Purple fades from Ohio, US vote maps

David Wasserman, U.S. House editor for the Cook Political Report, made a splash last week with a geopolitical analysis published on fivethirtyeight. com titled “Purple America Has All But Disappeared.”

Using presidential-election results from the nation’s counties — which don’t change by gerrymandering or annexation — Wasserman measured three factors: the number of counties where the top vote-getter’s percentagepoint margin was a single digit (less than 10 points), the number where one candidate won at least 60 percent of the vote, and the total number of “extreme landslide” counties, where the winning candidate prevailed by 50 or more points.

He found that of the nation’s 3,113 counties (or county equivalents), only 303 were decided by a single digit last year. In 1992, 1,096 counties’ results were closer than 10 points.

Sixty-one percent of counties gave either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump at least 60 percent of the major-party vote in November. That’s a jump from 50 percent of such counties in 2012 and 39 percent in 1992.

Over the same 24 years, the number of “extreme landslide” counties — those backing an Oval Office hopeful by a margin of at least 50 points — zoomed from 93 to 1,196, or more than a third of all counties in the U.S.

What about Ohio, the nation’s leading presidential bellwether? Much the same trend is occurring here.

In 1992, 37 of Ohio’s 88 counties were decided by single digits; no candidate took at least 60 percent in a county; and 16 counties had margins topping 50 points. (The 1992 race was a bit different than most because Ross Perot took so many votes from the majorparty candidates: Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.)

But by the 2012 matchup between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the number of counties where the difference was in single digits had dropped to 26, and 31 counties gave at least 60 percent to a candidate. Just three counties were decided by at least 50 points.

In 2016, Ohio was down to a mere eight single-digit counties; 65 were won by a candidate receiving at least 60 percent of the vote (in 21 of those, the winner garnered at least 70 percent); and 15 had winning margins of 50 or more points.

Teaching Trump

This comforting report comes from the University of Akron’s Matt Akers, director of government relations and assistant director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics:

“The good news is we have not had to call the police once,” he said Friday.

“We’ve had no fistfights, we’ve had no major disruptions in the class. We’ve had some minor heated exchanges.”

What kind of a class is this guy teaching? One of the more unusual offerings in the country: “Trump’s Triumph.”

Passions often come out in the weekly 2 ½ -hour gathering of 50 people — a blend of undergraduate and graduate students, plus community members up to age 80 who are auditing the course — but so far, the students have demonstrated they can disagree vigorously but come to appreciate another viewpoint.

Among the students, Republicans have a majority, by a ratio of almost 2-to-1, and “some of the older retirees are more liberal than some of the college students,” Akers said.

By studying historical perspectives such as Ohio Sen. Bob Taft’s opposition to NATO early in the Cold War or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war with the “disloyal” Chicago Tribune, students get a better understanding of some of Trump’s behavior, Akers said.

“It’s helped to calm people down a little bit,” he said. “They realize something like this has happened before, and not every day is the apocalypse.”