could win a majority in the legislature with a nonpartisan map and a big wave” of Democratic voter turnout, as in 2006 and 2018.
What’s a “nonpartisan map”? That’s at the heart of the next constitutional amendment that Ohioans will vote on.
The Citizens Not Politicians amendment is intended to end gerrymandering, the old practice of drawing political district boundaries in ways that benefit one party over another. Both parties have used gerrymandering to their own advantage at different times and in different states. In Ohio today, it’s the Republicans who benefit.
You can read more about gerrymandering and the proposed amendment in this Signal Cleveland explainer.
Governor DeWine recently announced his opposition to the amendment. But Fair Districts Ohio, the organization behind the amendment, gathered about 120,000 more signatures than were needed, and in more counties, to get the measure on the ballot. And if the amendment passes, it won’t just be another example of Ohio voters defying the party that they keep sending back to office, but also taking away some of its power.
