In Ohio, It's Really About the Economy

Voters reeling from job losses and housing troubles will play a key role in the Presidential contest

by Jane Sasseen

Browse Issues

Browse the BusinessWeek Archive

Some houses in the Nuss family’s neighborhood have sat for years without selling Photography by Billy Delfs, Chart by Alberta Mena/BW

McGregor is leery of the candidates' “feel-good“ messages Billy Delfs

Story Tools

• post a comment
• e-mail this story
• print this story
• order a reprint
• digg this
• save to del.icio.us

Abandoned homes in the Slavic Village section of Cleveland Billy Delfs

For most of her adult life, Kirsten Heft has voted Republican. A stay-at-home mother of two who lives on the outskirts of Columbus, Heft was raised in a GOP family, and her husband, Brian, a project manager at Motorola (MOT) and a member of the Air Force Reserves, is even more staunchly Republican. She voted twice for George W. Bush, and the GOP always seemed the way to go.

But as Ohio heads into the critical Mar. 4 vote, Heft has decided she'll register to vote in the Democratic primary. Fed up with the struggle to make ends meet on a budget without wiggle room, worried about how they'll manage to save for college for 9-year-old Travis and 7-year-old Robin, and outraged that her sister-in-law, recently diagnosed with cancer, has to worry as much about the cost of treatment as she does about getting better, Heft is going with Illinois Senator Barack Obama. "Thinking about how you're going to pay for your care shouldn't be the first thing on your mind when your doctor shows you your scans," says Heft. "Economic issues are key for me, and I think the Democrats are more interested in doing things that will help get the middle class back on track."

With a large swath of voters who can't be counted on to vote reliably Democratic or Republican, this quintessential swing state is once again set to play a critical role in the Presidential election, both in the Mar. 4 tally and the general contest in November. And the current mood is decidedly more sour than in 2004, when President Bush eked out a narrow win in the hard-fought Ohio race to clinch his reelection. That year, Democratic candidate John Kerry stressed the economy in his bid for Ohio votes, but the GOP's appeal to conservative social values carried the day.

This time around, though, an intense focus on helping Ohio's battered blue-collar and middle-class voters could favor the Democrats, especially if they continue to attract moderate Republicans and the 10% of the electorate that is made up of independents. New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Obama are now borrowing a page from the playbook used in 2006 by Sherrod Brown to defeat Mike DeWine, Ohio's Republican incumbent, for the U.S. Senate. Unlike John Kerry, Brown succeeded in turning the state's troubles into an electoral advantage. As a majority of independents and many Republicans abandoned the GOP, Brown grabbed 56% of the vote. Democratic candidates for a host of other offices from the governor on down also swept out their Republican rivals. "By focusing his populist streak on middle-class anxiety, [Brown] did a much better job tapping into concerns about the economy," says Herb Asher, a political science professor at Ohio State University.

The heated rhetoric used in Ohio by Obama and Clinton gives some hint of how the Democrats' eventual nominee may play the general election. With much of its manufacturing base devastated by global competition and the highest rate of home foreclosures in the nation, Ohio is at the epicenter of two of the economy's biggest challenges. Those issues, along with the high cost of and limited access to health care, increasingly have become the focus of the campaign.

Both Clinton and Obama have criticized trade deals such as Nafta that many voters here blame for the loss of jobs. Obama has urged companies to be "patriot employers" by creating good-paying jobs in the U.S. with benefits, while Clinton has pledged to appoint a "trade prosecutor" to enforce agreements and crack down on unfair Chinese practices. Each has amped up the attacks on oil companies, drugmakers, insurers, high-paid CEOs, and other corporate interests they say have benefited in recent years at the expense of ordinary Americans. "Both are taking an increasingly populist tone, molded for what they think Ohio wants," says Zach Schiller, the research director of Policy Matters Ohio, a public policy research organization.

BEYOND ANXIETY

Ohio's plight is a vivid reminder that manufacturing still provides a livelihood to millions of Americans—and that the agony of U.S. manufacturing's decline is far from over.