Ohio Matters will focus on six very different places across Ohio to hear what is on voters’ minds and how decisions being made in Washington affect their lives. They are Franklin, Greene, Jefferson, Seneca and Vinton counties and the city of Cleveland in Cuyahoga County.Rich Exner, cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Donald Trump upended the political map in Ohio, highlighting new divisions in the bellwether of all states.
Traditionally Democratic portions of eastern Ohio overwhelmingly voted Republican. Red counties in southern Ohio became more red. Yet Trump did worse in central Ohio’s Franklin County than any Republican in more than 100 years.
His victory caught some people by surprise. It perplexed others.
Perhaps this is because it seemingly has become more difficult for people in one area to understand the thinking of people elsewhere.
How do the concerns of voters in counties won by Trump with close to 80 percent of the vote differ from the concerns of those in counties where he received less than 35 percent?
Local economies, religion, age, race, ancestry and other factors help drive viewpoints. Voters’ thoughts run even deeper. All this begs exploring.
To share insight on what is on the minds of people – and how actions in Washington affect their lives – cleveland.com’s political team will fan out across the state this year.
Reporters Jeremy Pelzer, Mary Kilpatrick and Andrew J. Tobias will make regular visits to six areas chosen specifically because each place represents starkly different characteristics. The first of the stories in our Ohio Matters series will be published Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
The goal is to provide readers with a better understanding of the microcosm that is Ohio. The state’s diversity helps explain why Ohio voters have picked the presidential winner in each of the last 14 elections – a streak more than twice as long as any other state.
The political team will be in farm country (Seneca County) and an old industrial center (in Jefferson County around Steubenville), near the huge Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (Greene County), in Ohio’s smallest county (Vinton), and in both growing suburbia around Columbus and urban Cleveland.
Here’s a glimpse of each place, and why each was chosen.
Farm country
Seneca County, just southeast of Toledo, is one of Ohio’s leading counties for the production of corn, soybeans and wheat, and is among Ohio’s top counties for the use of migrant workers. It’s also home to Tiffin and Heidelberg universities.
Seneca County voted Republican in the last five presidential elections, but Trump did better (61.8 percent) than most previous Republican candidates, including Mitt Romney (52.4 percent) and John McCain (50.4 percent).
Old industrial belt
Blue-collar jobs – most notably for steel and coal-fired power plants – once fueled good lifestyles for large numbers of people in Steubenville and surrounding areas of Jefferson County. Pay averaged 10 percent above the national average in 1980. But it’s now nearly 30 percent below the national average, after the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
The Ohio River county in 2012 narrowly voted Republican for the first time in 40 years, and then went overwhelmingly for Trump (65.6 percent) last year.
Wealthy defense center
The economy of Greene County outside Dayton is largely tied to 27,000 jobs at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Nearly 40 percent of the county’s adults have bachelor’s degrees. Greene County’s median family income of $78,588 easily tops the medians for Ohio ($62,817) and the United States ($66,011).
Trump’s support in the county (59.3 percent) was about the same as the Republican presidential candidates in the previous four elections.
Isolated Ohio
Vinton County, with just over 13,000 residents, is Ohio’s smallest county. It’s also one of a grouping of southern Ohio counties that are isolated from urban centers and busy interstate highways and that share these characteristics – ranking high for poverty and near the bottom in the state for income and the share of adults with high school educations.
Vinton voted for Bill Clinton twice, but for Republicans in each of the last five elections. There was a huge jump in support for Trump (70.6 percent) in 2016 over Romney (52.2 percent) in 2012.
Suburban
Suburban Franklin County is wealthy and growing. The region’s economy, though diverse, has a huge public anchor; more than 50,000 people work for either the state of Ohio or Ohio State University.
Historically Republican, the Central Ohio county turned Democratic in 1996. Every Republican candidate since then has done worse than his predecessor, dropping to 34 percent support for Trump in 2016.
Large city
Issues unique to large cities will be explored right at home, in Cleveland, a staunchly Democratic area that hasn’t had a Republican mayor since George Voinovich more than a quarter century ago. Trump won just 14.2 percent of the Cleveland vote.
Issues run the gamut. The schools rank among the state’s worst. More than half the children are in poverty. Yet some neighborhoods are thriving. And Cleveland remains a job center, the biggest reason why Cuyahoga County is one of only three counties in Ohio where average pay is higher than the national average.
Rich Exner, data analysis editor for cleveland.com, writes about numbers on a variety of topics. Follow on Twitter @RichExner. 2016 election results by county
The darker areas of red (for Donald Trump) and blue (for Hillary Clinton) represent counties won by at least 20 percentage points. Scroll over the map for county details.
Related: See Ohio election results by county since 1960
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
