The other faction, call it the Bible-and-Beretta caucus, wants to save souls between rounds of target practice. That sort-of-religious outlook is a perpetual eddy in the stream of Ohio Republican politics. Yesteryear’s key example was Prohibition. Today’s is abortion.
The successful GOP politician is she or he who can successfully navigate through those two currents. Historically, Gov. Mike DeWine, of Cedarville, has been a skilled helmsman: Consistently right-to-life while also adhering to the James A. Rhodes school of economics that “profit is not a dirty word in Ohio.”
Now, though, Ohio Republicans, or at least some of them, are restless. There’s lots of appeal in all-or-nothing politics, as Donald Trump’s Ohio successes showed: He drew 51.3% of Ohio’s vote in 2016, a share that increased to 53.2% in 2020.
But as suggested by the recent rumpus at a meeting of the Ohio Republican State Central Committee, all is not placid in Lincoln’s party. A considerable (or at least noisy) faction – which defines itself as conservative – thinks DeWine is anything but conservative thanks to measures he took to fight COVID-19. Part of Republicans’ battle is also stoked by questions about the state party’s bookkeeping.
There’s always something on the right: But Republican splits (and stay-at-home GOP voters) give Democrats their best chances of winning Statehouse executive offices. In 1852, Democratic presidential nominee Franklin Pierce (coincidentally, a distant ancestor of Barbara Bush – there is an American Establishment) was the last Democrat to carry Ohio for 60 years, until 1912, when Woodrow Wilson did. Why? In part because Ohio Republicans split over whether to re-elect Cincinnati’s William Howard Taft as president or return Bull Moose Progressive Theodore Roosevelt to the White House. (Also in 1912, Ohio elected Dayton Democrat James M. Cox governor. Cox went on to become the Democratic Party’s 1920 nominee for president. His running mate? New York State’s Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
In 1970, Democrats won every statewide executive office (except secretary of state and then-separately elected lieutenant governor) thanks to an internal Republican fracas over the Crofters affair (which was peanuts by House Bill 6 standards but a huge deal at the time).
What’s more, in an angle that seems quaint today, in 1970 some Ohio House Republicans lost their seats – helping lose an Ohio House majority in 1972 – by voting “yes” on a measure to permit Sunday liquor sales by the drink under very limited circumstances. That’s what ideology gets a party in Ohio: Losses.
In 1976, the Ohio GOP split over incumbent Gerald Ford vs. challenger Ronald Reagan as Republicans’ prospective presidential nominee. That surely was partly why Jimmy Carter carried Ohio that year by 11,000 votes.
One upside for the GOP is that Republicans seem like a well-oiled machine compared to Democrats, who last ran Ohio’s government in the 1980s. Republicans have since had an almost 40-year streak of statewide wins (except for U.S. Senate seats) thanks partly to legendary Republican State Chair Ray Bliss’s maxim: Keep issues out of campaigns.
The Ohio GOP’s in-house rebels may feel otherwise. But Republican success stories such as four-term Gov. James A. Rhodes and two-term Govs. George V. Voinovich and John R. Kasich didn’t win by talking books-and-ideas. They talked bread-and-butter. And they won.
Thomas Suddes is an adjunct assistant professor at Ohio University. He covered the Statehouse for The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer for many years.
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