DETROIT – After last year’s midterm elections, there was a lot of talk about how different Ohio and Michigan, two supposedly very similar states, had become. Democrats swept the board in Michigan in November 2022, winning every statewide contest, gaining a congressional seat and taking both houses of the legislature.
But in Ohio, it was exactly the opposite. Republicans ruled. Gov. Mike DeWine was reelected by more than a million votes, despite not even getting a majority in the Republican primary. Republicans did lose one seat in Congress, but still have a 10-5 majority statewide.
The Ohio GOP also increased their already mammoth supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, and in their sweetest victory, won the open U.S. Senate seat vacated by another Republican, the retiring Rob Portman.
So why, some commentators and columnists asked, have the two states suddenly become so different?
The answer is simple: The question is wrong. There’s been no sudden shift. Ohio has been essentially red, and Michigan essentially blue, especially in national elections, for a long, long time.
Want proof? Many years ago, I interviewed Dave Powers, a close confidant of President John F. Kennedy, at the Kennedy Library in Boston. He told me that the state that shocked them most in that very close election of 1960 was Ohio. “We thought Ohio was as safe as Massachusetts,” he said, but JFK lost it, and it wasn’t even close.
Not only that, the numbers then were eerily similar to those in last year’s U.S. Senate contest. In 1960, Richard Nixon got 2,217,611 votes to 1,944,249 for Kennedy. In 2022 Republican J.D. Vance notched 2,191,114; Democrat Tim Ryan, 1,939,489.
True, neither state is a monolith, like Republican Wyoming or Democrat Hawaii. True, Republicans have often won races for governor in Michigan, though almost never for the U.S. Senate.
Democrats do sometimes win Ohio — but usually only after some huge Republican failing or scandal, such as the Coingate mess in 2006 that coincided with a national Democratic midterm landslide.
That year, Democrat Ted Strickland was elected governor of Ohio by nearly a million votes. But that remains the only time since 1986 that Republicans have lost Ohio’s statehouse. Four years later, Strickland was defeated for reelection.
That same year, a Democrat, Sherrod Brown, badly beat an incumbent Republican U.S. Senator, a man who had been in various offices since 1980. Normally, a loss like that would have been the end of the losing candidate. Except it wasn’t: The loser was Mike DeWine, who immediately started running for attorney general, and last year was reelected to a second term as governor, at age 75.
True, there have been many elections when both states voted for the same Presidential candidate, most famously in 2016, when Donald Trump won them. But while the Republican won Ohio by almost 450,000 votes, he won Michigan by barely 10,000.
Eight years earlier, both Ohio and Michigan had voted for Democrat Barack Obama. But the nation’s first African-American President’s margin was four times as large in Michigan.
The only time in modern history that a Democrat carried Ohio and not Michigan was in 1976, because the incumbent President, Gerald Ford was from the Wolverine State. I’ve focused on Presidential contests, because the difference in the legislatures and Congress can be at least partly explained by gerrymandering.
When it comes to the U.S. Senate, a statewide contest, the contrast is starkest of all. Ohio’s one statewide Democratic officeholder, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is running for a fourth term next year, is running scared, at least judging from the fundraising appeals I have been getting from him.
On the other hand, Michigan has an open seat, usually the most hotly contested of all, and there seems to be an almost universal assumption that Democrat Elissa Slotkin will be overwhelmingly favored; at this point, Republicans don’t even have a credible candidate. But if it is clear that Ohio is far more Republican, what isn’t so clear is why. Political scientists used to say it was because there was no one dominant city, like Detroit or Chicago.
But these days, Columbus has clearly emerged as Ohio’s major city, while Detroit is diminished. I often see the claim that, in these days of shifting allegiances, that Ohio is more Republican because it has a smaller proportion of college graduates. In fact, an identical proportion — 18.2 percent — of adults in both states has at least a bachelor’s degree, though Michigan has more with some college.
Otherwise, though Ohio has slightly more than a million more people than Michigan, the states are, demographically, near-mirrors of each other. So why do they vote so differently?
My guess, based on many years of observation, is that it is a matter of tradition and culture; much of Ohio seems more culturally conservative than Michigan, especially metropolitan Detroit.
But if you have a better explanation, I’d like to hear it. Finally, I don’t pretend to know how next year’s presidential election will turn out, or even who will be the candidates.
But I would happily bet that the Democrats, win or lose, will do better in Michigan, Republicans better in Ohio … and I’d also bet that no one really in the know is likely to take that bet.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
