August 8th Election Results and Wrap Up
A brief summary of the Ohio referendum, the Mississippi lt governor's race, and what's next
Ohio and Mississippi voters went to the polls yesterday, the former voting on a referendum that was largely seen as a proxy for abortion, the latter voting in a primary to determine who the statewide and legislative nominees would be for their upcoming elections, and both had rather interesting results. Since Ohio was by far the more impactful of the two, let’s talk about that first.
The referendum to raise the requirement for amending the Ohio constitution failed miserably last night, losing by a 57-43 margin. And looking at the map, there are some interesting patterns in the results.
(Image source is here)
The areas that voted most heavily against the proposition are, as expected, the heavily Democratic areas around Cincinnati (Hamilton county), Dayton (Montgomery county), Columbus (Franklin county), Cleveland (Cuyahoga county), Akron (Summit county), Toledo (Lucas county) and Athens (Athens county). However, if the No vote only won here, then the amendment would’ve lost. The critical areas that caused the amendment to fail were the areas that have recently supported Republicans, and they’re an interesting batch of counties. Some of them are ancestrally Democratic areas that have trended right recently (such as Mahoning, Trumbull, Lorain and Ashtabula, all of which voted for Obama twice and voted for Trump in 2020), some of them are ancestrally Republican but have trended left recently (namely Delaware county), and some of them are solidly Republican counties that aren’t trending one way or another (Greene and Geauga counties last voted for a Democrat in 1964 and have been very statically Republican ever since). There was a lot of broad opposition to this referendum from everywhere across the state, due not only to high democratic turnout but also a lot of people genuinely being uncomfortable with the idea of abortion being banned, even if they’re usually staunch republicans. If I were a person who wanted abortion banned, I’d be very nervous about the November referendum, since this referendum made it so it only needs to clear 50% to pass, and there’s clearly 50% willing to vote for it.
In addition to the Ohio referendum, Mississippi also held its primaries, where by far the biggest race was the race for lt governor. State senator and neo-Confederate Chris McDaniel ended up losing the race to incumbent Delbert Hosemann by a 9% margin, with Hosemann getting enough votes to avoid a runoff.
(Source located here)
The coalitions in this map are unsurprising. McDaniel won most of the same counties in his initial 2014 senate run, while the areas that supported Hosemann the most are the heavily Black areas in the Mississippi Delta and Jackson area, which opposed McDaniel for very obvious reasons. One thing that was pointed out by journalist Ben Jacobs is that McDaniel has gotten a remarkably similar amount of votes across all 3 of his runs, with each one seeing him get about 155 thousand people to go for him. The issue for McDaniel is that while 155 thousand was close to victory in 2014, voters are more tuned in now than they were then, which makes it very unlikely that he’d be able to win in the future, especially now that he will no longer be in office due to the fact that he ran for this race rather than his state senate seat. It’s very likely that with 3 statewide losses and McDaniel not having an office as soon as the general election comes around, that that’s it for McDaniel’s political career.
Beyond that race, not much of note in Mississippi. Tate Reeves won renomination as governor (albeit by an underwhelming margin for an incumbent running against no name opponents), and no other statewide position was even close. There will be a small handful of state legislative races that will see runoffs, but not many.
That’s it for the races that occurred yesterday. The next big elections won’t happen for a while- none are happening next week and through the rest of august there’s only a handful that will occur. The next big set of races will come in 4 weeks, when on September 5th, 2 congressional districts (Rhode Island’s 1st and Utah’s 2nd) will be holding primaries for special elections to fill vacancies to the US congress. When those races get closer I will discuss them, but that’s all for now.