Obama and Romney are Telling Ohioans that They're the Greatest. This Ohio Native Disagrees.

In my new, more realistic understanding of American democracy, gained just this year from a thousand expert sources, the role of all but a portion of the electorate is to show up at their polling places tomorrow and dutifully cancel out one another’s votes so that Ohio can choose our president.

And why has this privilege fallen to Ohio? The prevailing view, voiced by columnists and pundits and even some very fancy political scientists, is that Ohio is a national microcosm, blending diverse demographic and cultural groups in a way that reflects America at large. In other words, it’s a state with lots of rednecks that also has plenty of poor urban minorities balanced by a certain magic number of college-educated professionals. Add in a lot of struggling factory workers, stay-at-home moms, Roman Catholics, evangelicals, college students, military veterans, Latino immigrants, and nursing home residents, and there you have it: our republic in a can.

The situation disturbs me even so. That any one state should posses such outsize power over the country’s political destiny strikes me as outrageous on its face, but that this state should be my own birthplace, the very cradle of American mediocrity and overzealous lawn ornamentation, is positively terrifying.

To those who know it well, in a way the Census Bureau only could if it were based in Akron or Sandusky, the soul of Ohio is its utter soullessness. What Gertrude Stein said of Oakland—that “there isn’t any there there”—is so much truer of Ohio that no one would ever bother to mention it, let alone be considered witty for doing so. In Oakland, one half expects to find a there and is disappointed when one doesn’t. In Ohio, on the other hand, nothing– and nowhere–ness is the whole premise.

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