Ohio does in fact make or break U.S. presidents
Political junkees have long called Ohio the ultimate swing state, the king-maker in U.S. presidential races. WVXU's Howard Wilkinson has found the numbers to prove that, in fact, Ohio is the decider.
Political junkees have long called Ohio the ultimate swing state, the king-maker in U.S. presidential races. WVXU’s Howard Wilkinson has found the numbers to prove that, in fact, Ohio is the decider.
“At last we can prove what we knew intuitively all along – that there is no better state to look at than Ohio as the predictor of who the next president will be,” Wilkinson writes. “And it is the state where the vote in presidential elections most closely mirrors the nation’s vote as a whole.”
He shares data from Kyle Kondik, managing editor of a weekly politics newsletter published by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, looking at presidential elections dating back to 1896 and finding that no state had a higher percentage of picking the winner than Ohio. The candidate who won Ohio won the presidency 28 of 30 times, for 93 percent.
Ohio was followed closely by New Mexico, which picked 24 of the last 26 for 92 percent. (New Mexico didn’t become a state until 1912.)
Read the full WVXU story here.
Author
