Not a Priority: Democrats May Already Be Throwing in the Towel in Ohio
The Midwest state of Ohio, with its 18 Electoral College votes, has been considered an important “swing state” in many recent presidential elections, but that may not be the case in the upcoming 2020 election.
Ohio media outlet cleveland.com reported on the surprising admission from a prominent Democratic Party-aligned Super PAC that the state had essentially been downgraded as not being a priority in the next national election cycle.
Priorities USA, an influential left-leaning political action committee, helped former President Barack Obama win re-election in 2012, supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and backed a number of Democratic congressional and gubernatorial candidates in the midterm elections. They will assuredly back whoever emerges as the eventual Democratic nominee this time around.
The PAC has listed Ohio as a “GOP Watch” state — similar to Texas and Iowa — meaning that the state is leaning to the right and currently appears more favorable for Republicans and President Donald Trump’s re-election effort.
Signaling the downgrade of Ohio by Democrats is the fact that it was not included in the PAC’s first round of expenditures — roughly $100 million — for an early engagement program that is focused on targeting voters in the states of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Nor was Ohio mentioned in an already planned second round of that program, which intends to focus on states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire and North Carolina.
Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for Priorities USA, explained, “It’s not in our initial spending plans. It is in the states to watch and see if an investment is worth making.”
“That doesn’t mean we don’t think Ohio is winnable for a Democrat,” Schwerin added. “What we think that means is if Ohio is in play, we’ll have already won the easier states and have 270 electoral votes. Our investment strategy is how to get to 270 electoral votes.”
In other words, the Democratic PAC seems to think that they will handily win enough of the other states that they won’t have to worry about potentially losing Ohio and its 18 electoral votes to President Trump.
However, that sounds like an optimistic spin on the bad news that the perennial swing state may not be as “in play” this go-round as it usually is.
To be sure, local Democrats in the state have dismissed the downgrading of Ohio by Priorities USA and believe they stand poised to achieve victory, even as the state has increasingly been trending to the right in recent elections.
Democrats have won statewide elections in Ohio only three times since 2010 — Obama in 2012, and Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2012 and 2018 — while Trump won the state by more than 8 percentage points in 2016 and Republicans easily won the rest of the statewide elections in 2018, Cleveland.com reported, despite ample funding for the Democratic candidates from both state and national Democratic organizations, including Priorities USA.
The managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, Kyle Kondik, agreed that Ohio was shifting further toward Republicans and that it made sense for organizations like Priorities USA to focus their efforts on other states that are true toss-ups or trending blue.
“There are individual county-level trends that are positive for Democrats. There are just more for Republicans,” Kondik said.
He noted that it would be unlikely for Democrats to completely ignore Ohio in the 2020 election and suggested there would eventually be at least some effort mounted in the state, if only to force Trump and Republicans to focus resources there as a defensive move.
“I think if Democrats win Ohio, that probably means they’re winning back much of the rest of the Heartland states,” Kondik added. “You wouldn’t expect Ohio to be sort of the decisive state like it was in 2004.”
This is some pretty significant news for President Trump and though his race for re-election in 2020 is far from being a sure thing, the fact that Democrats have essentially written off a swing state as not being particularly competitive for them would seem to bode well for Trump’s chances overall.
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