Special pleading for the importance of Ohio is superfluous. Poblano at fivethirtyeight.com rates Obama's chances of winning without Ohio at just 17.37%, while McCain's chances without Ohio are a deminimis 2.41%. By those projections, there's over an 80% chance that Ohio will determine the national outcome.
Moreover, Ohio is now the only dead-even state in the nation, according to Poblano's poll tracking, "on the precipice of flipping." Recent Ohio polls are wildly erratic: Democrat-leaning PPP had Obama up by 8, then Rasmussen had McCain up by 10. Quinnipiac evened the score with Obama +2. WTF?
The spring refrain was that Obama had a winning strategy without Ohio, but that is looking less likeley. It depended on holding Michigan and winning at least one big eastern red state -- either Virginia, North Carolina or Florida. But Michigan and Ohio are falling back to the standard pattern of being fellow-travellers. Whoever wins Ohio will likely win Michigan, too. Virginia is looking more winnable for McCain, and it's by far the best Obama bet compared to North Carolina and Florida
No plausible combination of smaller western states, even including Montana and Alaska, would compensate for the electoral loss of Ohio and Michigan.
So Buckeye Blaster here we come.
That Ohio and Michigan -- the two states hardest hit by eight years of Bushonomics -- should even be in doubt is irritating and incomprehensible to many in the Obama camp. The consequence has been a kind of Ohiophobia or misohiopathy, if you will. "Those damned Ohioans," "I'm sick of hearing about Ohio," "Are Ohioans just plain stupid?" -- this is what we hear.
And it doesn't help, coming eleven weeks BEFORE the election. I humbly submit this inviolable political rule: Wait until AFTER the election, before you call the voters dumb.
Indeed, if Missouri is the Show Me state, Ohio has become the Show You Wrong state, and I do believe that Ohio voters take special glee in defying external expectations of us and proving the pols, polls and pundits wrong. (I even suspect that the wide variance in recent Ohio polls derives in part from an extraordinarily high rate of inrtentional deception among Ohio poll respondents.)
Yes, we Ohio voters are dedicated to proving that you cannot model, predict, or take for granted our behavior. This is a selected Darwinian trait. We survive at all, to the extent we do, by forcing the national politicians to cater to us, come look us in eye, and accept our bribes.
Ohioans invented the modern arts of running for office on criminal credentials (Democratic Governor Robert Lucas), ballot rigging (the infamous Nye machine), and political hucksterism (Abe Lincoln was nominated in 1860 as a result of a hoax sprung by an Ohio newspaper).
To the extent you are unfamiliar with these arts, we consider you to be low-information voters.
All you political prognosticators know that Ohio is the ultimate clusterf*ck. It's the American crossroads, where every type, trend, and demographic meets, shades, and intersects. You can't model or predict Ohio because we have too many multiracial Evangelical Democrats, black pro-choice Republicans, and gun-toting tobacco farmers who will vote for Obama because they want to start growing hemp.
We have counties where half of the registered Republicans may vote for Obama, and other counties where the official Democratic Party will collect unmarked absentee ballots to cast them for McCain.
There are constants in Ohio politics, but they aren't the presumed ones. Ohioans are easy to scare. The Georgian war will strongly help McCain, unless Obama supporters get off their kick of denying Russian expansionism VERY FAST. The wingnut slanders against Barack Obama will have a disproportionate effect in Ohio, because the Obama campaign relies on mass media and the Internet to counter those slanders, rather than fielding personnel to the flea markets, Labor Day picnics and county fairs.
After Labor Day, we are going to see a Republican offensive in the Ohio countryside that leaves us gasping -- comprised of organized defamation and trumped-up promises of jobs.
This thing is still winnable in Ohio, but it's going to take a fast and dramatic change of mindset and strategy. Please stop saying that Ohio is dispensable -- it only offends our precious sense of self-importance. Obama needs to appeal to our self-importance, not challenge it.
Interested readers may refer to my other diaries about the specific problems in southern Ohio.
To help the cause, I submit the following ten commandmanmdments (just a coincidence, I swear) of Ohio politics:
- There is one class of Politicians in America; thou shalt worship no party before it.
- Thou shalt make no craven image of the complex electorate; nor shalt thou honor fundamentals above fundamentalism.
- Thou shalt not utter the word "meme," ever.
- Thou shalt pitch thyself to the Politicians, or to the People, but not to both, for if thou sittest on the fence, thou shalt lose.
- Thou shalt honor the Sabbath and hold no economic summit on a Sunday without attending church services.
- Thou shalt pander for Ohio votes before and more convincingly than thou panderest for the votes of lesser nations, like Michigan and Colorado.
- Thou shalt appear to all the tribes of Ohioans in person, and when sending a surrogate, it shalt not be the woman whose last words in Ohio were "Shame on you!"
- Neither shalt thou send as surrugate the one who nodded in agreement to the "Shame on you!" speech.
- Thou shalt dwell in the oountryside, and condemn the cities as dens of iniquity.
- Thou shalt not forget that the 29 counties of Appalachian Ohio will determine the result of the Presidential election.
UPDATE: My powers of prophecy aside, PPP has just published a poll showing the race dead even in Ohio at 45-45. PPP last month had Obama up by 8 in Ohio. I am not happy about this -- it's just important we understand it. See
http://www.dailykos.com/...
I do not believe that Obama has "lost" an 8-point margin since July. The last PPP poll was deeply flawed and it became obvious it was an outlier. Most likely, the poll was skewed by failing to sample enough voters in the rural south, where there are multiple telephone problems. I think there has been slight slippage as there has been in the region, with more active preference-movement in Ohio than elsewhere, but the best overall assessment is that Ohio is dead even. (RCP average now has McCain up by 1.5 in Ohio, and other poll averages will shift as a result of the new PPP poll. Poblano interprets the new PPP poll as significantly improving McCain's chances of an Electoral College victory.)
UPDATE 2: A new blog on Rural Organizing in Ohio has been posted on the Obama website: Rural Organizing in Ohio