Ohio, what’s the matter? Perception trumps reality

For many years, Ohio has been seen as a bellwether state: With rare exceptions, whoever won Ohio in a presidential election won the nation as a whole. But in 2020, Donald Trump won Ohio by about 8 points even as Joe Biden led the national popular vote by more than 4 points and, of course, won the Electoral College vote.

Then Ohio’s 2022 Senate election was won by JD Vance, who has staked out a hard-line ideological position that may be more thoroughly MAGA than that of Trump himself. And in Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary, Trump’s endorsement was enough to propel Bernie Moreno, a former car dealer who has never held elected office, to victory over the preferred candidates of the state’s relatively moderate Republican establishment.

So I’ve been trying to understand what happened to Ohio, and what it can teach us about America’s future. My short answer is that the United States of America has become the Disconnected States of America, on several levels.

Once upon a time, Ohio’s bellwether status could be explained by the fact that in some sense it looked like America. These days, no state really looks like America because the economic fortunes of different regions have diverged so drastically. And Ohio has found itself on the losing side of that divergence.

You might expect Ohio voters to support politicians whose policies would help reverse this relative decline. But there’s a striking disconnect between who voters, especially working-class white voters, perceive as being on their side and politicians’ actual policies. For that matter, there’s a striking disconnect between voters’ views of the economy and their personal experiences. It’s vibes all the way down.

OK, some facts.

One quick way to see the divergence in regional fortunes is to compare per capita income of Ohio with a relatively rich state, Massachusetts. During the boom that followed World War II, Ohio and Massachusetts were basically tied. Since around 1980, however, Ohio has been on a long relative slide; its income is now about a third less than that of Massachusetts.

A lot of this has to do with the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs. There are considerably fewer manufacturing jobs in Ohio than there used to be.

And wages for production workers in Ohio have lagged behind inflation for 20 years. That probably has a lot to do with the collapse of unions, which used to represent a quarter of Ohio’s private-sector workers, but are vanishing from the scene.

More broadly, the 21st-century economy has favored metropolitan areas with highly educated workforces; Ohio, with its relatively low share of college-educated adults, has been left behind.

So it makes sense for Ohio voters to feel disgruntled. But again, you might expect disgruntled voters to support politicians actually trying to address the state’s problems. The Biden administration certainly hoped its industrial policies, which have led to a surge in manufacturing investment, would win over more blue-collar voters. You might also have expected Democrats to get some dividend from the fact that unemployment in Ohio is now significantly lower than it was under Trump, even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. But that doesn’t seem to have happened.

What about Trump? In most ways he governed as a conventional right-wing Republican, among other things trying to reverse the success of Obamacare, which had greatly reduced the percentage of Ohioans without health insurance. Trump did, however, break with party orthodoxy by launching a trade war, with substantial tariffs on some manufactured imports.

In economic terms, the trade war failed. A new paper confirms the results of other studies finding that the Trump tariffs didn’t raise manufacturing employment. The authors go further by breaking down the regional effects and find specifically that the trade war “has not provided economic help to the U.S. heartland.”

Yet, they found, the trade war appears to have been a political success. Regions whose industries were protected by tariffs became more likely to vote for Trump and Republicans in general, even though the tariffs didn’t result in a boost to employment. This, as the authors rather discreetly note, is “consistent with expressive views of politics.” That is, in 2020, many working-class voters in Ohio and elsewhere saw Trump as being on their side even though his policies didn’t help them. And if you look at some of today’s polling, it appears that they refuse to give Biden credit for policies that actually do help workers.

I’m not making a prediction for November. Perceptions of the economy have improved, even if they’re still somewhat depressed. But it’s still disturbing to see just how disconnected views about politicians have become from what those politicians really do.