Polls close at 7:30 PM ET on Tuesday for the last big special election of the cycle for a House seat: The election in Ohio’s 12th district in Columbus's suburbs, left open after Republican Rep. Pat Tiberi’s resignation to take a private sector job. While this seat went from 54-44 Romney to 53-42 Trump, both sides are treating the contest between Democratic Franklin County Recorder Danny O’Connor and GOP state Sen. Troy Balderson as very competitive. While O’Connor and his allies at End Citizens United released polls giving Balderson a small lead, an independent poll from Monmouth showed the race as a true tossup.
As Daily Kos Elections always does on election nights, we’re offering county-level benchmarks that show the numbers that O’Connor needs to hit, in order to eke out the barest-possible win. We do this by taking the 2016 presidential election results, both in each county and districtwide, as a baseline, and from there, adjust each county’s numbers so they add up to a Democratic win districtwide. This helps you gauge whether your preferred candidate is on track to win, even when one county (which might have a lean very different from the rest of the district) is disproportionately reporting its results early.
The first column gives the name of each county (with only seven counties either partly or entirely in the district, we don’t need to leave any out), and the second column shows the percentage of the total number of votes supplied by each county. In the case of OH-12, blue Franklin County (home of Columbus) supplies the most votes, and the question is whether O’Connor can hold down the GOP numbers in the other, much-redder counties of the rest of the district. The third column shows each county’s 2016 results, and the fourth column shows the adjusted number that O’Connor will need to hit, to get to 48 percent districtwide. (There’s a Green Party candidate on the ballot who’s been polling in the low single digits, so we’re modeling to 48 percent rather than 50.)
COUNTY |
% OF VOTE |
2016 RESULTS (D/R) |
WHAT O’CONNOR NEEDS TO WIN |
DISTRICTWIDE |
100 |
42/53 |
48/47 |
FRANKLIN (PT.) |
32 |
57/38 |
63/32 |
DELAWARE |
27 |
39/56 |
45/50 |
LICKING |
21 |
33/62 |
39/56 |
RICHLAND (PT.) |
8 |
33/62 |
39/56 |
MUSKINGUM (PT.) |
6 |
33/62 |
39/56 |
MORROW |
4 |
23/73 |
29/67 |
MARION (PT.) |
1 |
24/72 |
30/66 |
At first glance, the 12th is a less imposing district than Pennsylvania’s 18th, where Democrat Conor Lamb pulled off a narrow special election upset in March: Hillary Clinton lost OH-12 only 53-42 here, compared with a 58-39 margin in PA-18. So, in order to get to 48 percent for O’Connor, we’re adding 6 to each county’s Clinton results and subtracting 6 from each county’s Trump results.
There’s something of a key difference here, though. Pennsylvania’s 18th district is what you’d call an “ancestrally Democratic" district. It has a lot of hidden Democratic strength if you look below the presidential toplines; it was a district that Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis won even while getting flattened nationwide, and it still has a number of Democratic county commissioners and state legislators further downballot.
Ohio's 12th district doesn't have that same history at all, with a long history of support for establishment-type Republicans. In fact, the last time that Delaware County, in the suburbs to the north of Columbus (and which should probably be thought of as the "heart" of the 12th, more so than Columbus itself), voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1916, one of the longest streaks anywhere in the nation!
Delaware County is also a relatively affluent and well-educated area: Its median household income of over $90,000 is the highest of any county in Ohio, by a wide margin. As you may have noticed in the recent spate of special elections—more so at the legislative level, where there’s a larger sample size to draw on than at the congressional level—there hasn’t been as much snap-back in special elections in more well-to-do suburbs as we’ve seen in more rural areas in places like Missouri and Wisconsin. In other words, the baseline levels of Republican support in affluent suburbs hasn’t varied as much from 2016 to now, compared with more blue-collar places that swung significantly toward Trump in 2016 and have lurched back toward being swingier again after realizing how badly they got conned.
Balderson is more from the establishment line of the GOP, much in the same mold as his would-be predecessor Tiberi; Balderson only narrowly defeated a more right-wing challenger in the primary to get the nomination. One other interesting thing to note about Balderson is that he’s from rural Zanesville on the periphery of the district (in Muskingum County). On the one hand, that might help him to overperform in that part of the district — but as you can see above, that’s only a small percentage of the seat, and he may not be adequately well-known in the more suburban parts of the district. By contrast O’Connor is the recorder in Franklin County, which has the plurality of votes in the district—though keep in mind that most of O’Connor's constituents are in either Ohio's 3rd or 15th districts and can't vote for him this time.
The other thing that O’Connor might be able to bank on is an enthusiasm gap between the much more liberal Franklin County (Columbus is both a college town, home to The Ohio State University, and the state capitol, with many public employees; in fact, the rapidly-growing Columbus is gradually replacing Cleveland as the Democratic anchor for the state, at least in terms of raw number of votes) and the rest of the state. So, keep in mind that O’Connor could overperform in Franklin County not just by getting more than 63 percent of the vote here, but if Franklin County also provides more than 32 percent of the district’s total votes.