Voters in Ohio
a complex mix
Differing mantras carry weight across state with job woes
Hillary Clinton found sustenance here before, in a romping 2008 primary victory over Barack Obama, and is counting on loyalty and the state's Midwestern sensibility to help her dispatch this year's opponent, Bernie Sanders.
Sanders is hoping to build on his victory last week in Michigan, a neighboring state where he came from behind on the strength of vehement opposition to foreign trade, attracting working-class voters and, significantly, cutting into Clinton's black support.
The question for both: Was Michigan a fluke or a tipping point?
The answer may rest on the conflict that has torn Democratic voters in all the early states, between one candidate who says he inspires and another who argues she can most effectively accomplish the goals they share.
In Ohio — a perennial general election powerhouse — the Democratic choice will play out amid pockets of economic improvement and malaise.
Overall, the state has 200,000 fewer jobs than it did in 2000, when it hit peak employment, according to Policy Matters Ohio, a left-leaning policy research institute. In that time, median income has fallen 16 percent, along with hourly wages. The average income, just shy of $49,000 a year, is below the national average.
The state finally recovered the jobs lost in the Great Recession last October, about 18 months after most other states hit that mark.
“The overwhelming reason is the loss of manufacturing employment in Ohio,” said Amy Hanauer, the group's executive director. Not all of that is due to foreign trade deals, she said, “but there's no question that jobs have left Ohio for other countries.”
That plays directly into the case that Sanders is making as he blames job losses on deals including the North American Free Trade Agreement of the 1990s, backed by both President Bill Clinton and
The pact is only one of the centrist moves by both Clintons that Sanders has criticized. As in Michigan, trade has been his primary thrust in Ohio; ads running here assert that he's the only candidate who can be counted on to back workers, a nod not only to Clinton's support of NAFTA but also her work in the Obama administration on behalf of the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. (She has since come out against that agreement.)
“There's really not an area of the state that hasn't been touched” by job losses, said Jeff Rusnak, Sanders' state campaign director. “If you look at Ohio, it's the perfect state for Sen. Sanders. He really appeals to it because his message is so strong with the voters who have kind of been forgotten.
“Ohio in many ways is Michigan on steroids.”
Clinton started off with something of an advantage over Sanders, notably among the same voters he's seeking.
In 2008, Ohio voted after Obama's campaign roared to life, but it was Clinton who captured the state. She won those without college degrees — one of Sanders' strongest groups now — by 18 points and ran strongly among those at the lower end of the income scale. Among those who said trade had cost Americans jobs, she defeated Obama by 10 points.
But Sanders has leveled a far fiercer denunciation of Clinton's trade positions than did Obama, who generally shared her views. That, and the loss of even more jobs in the eight years since the last race, poses the sharpest danger to Clinton now.
If Sanders continues to command young and liberal voters, Clinton is depending on the same mix of African-American and suburban support that disappointed her in Michigan. Her campaign is running ads featuring the mothers of young African-American men killed by police.
The Clinton campaign is basing its hopes on the notion that Clinton will retain her 2008 supporters and — even more — that Ohioans want to look ahead, not re-litigate the 1990s. She may also benefit from the fact that, for all its jobs difficulty, the state is more conservative on the whole than Michigan, which has long had a weakness for liberal lightning rods.
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