Final Thoughts on Ohio’s Issues Election
Issue I was carried by Rust Belt Counties
Issue 1’s 223K margin of victory essentially came from 5 counties: Cuyahoga (73K), Franklin (35K), Mahoning (17K), Montgomery (17K), and Summit (25K). It also took Hamilton and Lucas Counties by 10K each. Every one of these counties has a deteriorating oldline industrial base in need of some form of revitalization (not necessarily with more oldine industries, though), and it’s not surprising that Issue 1 would have appealed to these counties.
I also expect that officials from these counties are going to be first in line with their hands out looking for the Issue 1 booty.
Bob Taft’s choice to be invisible didn’t hurt either.
Turnout and Non-Votes
Blackwell predicted 41%; the actual was 39.7%.
I didn’t anticipate the amount of non-voting on the five issues that took place. Of the 3051K Ohio residents who voted:
- 277K (9.1%) did not vote on Issue 1
- 188K (6.1%) did not vote on Issue 2
- 210K (6.9%) did not vote on Issue 3
- 215K (7.0%) did not vote on Issue 4
- 235K (7.7%) did not vote on Issue 5
Those non-voting rates seem pretty high to me. To compare: Of the 5722K ballots cast in November 2004, only 94K (1.6%) did not make a choice for President, 296K (5.2%) did not make a choice for Senator (in a non-competitive race), and 327K (5.7%) did not vote on that election’s Issue 1 (the marriage amendment).
You might expect voters who bother to come out in an off-year election to be more motivated and more likely to actually make selections. But the monstrosity of the ballot probably put off more than a few people. In fact, you can probably look at the progression of non-votes increasing from Issues 2 through 5 as being due to increasing numbers of voters saying “They expect me to read all this stuff?”
National Media Non-Coverage of RON Issue Defeats
The AP Election Wire has absolutely nothing on the RON humiliations, but it manages to have a story about a mayor’s race (Cincinnati) involving less than 70,000 votes. According to this Google News search on “Ohio issues defeated,” no out-of state newspaper or wire service has an after-election story on the Issues 2-5 debacle. I guess if it doesn’t fit the template (”Bush rebuked“), it didn’t happen.
Ohio News Network has a pretty evenhanded story. Kevin DeWine, presumably a relative of the Senator, makes some noise about making an attempt to draw more reasonable district lines, which I don’t disagree with, as long as it’s rational. But he could have waited a few weeks to start working on it instead of speaking out; now he’ll have pseudo-reforming harpies on his case for years.
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UPDATE: Now that 64% of voters have rejected Issue 2, the unfortunate reality is we’re stuck with most of it anyway. That’s because most of the garbage that was in Issue 2 was passed as HB 234. As discussed previously, it should be repealed immediately.
UPDATE 2 This Bloomberg piece manages to get in a sentence about Issues 2-5 in an article about how various state ballot initiatives fared throughout the nation: ” Similarly, voters in Ohio by margins of about 2-to-1 rejected four ballot issues that also included taking the authority to draw legislative districts away from lawmakers and other changes to how elections are run and campaigns funded.”
UPDATE 3: Give credit where it’s due–The New York Times, though the report has the usual biased tinge, at least devoted several paragraphs within a much larger story about how state initiatives fared. The CA initiatives got the lion’s share of the attention, but the NYT got the only loser’s quote I’ve seen printed in an out-of-state source so far. As expected, it’s are-you-kidding-me and in-denial in nature:
Keary McCarthy, a spokesman for Reform Ohio Now, the group behind the four initiatives, said that voters might have rejected the measures because they were confused by them. The national Republican Party and business interests ran a well-financed campaign to defeat them, Mr. McCarthy said.
“This became a national campaign,” he said. “If we did anything tonight, these issues are now in the public consciousness.”
You recognize it, don’t you? The “oh, those dumb voters” meme.
No sir. The only confusion in Ohio occurred when RON called this assemblage of rubbish “reform.”
