What's wrong with Ohio?

For many years, Ohio has been considered a barometer state: with rare exceptions, whoever won Ohio in a presidential election won in the nation as a whole.

But in 2020, Donald Trump won Ohio by about eight points, even though Joe Biden led the national popular vote by more than four points and, of course, won the Electoral College vote.

Later, in the 2022 Ohio Senate election, the winner was JD Vance, who has opted for a hardline ideological position that may be more decidedly Maga (acronym for the slogan Make America

Great

Again). than that of Trump himself.

And in Tuesday's Republican Senate primary, Trump's endorsement was enough for Bernie Moreno, a former car salesman who has never held elected office, to beat the preferred candidates of the state's relatively moderate Republican establishment.

So I've been trying to understand what's happened in Ohio, and what it can teach us about America's future.

My short answer is that the United States of America has become the Disconnected States of America, in several ways.

There was a time when Ohio's position as a barometer could be explained by the fact that, in some ways, it resembled the United States.

These days, no state really looks like the United States, because the economic fortunes of different regions have diverged dramatically.

And Ohio has found itself on the losing end of that divergence.

Ohio voters might be expected to support politicians whose programs would help reverse this relative decline.

But there is a striking disconnect between who voters perceive to be on their side and politicians' actual policies.

There is also a striking disconnect between voters' opinions about what is happening with the economy and their personal experiences.

It's all vibrations.

Okay, some facts.

A quick way to see the divergence in regional fortunes is to compare the per capita income of a given state with the income of a relatively wealthy state like Massachusetts.

During the generation-long post-World War II expansion, Ohio and Massachusetts were basically tied.

However, since 1980 or so, Ohio has experienced a long relative decline;

its income is now about a third lower than that of Massachusetts.

This is largely due to the loss of high-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector.

There are far fewer factory jobs in Ohio than before, in part because of foreign competition, although deindustrialization has taken place almost everywhere, including in Germany, which runs huge trade surpluses.

And wages for production workers in Ohio have lagged behind inflation for 20 years.

This probably has a lot to do with the collapse of unions, which used to represent a quarter of Ohio's private-sector workers but are disappearing from the scene.

More generally, the 21st century economy has favored metropolitan areas with highly skilled labor;

Ohio, with its relatively low percentage of college-educated adults, has lagged behind.

So it makes sense that Ohio voters are dissatisfied.

But, I insist, one would expect disaffected voters to support politicians who are really trying to solve the state's problems.

The Biden administration hoped its industrial policies, which have led to increased investment in the manufacturing sector, would win over more working-class voters.

Democrats might also have been expected to draw some dividend from the fact that unemployment in Ohio is now lower than it was under Trump, even before the Covid pandemic broke out.

But it doesn't seem to have happened.

And what about Trump?

In most respects he governed as a conventional right-wing Republican, attempting among other things to reverse the success of Obamacare.

However, Trump broke with party orthodoxy by launching a trade war, with hefty tariffs on some manufactured imports.

From an economic point of view, the trade war failed.

A new paper, whose writers include the authors of the original “China Shock” analysis, confirms the results of other studies that conclude that Trump's tariffs did not boost factory employment.

The authors go further and break down the regional effects;

Specifically, they discover that the trade war “has not provided economic aid to the interior of the United States.”

However, they find that the trade war appears to have been a political success.

Regions whose industries were protected by the tariffs became more likely to vote for Trump and Republicans in general, even though the tariffs did not result in increased employment.

This, as the authors rather discreetly note, is “consistent with explicit views on policy.”

That is, in 2020, many working-class voters in Ohio and elsewhere considered Trump to be on their side even though his policies did not help them.

And if you look at some of the current polls, they seem to refuse to give Biden credit for policies that actually help workers.

I'm not going to make a prediction for November.

Perception of the economy has improved, although it remains low.

So the economy may be good enough that other issues, including reproductive rights, carry Biden to victory.

But it's disturbing how disconnected opinions about politicians are from what they actually do.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner in Economics.

© The New York Times, 2024. Translation by News Clips.

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