A political landscape upended by Trump
Until 2016, Ohio was the ground zero of presidential politics. Yes, there was also Florida, Ohio’s bookend in all recent elections. But the Buckeye State’s fiercely competitive environment, combined with its heartland sensibilities, often made it the nation’s preeminent political crossroads every four years.
Everyone assumed 2016 would produce another memorable struggle, this time between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But as with so much else in the campaign, Trump tossed aside the expected script, as he swept to a surprisingly easy victor. Trump won all but eight counties, the best for any Republican since Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide — and Reagan carried the state by 19 points.
Michael Dawson, an expert on Ohio election statistics, offered other examples of the breadth of Trump’s victory. The president ranked in the top 10 of best-ever Republican performances in 61 of Ohio’s 88 counties. In 38 counties, he had the best percentage of any Republican nominee dating back 10 elections.
Trump has turned the state’s Republican Party upside down, which has left Republican Gov. John Kasich almost a man without a party in his own state. Kasich lost the GOP nomination to Trump in 2016, boycotted the arena at the GOP convention in Cleveland and ever since has been a critic of the president — and a possible 2020 challenger.
The contours of Ohio’s new politics will be on national display over the coming days, beginning with the president’s Saturday visit to Cleveland.
His visit came on the eve of Tuesday’s primary elections, in which the president is more than a bit player. The ultimate answer as to how Trump has changed the politics of the state will come in 2020, if he is on the ballot. But some clues will emerge from this year’s midterm elections, with Tuesday’s primaries providing the first indicators.
Kasich, who is term-limited, will be stepping down after eight years as governor. When he leaves office, Republicans will have held the governorship for 24 of the past 28 years.
Winning governorships is essential for Democrats if they hope to rebuild their party nationally. Ohio will present a major opportunity and a major challenge for the party in 2018. The Democratic primary reflects some of the fissures and tensions inside a party that has moved left and is debating just how far left it should go.
The primary features two former elected officials. The frontrunner is Richard Cordray, who served as state attorney general and most recently led the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington. He is a Democrat at least partially in the mold of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who led the fight to create the CFPB. He is consumer oriented and a bane of Wall Street and big banks.
Though an ally of Warren on many issues, he lacks the Massachusetts senator’s energy and passion and has been tagged with running a colorless campaign. A cartoon in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Friday showed a Cordray caricature wearing a red cap that read, “Make Ohio Bland Again.”
His principal opponent is a familiar figure in the state and nationally: Dennis Kucinich, the former Cleveland mayor, former Congress member and former presidential candidate. He has long operated on the party’s left edge, and in this contest, that’s where he has planted his flag. He has support from some of those Democrats who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for president in 2016.
Two factors threaten to hold down his vote, however. First is his lack of money, which has made it difficult for him to run television ads that could expand his appeal beyond his northeast Ohio base. Second and more significant was the embarrassment of having accepted $20,000 for a speech he gave to a group that included an organization sympathetic to Syrian President Bashar Assad. Kucinich announced that he would return the money, but past links to Assad have dogged him in the campaign against Cordray.