In spite of this trying presidential election, love has kept Tim Modzelewski and Marie Lacey together.
The couple spent Election Day outside a polling place at the Tallmadge Recreational Center.
Modzelewski, who left work early to vote, circled the parking lot all afternoon with a stack of Republican slate cards and a Trump-Pence yard sign above his head. Less enthused, Lacey leaned against their car with her head buried in a cellphone as pickup truck drivers honked their horns to support her boyfriend, the loudest Donald Trump fan in earshot.
“I’m not real happy about that,” Lacey said, shaking her head. “I voted today, but I’m not a Trump supporter. So I’ll let you figure that out.”
Nasty, tumultuous, long, wild, divisive. The 2016 presidential election has been called many things.
And, now, many are elated to call it over.
“I am thrilled this is the end of the election,” Lacey said. “We’re all going to live through this no matter who wins. The country will go on. We’re all going to be unhappy at some point with somebody’s politics, with their judgment or what they do.”
“We’re going to get through it and we’ll be fine.”
Bellwether no more?
Trump nearly ran the tables in Ohio, where he campaigned hard and often, showing that frequent visits and massive rallies could persuade voters more than the hundreds of millions of dollars in ads the Clinton campaign spent here.
The populist Trump said he would campaign in Democratic strongholds. And he did, with impressive results.
In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney took 71 Ohio counties, improving on the 66 counties Sen. John McCain took in 2008.
Trump has outdone them both. He swept 80 of 88 counties Tuesday, flipping Portage, Stark, Trumbull, Lorain and five other counties that Obama won in 2012. Montgomery, where Trump was leading late into the evening, was too close to call.
With the utmost importance in deciding national elections, Ohio awoke Tuesday with an impressive record of picking the winner in all but two presidential elections dating back to 1896. No Republican has ever lost here and gone on to win the White House.
There was concern leading up to the election that Ohio’s bellwether status might be slipping because of Trump’s strong showing here while Clinton looked to be the clear victor in national polling, as well as Ohio’s lack of diversity compared to the nation.
Political historians like Kyle Kondik of the Center for Politics at University of Virginia still considered Ohio the “crystal ball” into which America’s political pundits look for answers.
But the country, on the whole, is diversifying faster than Ohio. And Ohio’s abundance of white, non-college educated, blue-collar workers — fed up with career politicians and stuck in 15 years of wage stagnation — are turning to a Republican for answers.
“I never voted Republican before this primary. I voted for Trump so [Gov. John] Kasich wouldn’t get it, but he got it anyway,” said Modzelewski, a 54-year-old textile factory worker who last campaigned for a candidate in 1992 when Bill Clinton first ran for president.
“Trump’s enthusiasm to fix the system as an outsider really attracted me.”
In all, Trump grabbed more than 2.7 million votes in Ohio, about 52 percent of the vote. Because Trump took more than half the votes in the unofficial and preliminary results, third-party candidates were not a factor in Clinton’s demise, at least here.
How we voted
Men went big for Trump, as expected.
He also did well in Ohio’s suburbs, with middle- to high-income voters and evangelicals, according to exit polling reported by the Associated Press.
Exit polls showed 41 percent of Trump’s support in Ohio came from non-college educated whites, “greater than in many other states.”
Women preferred Clinton.
Lacey, 46, said she couldn’t stand how Trump talked about — or said he treated — women, gays, lesbians and minorities throughout the campaign.
“Just deplorable,” she said of Trump’s behavior. “In my heart, I don’t think he’s the right person to represent this country to the world.”
Exit polling by MSNBC showed female voters nationwide flocking to Clinton. In 2012, Obama beat Romney by 26 percentage points with women. In 2016, Clinton expanded that gap to 36 points.
But Trump closed any gender gap by splitting the union vote with Clinton, a voting block that Obama won by more than 20 points in 2012.
With a new brand of conservative to keep happy, Kent State professor and political author Danielle Sarver Coombs said the Republican establishment must adapt to its new constituents.
“I think that’s kind of the million dollar question for Republicans. There’s clearly a divide between Donald Trump and the Republican establishment, just look at Paul Ryan and John Kasich.
“If they want to keep those voters,” Coombs said, “they’ll have to decide what the party should look like 10 years from now.”
To the bitter end
In a room with mostly empty chairs and five white guys with cellphones, James from Cuyahoga Falls was well aware of the narrow path Trump must navigate to win.
He declined to give his last name because he doesn’t “trust the media.”
“He has to run the gantlet on it. He has to run all the battleground states. But right now, we’re looking at the polls and I believe Trump is up in Florida, New Hampshire and Ohio,” said James, who sat in the Summit County Trump headquarters, which the campaign has shared with local candidates. James dialed another voter’s number and left another message. Then he started making calls in Nevada, where polls would not close for another 150 minutes.
Across the street at the Clinton campaign’s Summit County headquarters in Wallhaven, three black women greeted a Beacon Journal reporter who walked in five minutes before Ohio polls closed at 7:30 p.m. Volunteer Jacquline Debose explained what the Clinton campaign had been up to as the clock wound down to zero. “Canvassing,” she said.
Debose served as the phone operator for an Uber-esque army of 30 volunteers drivers who dropped more than 100 voters off at the polls Tuesday.
“You got to be on the ground,” Debose said.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .