Bush gains in small counties negated Kerry's big-city wins
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COLUMBUS, Ohio -- While John Kerry was piling up winning margins on Nov. 2 in Ohio's big cities, President Bush was making impressive gains in more than a dozen small, Republican-leaning counties where Kerry's numbers moved little over the Democratic vote in 2000.
It was the result of the GOP's strategy to get voters to the polls in all 88 Ohio counties, said Chris McNulty, executive director of the Ohio Republican Party.
Bush made sufficient gains in the big counties while surging ahead in the smaller ones compared with his 2000 performance, McNulty said. That strategy was key to Bush's 2.5 percentage point victory over Kerry, McNulty said.
For instance, in Democratic-dominated counties like Lorain, Bush picked up enough votes to lessen Kerry's gains. In Lorain County, Kerry had an increase of about 16,000 votes over Al Gore, but Bush gained more than 11,000 over his 2000 election.
"In a lot of these cases we were able to win it in part of the urban counties and these collar (suburban) counties. Where we lost we were able to limit Kerry's vote margins, which was a significant part of the winning equation," McNulty said.
In many smaller, GOP-dominated counties, the Republican picked up thousands of new votes as the Democrats struggled to stay even with 2000. In two counties _ Van Wert and Mercer _ Kerry lost votes to Gore's 2000 total while Bush picked up almost 2,000 in Van Wert and 2,500 in Mercer.
The GOP plan was dubbed the 72-hour project, in which the party rallied volunteers over the campaign's last weekend to get voters to the polls. The party used it in the 2003 Canton mayor's race, when Republican Janet Weir Creighton narrowly won an open seat.
The idea was born after the 2000 presidential election. Republicans were alarmed by Bush's 3.5-percentage-point Ohio victory after internal polls found a double-digit lead the weekend before the election. The GOP acknowledged it had been out-hustled by the Democrats in getting out the vote.
McNulty said this year the Democrats relied too much on outside groups, such as America Coming Together, to get voters to the polls. While that may have been true in the Democratic-rich precincts where ACT's focus was voter registration, the party and the Kerry campaign counted on their own volunteer networks to work on statewide turnout, said Ohio Democratic Party spokesman Dan Trevas.
Democrats in smaller Ohio counties tend to be younger than Republicans and the state's economic conditions have caused many of them to look elsewhere for a career, Trevas said.
Small-community voters also responded to the Republicans' message of values, maintaining leadership during wartime and "cynicism on how the federal government is going to change their economic situation," Trevas said. The Democrats couldn't win that vote, "not with this message, with this candidate at this time," he said.
"Kerry wasn't a perfect candidate for much of Ohio's rural areas, especially during a time of war. We had to play to that (the economy)," he said.
Voters in Republican-dominant areas also responded to state Issue 1, the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages in Ohio, Trevas said. Issue backers also took advantage of Bush rallies in Democratic urban strongholds, he said. That helped to dampen Kerry's gains.
McNulty credited the GOP volunteer effort with the victory, especially over the campaign's final 72 hours.
"A lot of our hypothesis going into that election was true, that person-to-person contact," McNulty said. "The people who made it happen were the volunteers and the local leaders who were volunteers."
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Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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