Week 10: Politics Counts: Spotlight on 5 Ohio Counties - Washington Wire - WSJ - 1 views
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John West on 30 Oct 12This article looks deeply into what we talked about last week regarding Ohio being the key state to win for both candidates. The author examines the importance of the state even more closely by narrowing in on five specific counties that have historically helped decide which party Ohio swings to. In this sense, the article is also useful as a profile of important undecided voter demographics in the country. In Wood, Ottawa, and Sandusky counties, the population is small but they serve as an indication of which candidate the entire state will vote for. Full of both elderly whites and union members/auto workers, the counties have been notoriously difficult to predict but paint a larger picture of the state as a whole. Tuscarawas serves as a bridge between the industrial, union-heavy north and the more rural south, and has gone with the winner of every presidential election in the last twenty years. Finally, Hamilton is worth watching because it has a much larger black population than the rest of the state, which the article suggests will indicate if Obama has a large turn out of this demographic. I am interested to see the results from Ohio come in on Election Day, and after reading this article, I'm going to keep a particularly keen eye out for these counties. I normally look at the enormous emphasis given to certain states as a flaw in our campaigning process, but this article is a good reminder that these states themselves are very diverse and a pretty good representation of the country as a whole. That being said, I still feel like the issues put forward by the candidates in the coming weeks are going to favor swing states like Ohio. This article was also informative to me as a California voter because I don't normally think of there being a hierarchy within the swing states, and I particularly don't consider the counties within these states. The magnification that this article takes to Ohio makes me wonder how carefully the candidates themselves look: do they fo
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Anna Schutte on 09 Nov 12What intrigued me about this article was the need to examine four small counties in the state of Ohio in an effort to predict the outcome of a national election. More and more, as we've talked about, candidates are micro-targeting specific groups to hone their message to that groups specific concerns. Its become the way to win an election, but more and more it seems that it's just about convincing someone to vote for you and not about convincing them that important policies will help the country.