WP: How to Read the Buckeye Vote?
Some Say the State Isn't as Representative of America as It Once Was
By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 6, 2008; A11
CLEVELAND, March 5 -- Sen. Barack Obama had a simple answer for those who doubted he could expand his support beyond upper-income voters and African Americans: The more people saw of him, the better they would like him. But that argument fell flat Tuesday in Ohio. The senator from Illinois spent a week in Ohio and blanketed the state with ads, but he fared poorly with white working-class voters, a crucial demographic in which he had been consistently gaining ground elsewhere.
As Obama heads toward his next big showdown with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Pennsylvania -- and as his party contemplates whether he would be a strong general-election candidate in November -- Obama aides are being forced to confront the question of whether Ohio is an outlier or whether he has a serious problem with a key constituency.
In Ohio, for all of Obama's efforts there, many voters felt as though they did not know enough about the rookie senator with an exotic name -- or thought they knew things about him that were simply not true. Teri Harris, a laid-off school bus driver and single mother from the Cleveland suburb of Madison, said during canvassing on behalf of Clinton that she was bothered that Obama "turns his back during the Pledge of Allegiance," repeating a false rumor propagated on the Internet. "Does he believe in our country? I'm a little leery of that," said Harris, 48. Youngstown State University student Patrick Smith, 22, cited the same false rumor in rejecting Obama. "How can you be president if you don't say the Pledge of Allegiance?" he asked....
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According to exit polls, Obama lost white voters in Ohio by 30 points, voters with less than a college education (of all races) by 18 points, voters with family incomes under $50,000 (all races) by 14 points, and white voters over age 60 by 48 points. By contrast, in Virginia and Wisconsin last month, he won the white vote, and won or broke even among voters with lower income and education levels.
John Russo, co-director of Youngstown State's Center for Working-Class Studies, was blunt. "Race and class still matter in Ohio," he said. Experts point to ethnic makeup and decades of political tradition to help explain why Obama was not able to match his performance in Wisconsin, another Midwestern state with a soft economy. While Wisconsin has a strong reform ethos dating to the Lutheran Germans and Scandinavians who once dominated it, Ohio's ethnic mix leans to Roman Catholics -- largely Eastern European and Italian -- and Scotch-Irish, while its politics are more top-down and party- and union-oriented....
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The outcome leaves Obama looking for another way to connect with working-class voters in Pennsylvania, which has demographics similar to Ohio's, although with slightly higher levels of education. He will have help: Big unions that endorsed him last month, such as the Teamsters and Service Employees International, will have more time to work for him than they did in Ohio, where they narrowed his gap among union voters to 10 percent behind Clinton....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/05/AR2008030503297_pf.html
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