Fourth of July in Franklin
Sen. Jesse Helms dies at 86
Spotted at the Cityfolk Festival
Ohio Primary Election
New 'blue' map draws questions, skeptics
Sunday, March 09, 2008
WASHINGTON — Something funny happened in the March 4 primary election in Mercer, Greene, Butler and dozens of other traditionally red counties: They turned blue.
In 66 of Ohio's 88 counties, voters cast more Democratic ballots than Republican ballots. That's a far cry from 2004, when George W. Bush won 73 counties.
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It could be that all the drama Tuesday was on the Democratic side and everyone wanted to get in on the act. But some Democrats fear Republicans were crossing party lines to choose Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama, thinking Clinton would have a harder time beating John McCain. And with Ohio's weak enforcement of election laws designed to challenge such voters, raiding another party's primary is easy to do, they say.
Clinton won by an overwhelming margin — 10 percentage points — so it is hard to believe crossover voters determined the winner. But some counties bucked decades of voting patterns. Bush won Mercer County with 75 percent of the vote in 2004. On Tuesday, 53 percent of the voters cast Democratic presidential ballots.
"I don't think we're looking through rose-colored glasses by saying that Mercer County is a Republican county, no matter what the primary results may show," said John McClelland, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party.
Tom Zitter, vice chairman of the Mercer County Republican Party, attributes the heavy Democratic vote to "people who were expressing their opinion in an interesting way." Some Republicans, he acknowledged, voted for the Democrat they thought would be the most vulnerable in the fall.
According to the National Election Pool Exit Poll by Edison/Mitofsky, 9 percent of the ballots cast in the Democratic primary came from voters who identified themselves as Republicans, while 22 percent said they were independents.
Republicans, and many independent political analysts, attribute the shift to common sense: The Republican primary was all but over by March 4, while the Democrats were still slugging it out. But Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, isn't so quick to dismiss the theory of shifting political sands. He argues that a Democratic sea change began in 2006, when both he and Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland were elected. "People want change and John McCain is going to lose," he said. "This mountain is too high for him to climb."
