What the Hell Happened in Ohio?
For the most part, the data backs up the narrative that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton due to the defection of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party. According to CNN exit polls, Clinton lost whites without college degrees (the proxy category for the white working-class) by a spectacular 29% to 66% margin. This represented a 19-point decline for the Democrats compared to eight years ago, when Obama only lost those voters 40% to 58% to John McCain. In particular, this collapse of support was staggering in the Rust Belt states that propelled Trump to an Electoral College victory: 37 points in Michigan, 33 in Wisconsin, 26 in Iowa, 20 in Ohio, and 17 in Pennsylvania. Had Clinton been able to maintain even a small portion of the support of these voters, she would have assuredly won the presidency.
With that being said, let’s focus on Ohio for a second. The three maps below provide some insight into why Trump won that state. The map on the left shows Trump’s performance (colored in orange) versus Gov. John Kasich (colored in red) during the Republican presidential primary. As you can see, Trump won the counties along the eastern and southern portions of the state, while Kasich won most of the rest en route to his only primary victory. This pattern of support for Trump in Ohio would reappear during the general election, as shown on the map in the middle. The darkest blue colors indicate the largest shifts in support toward the Republican Party from the 2012 to the 2016 election. These shifts toward Trump are also concentrated in the eastern and southern portions of the state. These areas are analogous to the Appalachian region of Ohio, shown on the map to the right. One could conclude from this that Trump was able to win Ohio because of the strong support he received from white working-class voters in the Appalachia region.
Such an analysis, however, fails to tell the whole story. Largely unnoticed in the post-election analysis is the stunning fact that Clinton also experienced a 24-point decline in support among whites with college degrees in Ohio, compared to Obama in 2008. What’s more, Ohio was the only state in which the decline in support was greater among college educated versus non-college educated whites. This is made even more stunning by the fact that Clinton’s support nationally among this voting bloc actually represented a 1-point improvement over Obama’s margin against McCain (45%-48% compared to 47%-51%).
So what exactly happened? The map below tells part of the story. The states in red are the states in which Democrats lost support among college-educated whites since 2008, while the states in blue are the ones where their support grew (CNN does not have exit poll data for the states in gray). As you can see, there is a clear geographic split, with these voters in the South and West trending toward the Democrats and voters in the Midwest and Northeast peeling away. Ohio saw the most pronounced negative shift, followed by Missouri (17 points) and Florida (15 points). The greatest gains for the Democrats came in Utah (28 points) and Texas (18 points).
So it’s clear that the losses were part of a larger regional (though not national) trend. However, this still doesn’t explain why they were so pronounced in Ohio. Unfortunately, the exit polling provides little insight, and in fact only makes the situation even more muddled.
As it is, the exit polling reveals something rather counterintuitive about Trump’s support in Ohio. CNN asked Ohio voters whether or not they had a favorable opinion of Gov. Kasich. 50% did, while 40% did not. What is remarkable is that Clinton led 49%-46% among those who did, but trailed 35%-65% among those who did not. Extrapolating these numbers out, more than 57% of Clinton voters in Ohio had a favorable opinion of Kasich, compared to less than 48% of Trump voters. In other words, the Republican governor of Ohio was more popular among those who voted for the Democratic presidential nominee than the Republican one.
There was no secret that Gov. Kasich and President-elect Donald Trump have had an icy relationship at best. Kasich refused to endorse Trump after the primary, and did not even appear at the Republican National Convention held in his own state. On the surface, it would appear that Kasich’s supporters (especially in Ohio) were exactly the kind of voters who Hillary Clinton tried to court in the general election: moderate, suburban, college-educated whites who had no particular love for Trump. However, the exit polling shows that not only did Clinton fail to win over these voters, she actually lost many of them to Trump. He won by 20 points in the suburbs, whereas McCain lost there by a point. Clinton won moderates by only 6 points, whereas Obama had won them by 23. Counter to the idea that Kasich supporters were drowned out by a surge in turnout of the white working-class, there was actually a greater percentage of college educated whites among the electorate in 2016 than in 2008 (37% vs 33%), and a smaller percentage of non-college whites (43% vs 50%). As we’ve seen, those college educated whites ended up voting en masse for Trump. In fact, based on the exit polling it appears that more non-college whites voted for Clinton than college educated whites.
As baffling as this all seems, it is clear that many Kasich and even Obama supporters voted for Trump. Regardless of class or education level, whites in Ohio saw Trump as the agent of change that Hillary Clinton could never be for them, and the same could be said for white voters all across the country. This in part also explains why so many white voters, particularly working-class whites, decided to vote for Bernie Sanders in state after state during the Democratic primary.
Perhaps the most fascinating revelation from all of this is that had Clinton simply maintained Democratic support among college educated white voters in the Midwest, as she did overall nationally, she would have won the election. There is no question that she would have won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (not to mention Florida), even in the face of the “revolt” of the white-working class. It even appears possible that she would have won Ohio. This all goes to show just how spectacular of a failure the Clinton campaign really was. The Democratic Party’s decision to portray themselves as the party of the status quo proved disastrous in the end.
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