What We Can Do (To Win Elections)

Who represents us, and who the heck voted for them?

If you’re anything like me, you get relatively annoyed when you hear folks talk about how a specific political party has inevitability on its side in any given election. I’ve always viewed elections more as a toss-up than a contest with a predetermined outcome. Maybe that’s why I love politics so much? I don’t think I would be as passionate about elections if I felt there wasn’t even a possibility of either side winning. In this week’s What We Can, we’ll talk about a truth about winning elections that I think we don’t often consider, and I’ll try to convince you to reframe something that you may have believed for a long time.

If I asked you to tell me what makes a specific area a “Republican stronghold”, how would you define that? Would you point to the party affiliation of existing officeholders in that area, or would you refer to how your gut instinct just tells you that there aren’t any liberal-leaning folks there, just because?

I think we should rely more on actual data than our gut feeling, though, so let’s examine some actual numbers to get insight into the point I want to discuss today.

My home state, Ohio, is more diverse than folks tend to think. We have nearly 12 million residents, which makes us the 7th most populous state in the US. Around 96% of our residents are white, and we have approximately 24% non-white folks in the state. Interestingly, our Black population (12% or so) is roughly the same as the national average, but the percentage of minority-identifying Ohioans who aren’t Black is nearly two-thirds lower than the US average. But our diversity extends beyond racial identity and into political affiliation, which may be a surprise to you.

Going back to 1980, Ohio was considered to be a bellwether state for presidential elections. This was because it typically swung in the direction of the winner of those elections, regardless of which party that winner represented. In the last three Presidential races, though, Ohio has voted for the Republican Presidential candidate. It’s tough for me to see whether that’s a true trend in the electorate or whether that’s due to the fact that all three of those races have seen the Republican party supporting one guy. Another factor in that swing has been the incredibly dishonest gerrymandering project within the state that the Ohio GOP has embarked upon over the past two decades or so, but that’s a newsletter topic for another day.

If you don’t know that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the Republican-drawn legislative maps were unconstitutional FIVE TIMES and yet that the Ohio GOP has continued to use those same unconstitutional maps anyway, you might want to do some research into that particular stain on our state’s history.

It doesn’t take a lot of searching to see plenty of articles that claim Ohio is a solidly Republican state. Why? Because Republicans hold all the statewide offices at this point, because our House of Representatives and Senate both have solid GOP majorities, and because the current occupant of the White House has gotten Ohio’s electoral college votes for three presidential elections in a row. Sure, those are all true. But as I mentioned above, our districts are designed to make it incredibly challenging for non-GOP candidates to have a fair fight.

In fact, it was widely reported that out of 116 state legislative races in 2024, only six were actually a toss-up between the Republican and Democratic candidates. As David DeWitt wrote at the time,

If you average Ohio’s statewide partisan elections over the last 10 cycles, including 2022, Ohio is a 56-43 Republican-to-Democratic state. But after 2022, the Ohio House has 67 Republicans and 32 Democrats. In the Ohio Senate, 26 seats are Republican while seven are Democratic. Of Ohio’s 15 U.S. Congressional seats, 10 are held by Republicans and five held by Democrats.

This means that even though Republicans represent 56% of voters in Ohio on average, they control 66% of the state’s U.S. Congressional seats, 67% of the Ohio House, and 79% of the Ohio Senate.

That’s unfair, no matter which side you agree more with.

But putting unfair districts aside, do we really feel that Ohioans overwhelmingly support the GOP? In this state, the process for being considered affiliated with one of the two major political parties is relatively simple—you just have to vote in either party’s primary election. Done. If you don’t then vote in a different party primary within the next two years, you stay considered “affiliated” with that party. Nobody’s filling out paperwork, or swearing an oath, or doing anything heavy-duty to show that commitment to a party. It’s pretty obvious that most people who vote in a party’s primary are motivated enough to do that, but how do those motivated voters stack up to the total number of registered voters in the state? I looked at the past twenty years of voter data in Ohio, so I’ve got those numbers to share with you.

Here’s a three-question quiz, for those playing along at home:

1. What percentage of Ohioans tend to vote in our elections?

2. Does this percentage vary based on what type of election it is?

3. How many Ohioans are formally considered “unaffiliated” with either party?

I’ll let you ponder those three questions for a minute.

