Well, it was an exciting night in the Ohio 12 Special Election the other night. Danny O’Connor has that race in a too close to call status and the 1,700 vote margin dropped to about 1,500 yesterday. With the provisional and ballots O’Connor will likely get this down to the .5% and trigger a recount. There is an outside chance those ballots will push him over the top.
A day after a lot of conventional wisdom has sprung up around this great Urban/Rural divide issue. When you look at percentages to understand the district it is easy to jump to such a conclusion. I just find that data solely as percentages can be misleading, particularly regarding electoral potential. I think looking at raw vote totals and compare that with past performance in that district will provide a better picture for us.
The Election Cycle Pattern
A note before looking at some data. We all know that off presidential cycle elections see a dramatic drop off in the vote for both parties. Unfortunately, the Democratic vote tends to not just drop, but fall off a cliff. When you look at many of the special elections since 2016 what you see is that we are maintaining the 2016 vote total much much better while the Republican vote falls through the floor. That dynamic was also evident in the Virginia delegate elections last fall.
Vote Margins
The OH 12 has been voting Republican for a very long time, so the vote margins obviously favor the republican. This has been true in each county even, most of the time. Let’s take a look at the 2016 Congressional Race vote margins for the Democratic candidate compared to Tuesday’s vote margin for O’Connor:
Deleware and Franklin counties are the densely suburban areas around Columbus that make up the majority of the vote in the district. These 2 areas are made up of some of the wealthiest zip codes in the state as well. The remaining counties are mostly rural, with a few small towns and cities interspersed. As you can see by reviewing the chart above, O’Conner’s vote margins narrowed significantly compared to 2016. This, of course, is not surprising, given the results, but the gains are evident in each and every county. The urban/rural divide conventional wisdom tends to obscure that fact.
It is true, the largest gains were made in the two more densely populated areas of the district and not in the rural areas, but, as it turns out, that is largely a function of population size. O’Connor made strong gains across the board, urban and rural.
of course looking at this data alone is not fully instructive. So, I looked at a typical cycle. Now I only did a chart for 2012 compared to the 2014 cycle as those years are the only years the district was composed of the same map. it was gerrymandered after the 2010 election. Perusing prior elections the patterns seem to fit what we see here as well though. So this chart is fairly typical of what happens to vote margins between presidential years and off presidential years:
Here you can see that the margins are barely different even given the dramatic drop off in voter turnout we know occurs. Some areas we narrowed the margin, some areas the Republican widened the margin, but really the voting pattern across cycles is fairly consistent compared to the first chart and what happened Tuesday.
O'Connor narrowed his margin of loss in 6 of 7 counties and drove to a resounding victory in Franklin County to get the result he did. Here is a table with the tally of how much he changed the margin in each county.
County Name
|
Vote Margin Change in favor of O’Connor
|
Delaware
|
43,804
|
Franklin
|
42,721
|
Licking
|
28,698
|
Richland
|
7,489
|
Muskingum
|
5,964
|
Morrow
|
6,225
|
Marion
|
1,973
|
Total
|
136,874
|
He made gains on this front in each and every part of the district. he did see the most significant gains in the suburban areas with Franklin and Delaware Counties tallying 86,525 votes gained on the Republican compared to 2016. That is 63% of the 136,874 votes he gained overall. Of course, that leaves 37% of the remaining gains made in the rural areas for a total gain of 50,329 votes on the Republican compared to 2016. A gain of 50,329 votes in rural counties is a significant gain made. Just looking at the percentage does a disservice to the significant contribution the rural areas made on narrowing the gap for O’Connor the other night.
Gains in The Rural Parts of the District were as valuable as suburban gains
In fact, the two Columbus suburb dominated counties in the district comprised 64% of the total votes cast in the district while the rural counties made up 36% of the vote cast. So the 37% gains made against the Republican margin actually outperforms the total vote in the rural areas.
I do not deny that an urban/rural divide exists. But if we think about our districts in this way alone, and ignore the rural areas, it will be to our detriment. O’Connor made significant gains across the district, both urban areas and rural areas chipped in a fair share of the gains he made in his race. We must work red and blue areas to succeed.
I prefer to think of it how Democratic candidate for Congress Rashida Tlaib put it this morning. To paraphrase her, the American people are not so much divided as disconnected from one another. O'Connor results prove this out to a degree, he succeeded by making similar gains relative to population size in almost every area of the district. The rural areas contributed to his success as much as the urban.
For Clarities Sake
The above charts and table are looking at change in margin of the vote. I know it is a bit of a different way to look at things, in fact, some of these changes actually exceed the total vote cast for O'Connor in that county. I include the following two charts to provide clarity on how that happens.
Most of the gains made in margin really come from the Republican losing voters from 2016 while O'Connor bled off far fewer voters. the next two charts show the actual vote decline suffered by both candidates. The first is Tuesday’s result compared to the 2016 vote. After that chart, I throw in what the from 2012 to 2014 vote loss by county looked like for each candidate for some additional context.
The most surprising thing on this chart is that O’Connor actually increased his vote total in Delaware County. That is nearly unheard of in most districts across the country. Balderson lost more than 30,000 votes in 3 of the 4 counties compared to the Republican 2016 vote. Meanwhile, O’Connor kept his losses below 5,000 votes in 5 counties across the district and the other one barely exceeded a 5,000 vote loss and the 1 gain in vote already noted. O’Connor outperformed the Republican in retaining the 2016 vote in each and every county, and by SIGNIFICANT margins in each and every county.
For comparison’s sake, let’s take a look at the 2012 to 2014 cycle.
In a typical cycle, both parties tended to lose vote at a similar rate in this district.
In the end
O’Connor did a fantastic job. This data reveals there is power in maintaining turnout in off-cycle years. To really get things rolling in our districts across the country the next step is to figure out how to grow the vote each and every cycle, no matter if a president is on the ballot or not.
In the November rematch in this race, O’Connor needs to do just that to win. He needs about 150,000 votes to succeed (maybe a bit fewer as Balderson is clearly not Tiberi). That is something no Democrat has achieved in this district no matter if it was a Presidential year or not.
It is eminently doable, we just need to get behind him.