Tracking Ohio vote on election night: what counties to watch

[jefferson_dem]

Tracking Ohio vote on election night: what counties to watch
Posted by Stephen Koff/Plain Dealer Bureau Chief November 02, 2008 02:00AM
Chuck Crow/The Plain Dealer

John McCain last week bypassed Ohio's Republican strongholds and aimed his campaign squarely at the conservative blue-collar parts of Ohio that will help decide who takes the state. On Thursday, McCain spoke to voters from a gazebo in Sandusky with his wife Cindy and "Joe the Plumber" at his side.

Click here to view and print the full-size graphic. (745K, PDF)
WASHINGTON -- After the polls close Tuesday, media reports will trickle in to say that with some small percentage of the vote counted, one candidate or another is winning Ohio.

Ignore those reports.

Political pros will. Without knowing more about which precincts or counties the votes are from -- and which ones have not been counted -- these incomplete results are a poor predictor of whether Barack Obama or John McCain will win.

To understand why, campaign veterans point to what happened in 2004. Cuyahoga County went for John Kerry. So did Lucas County (Toledo), Franklin County (Columbus), Montgomery County (Dayton) and 47 percent of Hamilton County (Cincinnati). The Democrat carried nearly every large population center in Ohio.

And still he lost to President Bush. How could that happen?

Easily. Ohio has 88 counties, some of them sparsely populated. But like rabbits, their votes multiply. Look at just five small, heavily Republican counties in western Ohio -- Auglaize, Darke, Mercer, Putnam and Shelby, says Steve Fought, an Ohio Democratic political veteran, aide to congresswoman Marcy Kaptur and a dedicated student of Ohio's election map. Bush carried those five counties with a combined margin of more than 51,000 votes. Back in Columbus, Kerry won Franklin County by 48,548 votes.

That means that five rural counties rarely visited by major political figures, let alone major media, canceled out the Democratic vote in one of the state's biggest counties.

So come election night, what's a voter to do?

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http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2008/11/tracking_ohio_vote_on_election.html

PDF here - http://blog.cleveland.com/pdgraphics/2008/10/03WGWATCH01.pdf

[OilemFirchen]

1. One huge difference...

Jennifer Brunner. Moreso, no Kenneth Blackwell.

[OilemFirchen]

2. Clinton County's gonna go blue this year

And Hamilton may as well - if the AA turnout is as massive as I predict.

Any other Ohioans sensing other counties that may flip?