President Obama wins Ohio behind biggest cities

DAN SEWELL

JOHN SEEWER

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — Mitt Rom­ney won most of Ohio geo­graph­i­cally, while Pres­i­dent Barack Obama won where the most votes were to win the piv­otal bat­tle­ground state again.

The Demo­c­rat racked up votes in Ohio’s major urban/industrial areas, and Repub­li­can Mitt Rom­ney car­ried nearly every­where else. Obama was able to take the 18 elec­toral votes he and Rom­ney fought so hard for by win­ning its most pop­u­lated areas.

He car­ried the six biggest coun­ties in terms of votes, and eight of the top 10. He won two-thirds of the vote in the biggest cities, accord­ing to exit poll results for The Asso­ci­ated Press and the tele­vi­sion networks.

That was enough to off­set strong show­ings by Rom­ney in GOP-dominated sub­urbs and rural areas. Rom­ney won about five of every six coun­ties statewide.

With all precincts report­ing unof­fi­cial returns, Obama won by more than 107,000 votes, or nearly 50.2 per­cent, of 5.4 mil­lion votes cast, accord­ing to Ohio Sec­re­tary of State tallies.That was down from 2008, when he car­ried Ohio over John McCain with 51.5 per­cent of the vote, more than 262,000 votes ahead of the Republican.

Obama’s sup­port of fed­eral help for an auto indus­try bailout was a game-changer, said the GOP state chair­man, Bob Bennett.

“The biggest deter­min­ing fac­tor was that we couldn’t han­dle the auto­mo­bile bailout issue,” Ben­nett said Wednes­day. “That’s where we sig­nif­i­cantly underperformed.”

Voter sam­ples indi­cated wide sup­port for the Obama-backed auto bailout, help­ing an indus­try with plants and thou­sands of jobs in the state. The Rom­ney cam­paign had made a late effort in Ohio to under­cut Obama’s sup­port on that issue, with Rom­ney empha­siz­ing his long ties to the auto indus­try in Michi­gan and pro-Romney ads belit­tling the president’s efforts as help­ful to China.

Union vot­ers who nor­mally make up a big­ger chunk of the pres­i­den­tial elec­torate in Ohio than in other swing states favored Obama 60 per­cent to 38 per­cent, indi­cat­ing not only sup­port for the auto indus­try bailout but lin­ger­ing fall­out from the 2011 move by Repub­li­cans to restrict col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing for pub­lic employee unions. Also, Ohioans whose fam­i­lies make less than $50,000 a year sup­ported the pres­i­dent by a 3-to-5 mar­gin, exit polls showed.

Bob Rock­en­field, 70, of Cincin­nati, voted for Rom­ney, but said Wednes­day he felt Repub­li­cans are “just not get­ting across to people.”

He thinks Obama won Ohio because of his appeal to union work­ers and minori­ties, “and also play­ing up that Rom­ney was this coun­try club rich boy and he was for the mid­dle class.”

Frank Hocker, 67, a retiree who once worked at a truck man­u­fac­tur­ing plant in Spring­field, said he wasn’t a single-issue voter, but Obama won his praise for help­ing the auto industry.

“When Obama stuck his neck out and did the right thing with Gen­eral Motors, you know, that sat­is­fied me,” Hocker said.

Some con­ven­tional think­ing may be changed by the two most recent pres­i­den­tial elections.

Once, Ohio’s three biggest cities were con­sid­ered this way: Cleve­land solidly Demo­c­ra­tic, Cincin­nati Repub­li­can, and Colum­bus a swing area. But Obama has now car­ried the Cincin­nati and Colum­bus areas twice, rack­ing up 60 per­cent in Columbus-based Franklin County, besides eas­ily car­ry­ing Cleve­land. Obama in 2008 became the first Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date to carry Hamil­ton County (Cincin­nati area) since Lyn­don B. John­son in 1964.

Appalachian Ohio had been a swing region, with Bill Clin­ton car­ry­ing it twice. Rom­ney expanded on McCain’s suc­cess there, win­ning three east­ern Ohio coun­ties — Bel­mont, Jef­fer­son and Mon­roe — that last voted for a Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in 1972 with Richard Nixon.

In rural coun­ties where vot­ers often put faith con­cerns first, Rom­ney won about 60 per­cent of the vote. Exit polls indi­cated Rom­ney was more pop­u­lar than Obama among vot­ers look­ing for a pres­i­dent who shared their values.

But Obama did much bet­ter with vot­ers who felt he cared about their every­day concerns.

“I guess in a way we see our­selves in him,” said Dominique Crit­ten­den, 25, a nurse’s assis­tant in Cincin­nati. “I felt like when he spoke, he spoke to me. I didn’t feel that Rom­ney spoke to me.”

There appears to be a widen­ing gen­er­a­tion gap among Ohio voters.

For two con­sec­u­tive elec­tions, young vot­ers have turned out in big­ger num­bers than they had in the past. And they again deci­sively backed Obama by a 2-to-1 mar­gin. But the same held true for seniors who voted Repub­li­can again, while mid­dle age vot­ers and those near­ing retire­ment age edged over to Rom­ney after lean­ing Obama in 2008.

That could give Repub­li­cans oppor­tu­ni­ties, because Ohio’s pop­u­la­tion is grow­ing older, as Baby Boomers reach or near retire­ment. Ohio’s 65-and-older pop­u­la­tion increased by nearly 8 per­cent in the decade end­ing in 2010, com­pris­ing 14.3 per­cent of the state’s population.

Ben­nett said he is opti­mistic that the GOP can also do bet­ter in urban com­mu­ni­ties with effec­tive han­dling of the econ­omy, given that they are the hard­est hit by job­less­ness and poverty. Repub­li­can Gov. John Kasich’s approval rat­ings have gone up as the state’s employ­ment pic­ture has improved.

One Ohio trend that hasn’t changed: the state has now voted for the win­ning pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in the last 13 elec­tions. And no Repub­li­can has won with­out Ohio.

Posted by AP News on Nov 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.