Shifts in Ohio’s population and perspectives
Thomas Suddes
This much Ohioans know: New Census estimates suggest that while Franklin County (Columbus) is growing, Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Montgomery (Dayton) counties are losing people.
At first glance, that suggests a couple Democratic fortresses are disarming, while Central Ohio, much of it Republican, is, politically speaking, building an empire. So: A closely divided state is becoming more Republican? Not necessarily.
What’s in play isn’t so much Democrat versus Republican — for instance, Franklin County (Columbus) is now, in practice, Democratic — as it is older voters vs. younger voters, and what each group expects of government. Demographically, younger Ohioans subsidize older Ohioans.
Industrialization and manufacturing once grew Cuyahoga and Montgomery. Now, Franklin is booming based on services, including the biggest service business of all — government. As people from Northeast Ohio or the Miami Valley know, the Bank Party — high finance and its pals, some Republican, some Democratic — has shipped factories overseas. But as Central Ohioans know, government is a growth industry, despite prattling by both parties about “downsizing” (oops, “rightsizing”) government. Manufacturing’s decline cut membership in industrial unions. True, public employee unions can muster some clout. Good example: The 2011 repeal by Ohio voters of Senate Bill 5, a GOP bid to fetter public employee unions. (Interesting counter-factual musing: If Republicans had exempted police and fire unions from SB 5, would voters have repealed it?) Still, union power isn’t what it was. That’s a net negative for Ohio Democrats. That also dried up the social solidarity that prevailed in Ohio’s United Auto Worker and United Steelworker neighborhoods, and in southeast Ohio’s United Mine Worker towns.
Regional shifts in jobmix and regional clout started in the 1960s. One of the shrewdest legislators ever in the General Assembly, a downstate Republican, said Ohio’s income tax (passed in 1971 with GOP votes) was inevitable. “Cleveland could no longer pay for the rest of the state.” That is, Ohio (through its corporate franchise tax, passed in 1902) no longer could squeeze enough from, say, profit-challenged Republic Steel, and Youngstown’s Sheet & Tube, to balance Ohio’s books. True, passage of the income tax fueled a conservative furor, a plus for Republicans — in theory. But voters have never repealed the tax, despite constant agitation.
On the social front, Ohio was once at the heart of Prohibition. Social-issue conservatives may like to think that because Ohio voters banned same-sex marriage in 2004, political assaults on conduct (abortion, sexuality) can win Buckeye State elections. But voting is a lagging indicator. For instance, the reality network A&E has just debuted “Neighbors with Benefits,” a series on mate-swapping. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported it was filmed in Warren County’s Hamilton Twp. Warren County, northeast of Cincinnati, was strong for Mitt Romney (69 percent of its vote); Hamilton Twp. was stronger: 70 percent. Talk and walk don’t match. And consider Columbus. It long had (and enforced) an ordinance that made cross-dressing a crime. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional in the 1970s. Now, as The Columbus Dispatch reported the other day, Columbus ranks 15th among America’s biggest cities in its proportion of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender residents.
These shifts in Ohio’s population and perspectives don’t give either party automatic advantages — not if same old, same old, is what a party wants and how it campaigns. Success is managing change, not denouncing it: The politics of practicality, the art of the deal. Ohio has fewer miners and steelworkers, more programmers and nurses, and its population is drifting down I-71. But that can’t change the fact that Ohio’s most successful pols are, and will be, brokers — not theorists.