The numbers from Ohio

If there's any state the Republicans are in trouble in this year, it's Ohio. Incumbent Republican Gov. Bob Taft's job rating has been hovering in the teens.

Taft and other Republicans have had scandal problems. Control of Ohio state government tends to oscillate between the parties: From the 1840s to the 1990s, no party held the governorship for more than eight years. Today the Republicans are in their 16th year of controlling the governorship and the legislature. Ohio is overdue to go Democratic. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland has been leading the two contenders for the Republican nomination, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and Attorney General Jim Petro, in the polls for some time. Two-term Republican U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine has been running about even in many polls with the less well-known Democratic candidate, Rep. Sherrod Brown.

Now we have more than polls to go on: Ohioans voted yesterday in the two parties' primaries. There's some bad news in the results for Republicans, but not as bad as I expected. Ohio does not have party registration, so every voter gets to choose which party's primary he will vote in. The aggregate of those choices has some relevance to the general election result. It can't be considered anything like a precise forecast, of course. But one of the hypotheses strategists of both parties have been considering is that Republican turnout may be down this year relative to Democratic turnout. Republicans are downcast, the theory goes, angry at their party's high spending and their president's stand on immigration; and in Ohio that goes double, for Ohio's Republican state government has raised taxes. Democrats, on the other hand, the theory goes, are fired up, angry at George W. Bush and the Republican Congress and, in Ohio, at Taft and the Republicans.

There's something to support that theory in the Ohio primary results but not a lot. According to the unofficial results with 97.5 percent of precincts reporting, Republican candidates for governor received 797,030 votes and Democratic candidates 746,572. Republican candidates in the 18 U.S. House districts received 726,218 votes (including 633 for a write-in in one district), while Democratic candidates received 675,064. Republicans received more votes in statewide races for attorney general and treasurer; Democrats received more votes in statewide races for auditor and secretary of state, though in these latter two races there was a big drop-off in total votes cast. So in the race for governor, in which more votes were cast than any other, Republicans received just under?since the fig in the table is 51.6–sbv? 52 percent of the votes. Not bad for a state party that is, for good reason, supposed to be in grave trouble.

Let's put these numbers in historical perspective, by comparing them for comparable governor primaries over the past 25 years. Figures for races in the 1990s are here and those for races in the 1980s are here. We'll look at total votes cast for both parties' candidates for governor, at the Republican percentage of the two-party primary vote, and at the Republican percentage in the following general election. The Democratic numbers for 1986 are those for the race for U.S. Senate; incumbent Democratic Gov. Richard Celeste was unopposed in the primary, and the state did not report his vote total. As always, corrections of arithmetic errors are welcome.

Comments:

• You can expect higher turnout for a party when it has a seriously contested primary for governor. Republicans had seriously contested races this year and in 1986 and 1982; Democrats did in 1994, 1990, and 1982. So that may have increased Republican turnout this year. But turnout is also increased by seriously contested House races; this year, by my count, both parties had seriously contested primaries in five House races.

• Still, Republican primary turnout in total votes was the highest this year in the past 25 years. Democratic primary turnout, though notably up from 1994–2002, is below that in 1982–90. The Democratic party lost a lot of primary voters roundabout 1994. It has gained some of them back, but by no means all. Total turnout was higher than in any gubernatorial primary in the past 20 years but lower than in 1982, when Ohio was hit hard by recession and suffered job losses much greater than in recent years. But as compared with 1982, Republican turnout was up 96,466, while Democratic turnout was down 283,846.

• The Republican percentage of primary turnout was 51.6 yesterday, down 2.6 percentage points from 2002 (when turnout for both parties was a 25-year low) but almost exactly the same as in 1998 and 1994.

• There's some similarity between the Republican percentage of primary turnout and the Republican percentage in the general election in some years when no incumbent was running (1998, 1982) but not in another such year (1990). The relationship was weak to the point of nonexistent in years when incumbents were running for re-election (2002, 1994, 1986). This year no incumbent is running.

I don't claim that these numbers now make Ken Blackwell the favorite to beat Ted Strickland. The Republican total, as I noted, may have been increased by the fact that there was a primary contest. The 2.5 percent of precincts not yet reporting appear to be entirely in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), so the final Democratic total will surely be higher than the number here, though it's not likely to be larger than the Republican total (my thumbnail guess is that the Democratic total will be about 22,000 votes higher, the Republican total about 10,000 higher, but the latter will be lower, perhaps much lower, if all the precincts still out are in Cleveland).

But what fascinates me here is that turnout on both sides was robust, as it was in November 2004, when Ohio cast 5,627,908 votes, 687,491 more than its previous high (in 1992). People may be turned off by politics and politicians, but they're still voting like crazy—or at least in greater numbers than in the recent past. And people may be turned off by Republicans, but a lot of Republicans are still voting. This parallels what I saw in the special election last month in the 50th Congressional District of California. Somehow, despite all the discouraging news and dismal poll numbers, there are a lot of plodding, dull, dutiful people, too stubborn to take instruction from their betters in the mainstream media, who insist on going out and voting Republican. Hard to explain. But that's what the numbers seem to say.