Battle for the ’burbs expected to decide 2020 presidential election – By Rick Rouan (The Columbus Dispatch) / Nov 2 2019
The path to the presidency could run through Ohio’s suburbs in 2020.
Republicans and Democrats have acknowledged that the electoral calculus is changing in Ohio, where some long-red rings around Ohio’s cities are turning blue, making suburbs the front line in the battle for Ohio’s 18 electoral votes one year from today.
This is the first story in a yearlong, monthly series on the Battle for the ’Burbs in next year’s presidential election.
Although Hillary Clinton racked up 2016 wins in affluent Franklin County suburbs where Democrats traditionally haven’t performed well, President Donald Trump dealt his own blows to suburban fortifications built up over the years by Democrats.
“A lot of the hype, especially after 2018, about the Democratic gains in suburban America are really based mostly on a trend that’s concentrated in those really big metropolitan areas,” said David Hopkins, a political science professor at Boston College.
In 2016, 19 of 114 Ohio suburbs flipped from one party to another, according to a Dispatch analysis of precinct-level election results.
Trump flipped more suburbs than Clinton, however, and significantly narrowed margins in other areas, such as the Mahoning Valley, where Democrats have relied on large spreads to cancel out the Republican advantage in the state’s rural areas.
The Dispatch crunched election results for suburban communities within or adjacent to big-city counties, selecting cities with populations over 10,000 and townships with at least 20,000 people. Trump edged Clinton by a point in those suburbs after President Barack Obama ran even with Mitt Romney in 2012.
Trump made gains in Northeast Ohio that helped offset his suburban losses in Franklin County. For instance, in Summit County, Trump flipped two of the six suburbs that were part of the analysis: Barberton and Tallmadge. Cuyahoga Falls, Norton, Stow and Green all held steady.
In 2012, Obama won both communities with 59.5% of the vote in Barberton and 51.2% in Tallmadge. When 2016 rolled around, though, Clinton lost that advantage. Trump took Barberton with 48.7% of the vote; in Tallmadge, he had 50.1%.
The suburban victories, along with with a deepening red in other areas of the state, propelled Trump to his 8-point victory that, coupled with subsequent elections, have called into question Ohio’s status as a swing state.
“I do think that in order to win the state, Democrats will now have to win this disparate group of communities. But it’s more complicated than that,” said Kyle Kondik, an Ohio native and director of communication for the University of Virginia’s Center on Politics.
Kondik pointed out that those suburban communities cast only about 28% of the votes in Ohio, so a Democratic shift there would need to be coupled with improvements elsewhere in the state for the party’s nominee to close the gap.
If either party is going to improve next year on its 2016 suburban performance, it might need to look to the voters who didn’t cast a ballot for either of their candidates. In 2012, about 21,000 suburban Ohio voters representing about 1.3% of the votes cast ballots for a third-party candidate; that jumped to more than 69,000 and 4.4% of ballots in 2016.
Ohio State University political science professor Paul Beck said the suburban story for Democrats was more significant in 2018 than in 2016. Democrats flipped several seats in the Ohio House last year, including three in suburban districts in Franklin County along with a Franklin County Senate seat.
Not just suburbs
The Ohio Democratic Party wants to appeal to suburban voters, but it also needs to hold down GOP margins in rural areas and spur big turnout in its bread-and-butter urban areas, said David Pepper, the state party chairman.
Democrats are making most of their suburban gains in affluent areas, where educated white women are a key demographic they need to target, Pepper said, but “you’re not going to win Ohio unless you have an improvement in the rural parts of our state over where Hillary Clinton did and in those blue collar suburbs as well.”
Clinton flipped six suburbs in 2016, including Hilliard, Upper Arlington and Westerville, all of which have median household incomes that are higher than the state average. Westerville entered the national spotlight in October when the Democratic National Committee brought its fourth presidential debate to Otterbein University.
Surrogates for 10 of the 12 candidates met with young elected Democrats from across the state before the debate to talk about how to win the state. The message from Ohio’s elected officials centered on winning in the suburbs, said multiple people who attended the meeting.
Important issues
“I still don’t believe that Democrats’ focus on the suburbs is going to give them the numbers they need to win statewide in a presidential [election],” said Jane Timken, chairman of the Ohio GOP. “It almost did us a favor having the Democrats in Westerville. It highlighted how extreme to the left the Democrats have gone.”
For example, Medicare For All, a policy that two candidates have adopted, doesn’t align with suburban voter preferences for keeping their private health insurance, Timken said. Trump’s message about the economy and cutting regulations will resonate much more, she said.
Presidential elections in Ohio have become more about cultural issues than the economy, said Mike Dawson, creater of ohioelectionresults.com and a former staff member for Republicans George V. Voinovich and Mike DeWine.
Republicans have been leaking votes in the suburbs for years, Dawson said, but “Trump put that on steroids.” At the same time, though, rural and medium-sized counties have grown a deeper shade of red to offset the suburban losses, his data show.
“The cultural issues that are helping Republicans and hurting Democrats in rural areas are helping Democrats and hurting Republicans in suburban Ohio,” he said.
Suburbs around larger cities are turning blue in part because the dense, diverse urban population is spreading into the outer rings of the metropolitan area, Hopkins said. Around smaller cities, the suburbs remain mostly white, he said.
“I think for Democrats to try to compete in Ohio it means that they have to appeal to this white, culturally conservative vote. That has been a challenge for Democrats in recent elections,” Hopkins said.
“It’s not enough to bank on supercharging the turnout of minority groups or cultural liberals to win a state like Ohio. You need a playbook that acknowledges the prevalence of culturally white voters.”
Crowds converge at North State and Main streets in Westerville, Ohio, before the Democratic presidential debate Oct. 15. [Maddie Schroeder/The Columbus Dispatch file photo]
