the Center found that the two campaigns spent more than 99 percent of their respective television campaign advertising dollars in just 10 states from mid-April (when Romney effectively clinched the GOP nomination) through the November general election: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Few would be surprised if these 10 states again ate up nearly all the resources spent by the two major-party nominees in the 2016 presidential election.
If campaigns were run 100 years ago the way they are today, with the same technology, extensive candidate travel, and micro-targeting of television ads, a similar dynamic would have prevailed. A small number of electoral votes—36 percent of them in 1916 in 21 states, versus 31 percent of them in 14 states in 2012—would have been in play (with eventual presidential deviations less than five points), and the campaigns in both eras would have been wise to focus only on these states.
The difference would have been in the states targeted. Only five of them appear on both 1916’s list of states closest to the national average and 2012’s: Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, and Ohio. In both eras, Ohio was by far the most valuable prize among these states: in 1916, it had double (24) the number of electoral votes of its next closest rival among this group, Minnesota (12), and in 2012 it had nearly double the electoral votes (18) of the second-ranked state among this group, again Minnesota (10). Additionally, while Minnesota, New Mexico, and Oregon are included here as competitive, they really weren’t in 2012: New Mexico and Oregon did not see a single dollar of ad spending and neither presidential ticket visited them, while Minnesota saw only a pittance of ad spending and a single visit, by Ryan.
Ohio spent the entire post–Civil War era—and, really, before that as well—voting at or near the national political midpoint. Sometimes it had a lot of company in this position, particularly in the middle of the 20th century. Other times—including the elections in the 21st century held while many states were moving further toward the Democrats or the Republicans—it was one of relatively few prizes plausibly available to both parties in a competitive national election. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that suggests that Ohio has been the best bellwether state in presidential elections for a century or more.
TWO
Ohio at the Head of the Flock
In the late stages of the 2012 presidential campaign, a disconnect emerged between national horse-race polls for the presidential race and those at the state level. Republican Mitt Romney thoroughly outperformed Democratic incumbent Barack Obama in the first presidential debate, held about a month before Election Day, and surged in national polls. Romney took a small lead immediately after the debate and then held within one point of Obama in averages of national polls for the remainder of the campaign, according to the widely cited RealClearPolitics website’s average of national polls.1 The Gallup daily presidential tracker, posted promptly at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time every day and immediately dissected by political journalists and junkies, proved particularly favorable for Romney, showing him with leads in the mid-single digits for much of the rest of the campaign before narrowing to a final prediction of Romney 49 percent, Obama 48 percent.2
Yet, while the national polls were showing a race that was effectively a tie, the state-level polls in one key state were telling a different story. In Ohio, Obama consistently led Romney for the entirety of the race in nearly every poll, including those conducted at the high-water mark for Romney after the first debate. Of 85 polls conducted in the state during the 2012 calendar year, just nine ever showed Romney leading. Eight showed ties, and Obama led the rest.3
The incumbent’s lead in the state proved durable, and the polls almost exactly nailed his victory margin. The final RealClearPolitics average showed Obama with a lead of 2.9 percentage points, and he would win the state by three points. The accurate Ohio polling was an exception in 2012, though: Obama led on Election Day in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls by less than a point while winning nationally by four, and the averaged polls of many of the other swing states generally undershot Obama’s final margin by roughly three to four points. There was no way to know before the election with certainty that Ohio’s polls would be correct and so many of the national and other state polls would be off. But in hindsight they were a strong sign Obama would win not just Ohio, but nationally as well. Overall, the winning presidential candidate has carried Ohio in 28 of the last 30 elections, so the Ohio polling suggested an Obama win.
While Obama could have won the White House without Ohio, the president’s victory kept alive a dubious streak for Republicans: they still have never won a presidential election without Ohio, going back to the party’s first presidential election in 1856, when Republican John C. Frémont captured the state but lost the election to Democrat James Buchanan.
Not only has no Republican ever won the White House without carrying Ohio, but the state is typically more Republican than the nation as a whole. In the last 30 elections, the Democratic presidential candidate has outperformed his national average in Ohio only six times. This alone should have suggested that either the national polls showing what was basically a tied race, or the Ohio polls indicating a small lead for Obama, were wrong in 2012: it would be historically out of step for a Democrat to significantly outperform his national performance in the Buckeye State.
So the Ohio polling suggested not just an Obama win, but a national victory of more than three points—but not by much more than three points. Ohio’s two-party presidential vote has not deviated more than three points from the national average in any election since the conclusion of World War II. Thus, the Ohio polling would have suggested an Obama win of more than three points but less than six points. Obama won by four.
The long historical record suggests that, with just a few exceptions, Ohio has long mimicked the national voting, and that it has done so better than any other state. The case for Ohio as the nation’s top bellwether state is therefore threefold:
1. Ohio has the best record of any state in voting for the winning candidate.
2. Ohio’s results most often reflect the national voting average.
3. Ohio has provided the decisive electoral votes to the winning candidate more times than any other state.
WINS AND LOSSES
This book focuses on the presidential elections from 1896 through 2012. Why begin there?
The 1896 election began a 30-cycle span, running through 2012, during which Ohio voted for the winning presidential candidate in all but two elections: 1944 and 1960. By percentage, that’s the best record for any state over those 116 years. While Ohio’s voting consistently came close to the national average prior to 1896, a logical place to begin this study is at the beginning of its long and rarely broken streak of voting for presidential winners.
Beyond that, historical and ideological reasons urge starting in 1896. Political scientists have long regarded 1896 as a seminal, realigning election.4 It ended a post-Reconstruction electoral era, from 1876 to 1892, of extremely close presidential elections that featured not one, but two, Electoral College “misfires,” where the winner of the national popular vote lost the presidency (Democrats Samuel Tilden in 1876 and incumbent President Grover Cleveland in 1888). Ohio Republican William McKinley’s more than four-point margin in 1896 was the biggest victory since Republican Ulysses S. Grant’s 12-point reelection triumph in 1872.
More important, 1896 represented an ideological shift in one of the parties. Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan pushed for the free coinage of silver, co-opting the agrarian Populist movement that had supported James Weaver’s third-party candidacy in 1892, when Weaver received close to 9 percent of the vote and carried five states. Bryan’s silver stance