Why don’t we take a break for a bit, just to avoid spoilers. Here’s how my dog feels after a long week of doing math to figure out electoral turnout numbers for fun (same, Ivy, same):

Okay, here are your answers:

1. Ohio’s average general election turnout is 51.22%.

2. For presidential elections, our turnout is far higher than in non-presidential years.

3. 5,734,850 Ohioans aren’t officially affiliated with either major party.

So what do these numbers actually mean? First, almost half of all the Ohioans who have register don’t bother to actually vote in statewide elections, on average. That means 49% of Ohioans might not have voted for Republicans if they did vote for anybody. We can’t prove a negative, so we don’t know that, but it’s a possibility. See point three below for more thoughts on this.

Second, for presidential elections our voter turnout is 71.51%. That means people are more motivated to leave their homes and take a few minutes to make their voices heard when candidates spend a billion or so dollars to convince them to do so, which isn’t that surprising. But for years when there isn’t a presidential election to motivate people, Ohio’s voter turnout averages just 43.43%. Less than half of Ohio’s registered voters vote during midterm elections, which is an important thing for us to consider.

The third point I want to mention is about party affiliation. There are currently 8,060,554 registered voters in the state of Ohio. 1,508,641 are registered Republicans, and 817,063 are registered Democrats. As I stated above, 5,734,850 registered voters in the state aren’t motivated enough to vote in a single primary over the past two years, which would have put them in one of the two major party columns.

This means 18.7% of Ohio’s voters are registered Republicans, 10.1% are registered Democrats, and 71% aren’t officially affiliated with either party.

Let that sink in for a second. Everyone has heard that Ohio’s a predominantly-Republican state. Nobody would be shocked to hear you make that point. But why are we letting this narrative continue, given the fact that only 18.7% of the voters in this state are actually passionate enough to vote in a Republican primary across the last two election cycles? As David DeWitt says in his piece, we’re probably a slightly rightward-leaning state (56-43, by his numbers). But the vast, vast majority of Ohio’s registered voters end up voting for the candidate they prefer, and don’t weigh in for primary elections at all. And that’s putting aside the blatant electoral cheating we see in Ohio’s unconstitutional district maps. If Ohioans don’t truly favor one major party or the other, then why do we let Republicans get away with lying to us and saying that anyone who disagrees with their policies are in the tiniest of minorities?

Oh yeah. Because unscrupulous people in positions of power have a huge motivation to lie in order to stay in those positions of power.

Representative David Thomas loves telling his constituents this lie. Here’s one recent example of him gaslighting one of the people he’s supposed to be representing about the true percentage of people in his district who agree with his radical positions:

Rep. Thomas is right about those proportions of the vote, but that is incredibly misleading, due to the fact that you’re talking about the portion of this district who actually cast a vote in either the primary or general election. The 65th District has a population of 113,990. Since 76% of them are 18 or older, and 93% of those who are eligible to vote are registered in this state, that leaves a population of around 80,568 registered voters in the 65th District. How many people voted in the Republican primary that Rep. Thomas is referring to above? A grand total of 14,065.

Or, put another way, only 17.4% of the people in his district voted in his primary (for either candidate), which is almost a percentage point and a half lower than the percentage of GOP-identified voters in the state as a whole. And lest you think that his was some landslide of an electoral victory, he had no Democratic opponent in the general election. Beyond that, Rep. Thomas only received 44,110 votes in the general election (with no alternative candidate to vote for). That means 54.7% of of the voters in his district voted for him even though he was running as a Republican on the same ballot as Donald Trump, who won 55.2% of the vote in the state. Ouch.

Let’s further break these numbers down into easier to understand terms:

1. David Thomas says he won the primary “72/28”.

2. To be clear, that was the breakdown in the GOP primary between he and his single opponent, with a total of 12.5% of the voters in his district casting a vote for him.

3. Nobody ran against David Thomas in the general election.

4. Even though people in his district were very motivated to vote for Donald Trump, fewer of them bothered to also mark his name on the same exact ballot.

Here’s why the misconception (pushed by Rep. Thomas and many other Republicans) of the inevitability of their deeply unpopular policy positions is so incredibly dangerous: The people in his district didn’t care much either way. 88% of the voters in his district didn’t come and vote for him in the primary, and half didn’t bother to vote for him in the general election either. And yet he claims that his tiny group of motivated voters gives him the right to gaslight anyone who disagrees with him. Do you see the problem here?

