The Republican-run Ohio House of Representatives never forgets why voters send it to the Statehouse – to limit women’s access to abortion, and to boost gun peddlers’ profits. House Republicans don’t let themselves get distracted by trivial side issues, such as public school funding (ruled unconstitutional 21 years ago).

For 1997, the year that Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s school funding “system” unconstitutionally overrelies on property taxes, Ohio real estate owners were charged $7.2 billion in taxes. (Ohio’s public schools receive about two-thirds of every $1 in real estate taxes.) For 2015, latest year at hand, owners were charged $15.7 billion in real estate taxes.

In 2017, women obtained 20,893 abortions in Ohio. In 1997, year of the school-funding ruling, women obtained about 35,000 abortions in Ohio. That is, (unconstitutional) property taxes, up; (constitutional) abortions, down. So the Republicans who run Ohio’s House do the “logical” thing: Go after abortion. Not property taxes. (Still, House Republicans’ first love remains the right to shoot. On Wednesday, they passed a “stand-your-ground” gun bill. Yee-haw!)

The state Senate’s supposed to check and balance the House, and vice versa. But both are GOP-run, and lots of those Republicans daydream about yammering on C-SPAN as members of Congress. So they don’t rock the boat. They get with the Republican program: Ignore Ohioans’ real burdens. and distract voters with grandstanding over abortion, guns or sexuality.

Attacking sexual minorities seems to be a GOP fave. In 2020, when Donald Trump will seek re-election, don’t be surprised if GOP operatives cook up a statewide Ohio ballot issue that, somehow, some way, could fetter the rights of transgender Ohioans. Object: to boost Republican turnout.

GOP managers did much the same in 2004 with a statewide ballot issue to ban same-sex marriage. Goal: to bloat Dubya Bush’s second-term Ohio turnout. Republicans fretted that Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry might (even in the middle of a war) deny Bush a second term.

Bush would have carried Ohio anyway. Fact is (attention, Sen. Elizabeth Warren) Ohio doesn’t seem to want a Massachusetts Democrat in the White House: Not JFK in 1960; not Michael Dukakis in 1988; not John Kerry in 2004.

No, Ohio is not yet a pure red state

Nov. 6’s election has spawned an interesting side effect. Out-of-staters just know Ohio has become a red state or a purple state, or something besides what Ohio still is: a state with a GOP edge that – given the right issues and the right candidates – Democrats can and do win.

As someone at a Columbus gathering recently pointed out, Ohioans backed George H.W. Bush for president in 1988 even as they gave liberal Democratic U.S. Howard M. Metzenbaum a third term. What’s more, Metzenbaum beat GOP challenger George V. Voinovich by 607,000 votes, while Bush bested Dukakis in Ohio by about 477,000 votes.

Ohio twice voted for Bill Clinton and twice for Barack Obama. And Obama’s 2012 Ohio popular vote (2.83 million votes) virtually matched Trump’s 2016 Ohio popular vote (2.84 million votes).

As for 2016, unfairly or not, voters seemingly don’t warm to Hillary Clinton. And she ignored the Great Lakes states. True, Democrats’ avalanche-scale margins in such Ohio counties as Mahoning (Youngstown) and Trumbull (Warren) are gone for good. That’s because, in Washington and Columbus, Democrats took Mahoning and Trumbull voters for granted. Metzenbaum and John Glenn could have landed big federal offices (i.e., jobs) for Youngstown and Warren the way Robert C. Byrd did for West Virginia. They didn’t. Now, General Motors’ Lordstown plant is in jeopardy. Along the Mahoning, GOP presidential margins will grow.

Meanwhile, the number of Ohio’s metropolitan regions, and the ethnic range of Ohio’s people, far exceed, say, Indiana’s – a state that, for unfathomable reasons, some people think Ohio is starting to resemble politically, although Indianapolis is to Cleveland what Wonder Bread is to pumpernickel.

No question, Ohio has had its problems. Unlike Indiana, though, the Buckeye State has never elected a Ku Klux Klan member its governor. For good (Northeast Ohio’s Western Reserve, in the fall) or bad (the General Assembly, any day of the week), there’s no place like Ohio, politically or otherwise. Not even a state next-door.

Thomas Suddes, a member of the editorial board, writes from Athens.

To reach Thomas Suddes: tsuddes@cleveland.com, 216-999-4689

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