Ohio is secondary when it comes to presidential primaries. Can anything be done about it?

WASHINGTON, D. C. - Every four years, presidential wannabes spend months chatting up voters in New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina, Nevada and Michigan in hopes that winning the nation’s earliest primaries and caucuses will vault them into the White House come November.

Between those states and the 15 states who schedule their contests on March 5′s “Super Tuesday,” each party’s presidential nominee is often decided before Ohio – which casts ballots on March 19 – and other later-primary states have weighed in.

The situation is much the same this year. President Joe Biden has no credible challenge in the Democratic primary, and the roster of Republican candidates challenging former President Donald Trump for the GOP nomination has winnowed down to one: former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who lost her own home state and is hanging by a thread. Super Tuesday could deal the last blow to Haley’s candidacy, deciding that race a full two weeks before Ohio’s primary.

Ohioans still will cast primary ballots for president, but they won’t mean much. The Buckeye State’s inconsequential role in picking the presidential candidates highlights what some see as a need to reform the system that lets states race to be first in the country at the expense of their neighbors.

“That’s a real problem when a state that’s as big as Ohio, the seventh biggest state in the country, doesn’t have much of an impact on the presidential primary race,” says University of Akron political scientist David Cohen, who thinks it would be more fair to decide presidential nominees by having regional primaries instead of trusting small, overwhelmingly white states like Iowa and New Hampshire to make decisions.

Cohen says the current front-loaded primary system evolved when the Democratic party’s nomination process broke down in 1968, following President Lyndon Johnson’s dropped reelection bid. Before that, Cohen says presidential nominees were largely picked by party bosses.

A report produced by the McGovern-Fraser Commission after that election established clearer guidelines for the Democrats’ presidential selection process, elevating the role of primaries. Republicans ended up adopting many of its recommendations, as well.

He says Super Tuesday evolved as a plan by southern Democrats to cluster a group of their primaries on the same day in hopes of nominating someone more conservative than unsuccessful nominees George McGovern and Walter Mondale. The strategy backfired when Mike Dukakis was nominated, but front loading took off in the 1990s, with state after state moving up their primaries to have more impact.

 “States have an incentive to go early, because if they wait until May or June, they risk not having any kind of impact whatsoever,” says Cohen.

 Case Western Reserve University political scientist Justin Buchler argues that states with earlier primaries have somewhat more influence over the decision process, but he disagrees with Cohen that which state goes first makes much difference in who ultimately wins a party’s nomination. He says cross-state differences between people who are in the same political party are “relatively minor.”

He says voters in later primary states like Ohio get a say in who gets their party’s nomination, but their votes end up being “a reflection of a result we already know.” Knowing the party’s nominee in advance doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with the process, says Buchler, observing that this year’s major presidential party nominees were a foregone conclusion before any state cast ballots, since Biden and Trump were such early frontrunners.

Ohio Northern University political scientist Robert Alexander worries that Ohio’s political clout is being reduced because its longtime status as a swing state might be over.

Although Democratic President Barack Obama won the state twice, Alexander says GOP dominance of state politics and successive Ohio wins by Trump indicate Ohio may be permanently tilted to the right, making it less likely to get presidential candidate attention than states that can be won by either party.

“We do see that certain public policies definitely cater to swing states, and so that probably hurts us more than where we sit as a primary state,” says Alexander.

History of Ohio’s primaries
 
Ohio’s presidential primaries were held in May and June until 1996, when they were moved up to mid-March with the goal of increasing the state’s voice in the presidential selection process. In non-presidential years, Ohio’s primary is in May.

The 1990s move was advocated by Ohio’s then-Senate President, Cincinnati Republican Stanley Aronoff, who told the Associated Press that having a primary that occurs after nominations are locked up resulted in fewer Ohioans being appointed to high federal posts in both GOP and Democratic administrations.

“It’s all over by the time it gets to Ohio,” agreed then-Ohio Secretary of State Bob Taft, who subsequently became the state’s GOP governor. “Ohio should play a role in selecting who will be the nominee of each party for president.”

According to Ohio Politics Almanac co-author Michael Curtin, who covered the switch as a Columbus Dispatch journalist, Aronoff saw the state losing political clout as its status as an “industrial dynamo” waned following a recession in the early 1980s. He noticed that other states were moving towards earlier primaries as a way to improve their political status, since presidential primaries bring national attention and political spending, and he wanted Ohio to be part of it.

Curtin says the move did not achieve “the kind of relevancy that the backers of that legislation intended,” as other states kept moving their primaries forward to a date earlier than Ohio’s. After the 1996 switch, some officials like former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Cincinnati Republican, suggested moving Ohio’s primary to an earlier date in March, but those efforts did not take hold. These days, presidential nominations are usually settled before Ohio primary voters weigh in.

Since the state’s primary date switched, Curtin recalls just one instance when the state’s results were closely watched: the 2008 Democratic presidential primary duel between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Clinton won Ohio, but Obama won the nomination and the White House.

According to Curtin, Aronoff felt the fairest way to pick presidential nominees would be to divide the nation into four regions for primary purposes, with states in each region conducting simultaneous primaries. Under the system he supported, each region would get the earliest primary slot every 16 years so all would have a chance to go first.

“It’s probably too much to think that we could ever get our act together collectively to get it done, because it asks people to make a bit of a sacrifice in terms of working together among states,” says Curtin. “There would be logic and symmetry to that system, which is why it will never happen.”

Reform proposals
 
Ohio Rep. Dan Troy, a Willowick Democrat, thinks it is time for Ohio to give up on March presidential primaries. Last year, he introduced bipartisan legislation with backing from the Ohio Association of Election Officials that would require May primaries each year and stop the March switch in presidential election years.

Troy argues that switching the date confuses voters, forces candidates to file their petitions far earlier than usual, and makes them campaign in bad weather. Later primaries shorten the election season, and “may give us a little bit more time to actually do some governing rather than partisan politics,” says Troy.

Troy also is skeptical that a March primary gives Ohio any more political clout than it had when its primaries were several months later. He says the last time Ohio played a decisive role in picking a presidential nominee was in 1976, when its June primary results help push Jimmy Carter over the top.

“I don’t know that the early date makes us that much more of a player, and as we know right now, both nominations for the Republican and Democrat Party are pretty much settled” says Troy.

Professors Cohen and Alexander would like to see the current primary system replaced with a regional primary system, similar to what Aronoff sought. They argued in a 2020 USA Today opinion piece that having a single national primary day would tilt the field towards a candidate capable of self-funding, like businessman Michael Bloomberg.

They contend that a regional primary that includes Great Lakes states would better reflect the nation’s race, age, education, religion and religiosity than places like Iowa and New Hampshire. They suggest other regions would get to weigh in throughout the primary season and could potentially replace the Great Lakes as the first primary depending on their “representativeness” quotient in future years.

“Taken together, these states compose one-fourth of all Electoral College votes (134), making them a logical grouping to test the competitiveness of candidates for the general election,” the pair said of the Great Lakes states. “Strength in this region would be an important signal to partisans looking for a nominee who could succeed in November.”

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato endorses a different variant of a regional primary system in his book titled “A More Perfect Constitution.” He’d like to see a rotating regional primary that would give every state a more realistic chance of voting at the start of the calendar and compresses the bloated presidential nomination calendar. He argues that such a plan would have to be put into the Constitution.

 “Without a constitutional requirement, there is simply no solution to a situation that deteriorates every four years,” wrote Sabato. “Try as they might, the national party committees cannot orchestrate a fix.”