President Donald J. Trump is a loser—just not the biggest loser in the 2020 Presidential Election. That is Ohio. It lost its status as a microcosmic reflection of America. It lost its bellwether standing. It lost its reputation as a battleground state.
Once the self-proclaimed Heart of It All, the previously discarded slogan became irrelevant when voters for the second time decided Trump, a boil on the butt of America, should have a second term as president. The vote proved Ohio has no heart at all.
The pollsters did not see it coming. Perhaps they were thinking The Five Ohios, a “regional diversity unlike any other in the country” identified by many over the years but perhaps never explained as well as by the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics experts at the University of Akron, both on their website and in the 2011 bookBuckeye Battleground: Ohio Campaigns and Elections in the Twenty-First Century.
The Five Ohios include: 1. The urban industrial/postindustrial Northeast; 2. The rural, agricultural, Northwest; 3. The central region dominated by the government/educational center, Columbus; 4. The more sparsely populated Appalachian Southeast; 5. The southern, conservative Southeast of Cincinnati and Dayton.
Like football, politics is a contact sport. I know this because for many years I wrote about football as a columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal and then about politics and those who play that game for the newspaper’s editorial page. David Giffels, my former colleague and co-author of Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron, revisited the Five Ohios to write his new book Barnstorming Ohio To Understand America.
Giffels made a similar journey before the 2004 presidential election around the only state he has ever called home. Then, as recently, he did not so much try to support or unmask Ohio’s status as a swing state as answer a question about Ohioans: “Ohio isn’t any more American than any other place, but it is completely so . . .,” he wrote. “It is an ur-place, sublimely average in both the dispositional and mathematical senses, an intersection of lifestyles and economies, of geographical characteristics and political tendencies, of climates, of conscience, of concerns, a place with answers to the most important question: Who are we?”
Though Giffels has become a professor in UA’s English department, teaching writing, he has not turned into a person who hides behind the ivy-covered walls of academia, thinking it is where all answers are found. He leaves his classroom and goes out to listen to Ohioans, whom he believes can help him answer the question he posed.
I wonder if that is true, not because the outcome of the state’s presidential vote reduced its predictive stature to ashes and awarded ultimate loser Donald Trump another eight-point victory but because so many Ohioans considered the man and gave a thumps-up.
Once Ohio not only could choose presidents with uncanny reliability but also produced them. Depending on the determining factor (birthplace, roots, or affiliation when elected), Ohio and Virginia are the dominant producers of presidents. Each can lay claim to seven or eight, almost all serving before the twentieth century. Warren G. Harding, the last, served from 1921 to 1923, and became the fourth Ohio president to die in office. In the past 120 years Ohio has been better known for picking presidents.
“Since 1896,” Giffels wrote, “Ohio voters have sided with the winner in 29 or 31 presidential elections. No state has a higher percentage of accuracy. No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio. We are the only state to have a perfect record choosing the victor since 1964.”
At least Joe Biden’s victory over Trump, which ended the streak, also put an end to what I consider the worst presidency of modern, if not all, time. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, like Trump a Republican but one who has seemed uncomfortable answering for, much less defending, Trump’s meanspirited reign, explained Trump’s ability to win over Ohioans by concluding that the state “likes a fighter.” As if to prove he is nothing if not that, Trump fights on, a flailing bully falsely claiming voter fraud in a stolen election.
The only fraud in the election was Trump himself.
In one of my favorite chapters in Giffels’ Barnstorming Ohio, he considers what might explain who we are by attending, appropriately enough, the Bellwether Festival on the Ohio Renaissance Festival Grounds outside Dayton. Drawn to music Giffels once played in band and is co-author, with Jade Dellinger, of Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! a book about the unique Akron rock band. There, he hooked up with Festival headliner Bob Pollard, another Devo devotee and unique in his own right as leader of a-late-in-life-success story Guided By Voices (GBV).
Pollard’s stage persona is, by Giffels account, a “sharp-witted, boozy, braggadocios stage persona dubbed ‘Your Bobness’ ” that would seem to fit perfectly with his desire for the band “to be the Beatles on record and the Who live.” As if to double-down on the point GBV had made with its music, he ended the set with “a final boast from His Bobness: ‘Hey, GBV’s got the goods, baby.”
And, with that, Giffels had the goods of summation about who we Ohioans are and what we want: “To be heard,” Giffels wrote. “This may be the most universal, most existential desire of Ohio and its people, of anyone who has been painted with and bristles at the term flyover. It seems that we only get asked to speak when our voices serve someone else’s purpose, which is a big part of the frustration and paradox of living in a place that knows it has something to say—knows this because we always get asked, but rarely outside the months leading to a national election.”
With Ohioans’ decision to give their heart to the heartless Trump, I’m not sure a loving, caring world should want to be guided by our voice. We’re no bellwether of right.