I’ll offer one more example of Rep. Thomas using this disingenuous strategy to silence those who disagree with him and overstate his support:

In this response, to a different voter, Rep. Thomas is once again claiming that he knows best what the voters of his district and our state want, and that if you disagree with him you are in a tiny minority. I won’t speak (today) to the ridiculousness of David’s efforts around property tax in the state, besides to say that the proponents of this “strong momentum constitutional amendment drive” got a tiny, tiny number of signatures from voters. So few, in fact, that they’re embarrassed to publicly give exact numbers to the press. As the Cleveland ABC News affiliate wrote last month:

The Citizens for Property Tax Reform didn't submit the signatures they gathered. "It's such a huge undertaking," organizer Beth Blackmarr said Thursday...Her team, Citizens for Property Tax Reform, knew they weren’t near the 415,000 they needed. She didn't have an estimate of how many they collected, nor how much money they raised. "As naive as we are, we may have underestimated, just a little bit, how big the response was really going to be," she said. "That's been quite rewarding, so we've asked everybody to keep on trucking and keep going."

Did you catch that? Not only did their signature gathering efforts fail, but they have no idea how many people they tricked into signing, and no idea how much money their campaign raised for the effort. Sounds like a well-oiled machine, doesn’t it? Does that look like Rep. Thomas’s “evidence enough that the public is demanding action”? Absolutely not. This is a niche group who are pushing a half-baked and incredibly dangerous fringe idea, and yet we have a State Representative who claims that if you don’t agree with them, your voice is so small and insignificant that you should probably just shut up.

It all comes down to the power, folks. Does the power lie with you, the voter? Or does it lie with your elected officials? A fair answer probably lies somewhere between the two extremes, as it so often does in this world of many, many gray areas. But voters have a great deal of power, if we can just have the kinds of conversations that will get them to vote for our issues and candidates.

There’s one last data point I want to draw your attention to, in this edition of What We Can. Remember back when I asked you whether certain types of elections have markedly different levels of voter turnout in this state? I was right to point out that non-presidential election years have a lower turnout. But there’s yet another category of election that has an even LOWER turnout in Ohio: elections that happen one year after those big presidential races. The data is out there and freely available—if you don’t believe me, go and check for yourself. Going back 20 years, the numbers show that almost no voters in Ohio bother to turn out the very next year following a presidential election. In this 20-year period, average voter turnout for those immediate midterm elections dropped to a staggering 33.97%! In fact, it dropped below 27% for one of those years.

So what’s the point I’m trying to make here? This November, voter turnout is likely to be less than half of what it was in 2024. The same will hold true next year for the midterms, and likely the year after that (though the effect is lessened for the other two years in a given cycle). This means that 2025 is a big chance for us to try and turn out some of the two-thirds of Ohio’s registered voters who are unlikely to vote without your voice and persuasion.

We can win by cheating (like the Republicans) or by intimidation and making the rules more difficult (also like the Republicans). We can win by trying to convince the likeliest voters to switch to our side (which is doable, but sometimes pretty hard). Or we can win by targeting the 66% of registered voters who would not ordinarily cast a vote at all this year. That last option sounds both simpler and more realistic to me.

If you take nothing else from this week’s newsletter, please hear this: No election is inevitable. No matter how unfair the districts, no matter how stacked the deck. No matter how supposedly “red” your area or your state may be. No matter how dishonest those in positions of power are about how their constituents feel on any given issue.

Do not believe people who tell you that voting doesn’t matter. Do not believe people who tell you that your side will lose anyway. Look at the actual numbers, not their attempts to trick you. And don’t give up. When you don’t vote, you help the bad guys hurt every single one of us.

Thanks for considering these issues with me, and thanks for being here. I hope this newsletter gives you something to consider, whether you’re in my political camp or not. My preference is always going to be an absolutely fair fight—let’s present our perspectives to all the voters, make voting easy and transparent, and see whose ideas win. Anything else isn’t fair to you, or me, or anybody.

Please keep reading, sharing, and thinking. In return, I promise to keep writing.

Sources:

• https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/politics/ohio-politics/heres-what-wont-make-the-november-ballot-in-ohio

• https://censusreporter.org/profiles/62000US39065-state-house-district-65-oh/

• https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2024/10/11/ohio-gerrymandering-a-brief-and-awful-history-of-the-very-recent-past/

• https://ballotpedia.org/Ohio_House_of_Representatives_District_65

• https://www.ohiosos.gov/elections/election-results-and-data/historical-election-comparisons/voter-turnout-in-general-elections/

• https://www.ohiosos.gov/media-center/press-releases/2024/2024-05-10a/