Ohio, The I-71, And The Highway To Democratic Defeat

How Two Lunches Explain Why The Old Ohio Isn't Coming Back

It was maybe 22 hours apart, if that.

The year I was 16 was the first time I came out to anybody, a couple of close friends at school sort of figured it out and so I told them. The list of people who knew wasn't long - it was just a few friends at most. Notably, that list didn't extend to my mother, who I worried would try her best but not fundamentally be able to be much help with the hell that was going through my head for years at this point.

In August 2013, we found ourselves in Ohio, on a road trip through Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Canton, and in Cincinnati, we got a late lunch at a little taco shop on the water, right by the Ohio-Kentucky border, and by the Reds stadium. It was a covered patio where we ate, and the food was delicious, and as an uplift to the very important, but necessarily somber, morning spent at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, it was perfect. We sat at our table for a while, just relaxing in the afternoon shade before heading off to our next part of the trip.

I'm almost never one for people watching - I find it boring, because I don't care who people are or what they do in public. I don't think that proves anything about who they are. But that day, I found myself leaning back in my chair, watching the couple a table to my left, and in front of me. They weren't obviously a couple or anything - it was a pair of professionals, dressed up but not totally formally. It looked to anyone else like a pair of colleagues, I'm sure, but I know it was a gay couple. To my closeted self, watching the attentive, affectionate, but yet subtle way they responded to each other, knowing the other's rhythms and wants, was inspiring to me. It gave me hope, and that night I resolved to tell my parents when me and my Mom got back from Ohio.

22 hours later, we dug into an Applebees in Ross County, Ohio, the only available food option acceptable to us on the scenic highway we took to go from Cincinnati to Canton, and in that diner was Fox News on TV. This being the summer of 2013, gay marriage was a hot talking point, and between the utterances that took various forms, every third word I heard in that diner was either a racial slur to describe the President or a homophobic epithet to describe people like me.

It wasn't my first exposure to knowing I'm gay in a room full of people with nothing but hatred for the idea of people like me, but it stung. It kept me in the closet for another 8 months to my folks. The I-71 is the main thoroughfare in Ohio, the line from Cleveland to Cincinnati. It is in some ways better known as a sort of second Mason-Dixon Line, the line at which the south begins. Because in Cleveland and Cincinnati, I felt at home, safe. I felt free to be the man I was, and be honest with what that meant. South of the I-71, I felt isolated and alone.

…

I know I've written about that 24 hours before, but it's instructive in thinking about the state as a whole. Look at this map courtesy of Lak, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Almost uniformly, the areas where Biden did the worst in the state are south of the I-71, and it's not like Lak's model would have any particular reason to expect much success there anyways for Biden. These were the areas where the biggest anti-Biden swings were occurring, even compared to Hillary's weak performances, and it makes sense why. This map makes perfect sense to me because this is what I would have guessed - not because of my knowledge of past results or any understanding of political geography, but because of an understanding of the people who live there.

I oscillate on the viability of Tim Ryan winning his Senate bid in Ohio quite a lot - from "no hope waste of time" to "viable longshot", to be clear - but I don't find the prospects of it that fascinating. Even if we do manage to win it, we'll hold it for a term, and then lose it back in 2028. 6 years of a single Senate seat would be nice, and could potentially be decisive, but it's not exactly the most tantalizing prospect. It is to me what Colorado 2014 was to the GOP - a fun oddity, but nobody was that surprised when Gardner lost.

Could Democrats win it? Maybe, if everything breaks right for them. I laid out the case for how they could do it before, and it mostly holds up, but the most interesting part of Ohio to me is that you see three different cultures in play. You have the three major cities, bastions of liberalism and diversity, where you're not surprised to see a group of six people, three white, three not, beside you at a baseball game, as I saw at the Cleveland baseball game I attended that trip. Cincinnati and Cleveland don't have a discernibly different vibe to them than Baltimore or Philadelphia, and that is a compliment - I love all four of those cities greatly.

There's the suburbs and exurbs of these places, which are slowly moving left, but can still feel stodgy and stubborn. Democrats had some hopes of breaking the GOP's gerrymander in 2020, mostly because they thought the rural areas (especially in outer Cincy) might swing enough to turn the GOP fortunes around. It wasn't, because there wasn't enough of a swing from 2016 to 2020 with well-off white social liberals, but they're coming. The GOP will probably be able to avoid Congressional losses for a few more cycles with new maps, but not forever.

And then, there's the rurals, and mostly the rural south, under the I-71. Even Youngstown, the bastion of Tim Ryan, is starting to behave like a culturally southern place, with the whites getting increasingly Republican and leaving the only bastion of Democratic support the heavy Black population. 

Democratic victories in the state will have to run through the cities on the I-71, and their suburbs, and not south of it. They lost the state because they bled support with voters who are culturally southern, but their path back to victory won't run through the same places or people. It will take them winning the cities by huge margins and getting huge swings to them in the suburbs and exurbs to make the gains necessary to win. If the Ohio Democratic Party actually wants success - meaningful, long term success - they need to remember the lesson of the last decade. The old way to win Ohio is gone, a mere memory on the highway to Democratic Defeats.