Political-junkie site tracks Columbus’ power
The center of Ohio has become center stage in American presidential elections.
So says the creator of ohioelectionresults.com, a free website that is the most comprehensive compilation of Ohio election data ever assembled, according to political junkies who have previewed it.
“Central Ohio is the nation’s new presidential battleground,” said Mike Dawson, who officially launched the new site yesterday.
The 20-county Columbus media market, overwhelmingly Republican since the early 20th century, gradually has become a key swing area and will be a focal point of the 2016 presidential race, Dawson said.
During the past four decades, the Columbus region has gained strength, going from 15 percent of the statewide vote in 1976 to 20 percent in 2012. That’s been good news for Democrats.
In the five presidential elections between 1976 and 1992, GOP nominees won an average of 20 percent more votes than Democrats. But in the five elections between 1996 and 2012, that margin narrowed to 2.4 percent.
The region went from handing Republican Ronald Reagan a 36-point win in 1984 to supporting Democrat Barack Obama by 2.8 points and 4 points in 2008 and 2012, respectively.
The emergence of the Columbus area as an electoral juggernaut in must-win Ohio is evident amid the trove of statistics, graphs and maps on Dawson’s website that chronicle elections for president, governor, U.S. Senate and other statewide races back to 1855, the advent of the current two-party system in Ohio.
Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted called the site a “rich public resource,” even if its constituency mainly will be campaign consultants, academics and political reporters.
Dawson, 57, said he has spent more than a thousand hours over 25 years compiling Ohio election data, his interest first piqued when he looked in vain for statistics while press secretary for Gov. George V. Voinovich in the 1990s.
Over the years, Dawson painstakingly keyed data from Ohio elections into spreadsheets that he could sort in all manner of ways. In the process, he found errors in the official statistics compiled by secretaries of state, including in 1968 when presidential election results for Richard M. Nixon and George Wallace from five counties were incorrectly transposed.
Husted said Dawson’s “user-friendly” reporting of election results inspired him to make changes to his office’s official site.
“If you look at our own system, we improved it dramatically because of the advice we got back from Mike about how to make our data more usable,” Husted said.
Joe Hallett is retired senior editor of The Dispatch.