This is, frankly, not the first time that someone has asked that question with respect to presidential politics. I was one of the organizers of the GOTV effort in Lorain, OH for Kerry in 2004 and I did some phonebanking and canvassing for Obama this primary. Given that I consistently back candidates who the majority of Ohio voters don’t, I can’t pretend to have any great insights into Ohio voters, but here are a few thoughts about why Obama didn’t do better here. My apologies in advance for overgeneralizing and/or insulting my fellow Ohioans. Also, I’ll say that specifically my comments are relevant to my experiences in NE Ohio. This is a pretty diverse state and I wouldn’t presume to understand what happens in Cincinnati or the Ohio valley.
Obama came across as not "having enough substance": Nevermind that Obama is the same age that Bill Clinton was when he won the presidency in 1992 (and took Ohio) and nevermind that his website is as chock full of all the policy prescriptions you’d want from a Democratic candidate, my sense in talking to voters is that they found him to not have enough substance. In part this is a question of the experience meme that Clinton has kept hammering at, but it is also the fact that many white voters, especially white voters of a certain age, often see black men as too slick, too superficial and not "real" enough. Just as many people see Clinton as "old" because she is a woman, even though she is a decade younger than John McCain, I think people often see Obama as "young" because he is black. But, alas, this perspective was also reinforced by Obama’s ads. Too many of them portrayed Obama speaking to a large crowd or had young people saying things about how Obama inspired them. Ohioans just aren't into inspirational political figures--Ohioans prefer their politicians to be boring white men. To many, the message of Obama's ads was that he was cool. And Ohio is most resolutely not a cool place. Hell, if Ohioans were cool, they’d get the hell out of Ohio.
Speaking of, Ohio is the kind of state people generally leave, not the one that people come to. There is a serious brain drain here, which has several consequences, but one that I, a relative newcomer, have been struck by is the fact that people are still friends with the people that they have known forever. Obama is a new face and Ohioans just aren’t used to new people. A biracial man who grew up in Hawaii is about as close to a Martian as most Ohioans are going to meet. Which brings me to the second issue, namely...
Obama came across as "not American": I don’t know if I would pin this on his name or the picture of him in Somali robes or the Farrakhan "endorsement" or the Muslim whispers or the supposed deal with Canada re: NAFTA, but I was surprised at how many people I spoke with either told me that they were worried that Obama was a foreign agent or that they had had to convince their friends or relatives that he wasn’t a Muslim or a foreign citizen or whatever. Clinton’s people definitely played on this, but there were already a lot of Ohioans were quite willing to believe that this black guy with a funny name was probably not the kind of guy who enjoyed apple pie and church on Sundays.
And then there are the factors that it is hard to answer. There was the woman who told me that all biracial people (including some of her best friends) hated white people, so she, as a white woman, would not want to vote for someone who was out to get her. There was another person who wouldn’t vote for a black man because she was convinced that he would be assassinated. There was someone else who said that he was sure that Obama was an environmentalist and he couldn’t vote for an environmentalist because they don’t care about poor people. There was someone else who told me that she had voted for Gore in 2000, and since he had lost, she had decided never to vote again. I don’t know if I could connect all that to a trend.
Ohio will most likely be a swing state come the fall. I also don’t know how Obama, should he be the nominee, will counter-act these particular prejudices. But he better start working on it.
Then again, in 2006, Democrats swept the state after years of Republican rule. So anything is possible, even in Ohio.