Republicans Beat Democrats in Ohio Ground Game

In Ohio, it really was all about the turnout -- though in ways that defied the conventional political wisdom of the Buckeye State.

A hugely motivated Republican base, driven in part by a “marriage protection” amendment to the state constitution, proved more than equal to the task of matching heavy increases in Democratic voting strength in Ohio’s big cities.

The GOP’s extensive mobilization delivered the state’s 20 electoral votes -- and the White House -- to President Bush.

More than 5.7 million Ohioans showed up to vote Tuesday, many waiting patiently for hours in the rain to have their say. That is about 1 million voters more than the total participating in the 2000 presidential election.

“Traditionally, the status quo in Ohio has been the notion that heavy turnout always favors the Democrats,” said Jason Mauk, a spokesman for the state Republican Party.

“Well, we turned the status quo on its head Tuesday.”

Many independent political experts and activists on the Democratic side agreed with that assessment Wednesday and credited the Bush campaign with turning up nearly 450,000 more votes than he got in 2000. Many Democrats still seemed stunned by the outcome Wednesday.

“It’s a little bit baffling at this point,” said Tony Charles, who headed the pro-Kerry America Coming Together operation in Cleveland. “Turnout was actually great on our side, but it was better on the GOP side than we anticipated.”

Democrats thought they had an excellent chance to capture Ohio, given the continuing hemorrhage of manufacturing jobs and an array of other economic problems. John F. Kerry visited the state 36 times in the general-election campaign, and both the Democrats and outside advocacy groups spent heavily on television advertising that attacked Bush on the lost-jobs issue.

But despite voter concerns over the economy, exit polls point to some clues to how the Bush campaign built its victorious operation.

Among Bush voters, “moral values” was the top issue on their minds, according to the polls, followed by terrorism. Moral values were cited as the primary issue by 23% of the state’s voters, and among this group 85% voted for Bush.

“I’m not sure the Democrats realize just how strong the church is in Ohio,” said the Rev. Bob Huffaker, senior pastor at the 5,000-member Grove City Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical church in the exurbs south of Columbus.

Grove City is a fast-growing place where new housing developments are overtaking what once were cornfields, and chain stores such as Staples, Petsmart and Bed Bath & Beyond have only recently opened branches.

“These people were voting their values,” said Huffaker, who had urged his parishioners to do just that in his Sunday message, albeit without mentioning Bush by name. “It was incredibly important to them to vote, especially on the marriage issue.”

Huffaker, who last month introduced Vice President Dick Cheney at a rally in Grove City, said: “Our parishioners are evangelical Christians, who see moral decay all around them and feel they have to speak up. It’s a biblical issue. It’s a spiritual issue.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by Nicholas Jackson, 29, a physical therapist in Newark, who works with mentally retarded people and is active in his church, the evangelical Vineyard Grace Fellowship.

Jackson feels so strongly about cultural issues, including stopping gay marriage, that he wrote a letter published in his local newspaper under the headline, “How Would Jesus Vote?” For Bush, in Jackson’s view.

“There’s a whole world view involved,” said Jackson, who was at his polling place Tuesday when the doors opened at 6:30 a.m.

“It’s either going to be someone’s immorality or someone’s morality that wins out. Someone’s cultural worldview is going to win out.”

Kerry, Jackson said, was “at odds with his own Catholic Church” on issues such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research and wanted “God out of the Constitution, from what I can see.”

Issue One on Ohio’s ballot was passed by a wide margin, 62% to 38%, and will amend the state’s constitution to define marriage as “only a union between one man and one woman.” Critics say another sentence in the amendment is so broad and so vague that it will likely open a floodgate of litigation by religious groups to deny state funding for Ohio State University and other public institutions that are offering domestic-partner benefits.

Motivation on religious grounds is hardly the sole explanation for the Republican turnout that boosted Bush, but it was clearly a major factor, experts said.

“There were a significant number of Christian conservatives who made an extra effort to get out to the polls because the marriage issue was on the ballot,” said John C. Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and an expert on Ohio politics.

“It’s not that the Democrats failed to do a great job,” said Green. “They did do a good job, and their get-out-the-vote effort was astounding in terms of resources and people -- but not as efficient as it could have been. Their basic problem is that the Republicans did a great job too.”

The Bush campaign had paid liaisons to the Christian evangelical community, and with 70,000 volunteers conducted a highly disciplined effort to target new voters who were likely Bush supporters and to keep track of them right up to election day.

“Our voter registration program was far more targeted and efficient than anything we saw on the other side,” said Mauk at Republican headquarters.

Democratic-leaning groups that mustered massive efforts to register voters and get them to the polls were stunned Wednesday that the Republicans had bested them.

“I can guarantee you, we’ve never had a campaign that was that intense,” said John Ryan, executive secretary of the AFL-CIO in Cleveland and a seasoned veteran of Democratic politics in the state.

“We knocked on more doors than we ever possibly had before in Ohio.”