Will Ohio Predict the Winner Again?

For 11 straight elections, the winner of Ohio has won the Presidency. John McCain is leading 46 to 42% among likely voters there and the internals of the recent poll tell us why:

On who is more trustworthy: McCain 49, Obama 41

On who is more likely to lower taxes: McCain 41, Obama 31

31% believe Palin is most like them, compared to 22% for Obama, 21% for McCain, and 13% for Biden

About 38% of voters and 42% of self-described independents of believe Palin has been treated unfairly by the media.

On who has the best plan to bring jobs to Ohio: Obama 40, McCain 29

For me, these numbers underline the effectiveness of the GOP's relentless drumbeat claiming Obama will raise all kinds of taxes during the past two months, and the charge of unfairness to Palin is also a McCain campaign creation.

But there is more to concern Democrats, as discussed in Walter Shapiro's must-read Salon piece today :

"What shapes campaign discussions -- both on- and off-the-record with leading Democrats and Republicans alike in this tightly knotted industrial state -- is uncertainty over the electoral impact of Barack Obama's race. No one has the hubris to try to quantify the racial factor (unlike amateur political mavens who exude ill-informed certainty) and no one dismisses the chances of Obama winning Ohio's 20 electoral votes. But with early voting scheduled to begin here Sept. 30 (another first for Ohio), there is an undercurrent of nervousness among Democrats about the party's great experiment in nominating Obama.

"I know there is a real concern out there that some people who normally would be voting Democratic might not vote for an African-American," said Tim Burke, the Democratic chairman of Hamilton County (Cincinnati and its suburbs). "Gov. [Ted] Strickland has spoken openly about this." Campaigning for Obama in Jackson County in the Appalachian southeastern corner of the state earlier this month, Strickland declared, "I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room -- and I'm not talking about any Republican. The elephant in the room is what everybody's thinking but nobody willing to talk about ... it's race."

Interviews with Ohioans in the article will give little comfort to the Democrats. There is no question that the Obama campaign is running the most impressive voter registration/turnout effort in U.S. political history, and for the first time there is a lengthy early voting period in most parts of the state. Nevertheless, there is a real question whether Ohio is winnable, making the electoral arithmetic very dicey come November 4.

- Richard Holcomb