What’s the Matter With Ohio (And Red State Voters)?

A continuing paradox is how many voters - especially working class voters - seemingly continue to be in a funk about the nation's economy and support Republican politicians who actually push policies detrimental to these voters' economic interests and do nothing to deliver true improvement to their lives.  Performance politics and the old Republican memes of "god guns and gays" time and again dupe these voters into voting against their own best interest and/or claiming that Trump's policies and those of Republicans pushing for a new Gilded Age benefitted them when the actual data shows otherwise.  This is a perennial phenomenon in Southwest and rural parts of Virginia where people vote overwhelmingly Republican even as the GOP policies do nothing to help them and often harm them - GOP opposition to Medicaid expansion which saved rural hospitals is but one example. The same phenomenon is found across the country in red states such as Ohio where voter perception is out of touch with reality. The challenge for Democrats is how to get through to such people, many of whom live in a Fox News bubble and/or are so focused on grievances and hatred towards others that  they are blind to the truth.  A column in the New York Times looks at Ohio as a case in point of this paradox.  Here are excepts:

For many years, Ohio has been thought of as a bellwether state: With rare exceptions, whoever won Ohio in a presidential election won the nation as a whole. But in 2020, Donald Trump won Ohio by about eight points even as Joe Biden led the national popular vote by more than four points and, of course, won the Electoral College vote.

Then Ohio’s 2022 Senate election was won by J.D. Vance, who has staked out a hard-line ideological position that may be more thoroughly MAGA than that of Trump himself. And in Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary, Trump’s endorsement was enough to propel Bernie Moreno, a former car dealer who has never held elected office, to victory over the preferred candidates of the state’s relatively moderate Republican establishment.

So I’ve been trying to understand what happened to Ohio, and what it can teach us about America’s future. My short answer is that the United States of America has become the Disconnected States of America, on several levels.

Once upon a time, Ohio’s bellwether status could be explained by the fact that in some sense it looked like America. These days, no state really looks like America because the economic fortunes of different regions have diverged so drastically. And Ohio has found itself on the losing side of that divergence.

You might expect Ohio voters to support politicians whose policies would help reverse this relative decline. But there’s a striking disconnect between who voters, especially working-class white voters, perceive as being on their side and politicians’ actual policies. For that matter, as I wrote earlier this week, there’s a striking disconnect between voters’ views of what is happening with the economy and their personal experiences. It’s vibes all the way down.

One quick way to see the divergence in regional fortunes is to compare per capita income of a given state with income in a relatively rich state like Massachusetts. During the generation-long boom that followed World War II, Ohio and Massachusetts were basically tied. Since around 1980, however, Ohio has been on a long relative slide; its income is now about a third less than that of Massachusetts.

A lot of this has to do with the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs. There are considerably fewer manufacturing jobs in Ohio than there used to be, partly because of foreign competition . . . . although deindustrialization has been happening almost everywhere, even in Germany, which runs huge trade surpluses.

And wages for production workers in Ohio have lagged behind inflation for 20 years. That probably has a lot to do with the collapse of unions, which used to represent a quarter of Ohio’s private-sector workers, but are vanishing from the scene.

More broadly, the 21st-century economy has favored metropolitan areas with highly educated work forces; Ohio, with its relatively low share of college-educated adults, has been left behind.

So it makes sense for Ohio voters to feel disgruntled. But again, you might have expected disgruntled voters to support politicians actually trying to address the state’s problems. The Biden administration certainly hoped that its industrial policies, which have led to a surge in manufacturing investment, would win over more blue-collar voters. You might also have expected Democrats to get some dividend from the fact that unemployment in Ohio is now significantly lower than it was under Trump, even before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. But that doesn’t seem to have happened.

What about Trump? In most ways he governed as a conventional right-wing Republican, among other things trying to reverse the success of Obamacare, which had greatly reduced the percentage of Ohioans without health insurance. Trump did, however, break with G.O.P. orthodoxy by launching a trade war, with substantial tariffs on some manufactured imports.

In economic terms, the trade war failed. . . . Trump tariffs didn’t raise manufacturing employment. . . . . Yet, they found, the trade war appears to have been a political success. Regions whose industries were protected by tariffs became more likely to vote for Trump and Republicans in general, even though the tariffs didn’t result in a boost to employment. This, as the authors rather discreetly note, is “consistent with expressive views of politics.” That is, in 2020, many working-class voters in Ohio and elsewhere saw Trump as being on their side even though his policies didn’t help them. And if you look at some of today’s polling, it appears that they refuse to give President Biden credit for policies that actually do help workers.

Perceptions of the economy have improved, even if they’re still somewhat depressed. So the economy may be good enough for other issues, like reproductive rights, to carry Biden over the top. . . . But it’s still disturbing to see just how disconnected views about politicians have become from what those politicians really do.