From TIME’s Amy Sullivan:
I recently spent some time in Hamilton County, which includes and
surrounds Cincinnati in Ohio’s southwest corner, for our battleground
county series in the magazine. Hamilton has always been reliably Republican — the urban population is
relatively small and the suburbs are either socially conservative
(working-class Catholics) or fiscally conservative (affluent
executives at Cincinnati-based Fortune 500 headquarters).
The county has only voted for a Democratic presidential candidate
four times in the last 100 years (1912, 1932, 1936, and 1964). But
that could change this year. Internal polling shows Obama and McCain
neck-and-neck in Hamilton. Democrat challenger Steve Driehaus is
running even with Republican Steve Chabot in a race for the 1st
congressional district.
Local Democrats say their biggest advantage comes from the record
number of new voters they registered for the Ohio primary battle
between Clinton and Obama. I was skeptical that they could have found
that many new Democrats, but the numbers are eye-popping: In 2000, the
last year in which both parties had competitive primaries, 115,300
voters participated on the GOP side and 54,600 cast ballots for
Democrats. This year, 83,400 voted for Republican candidates and
nearly 165,000 participated in the Democratic primary.
Unaffiliated voters still outnumber both Republicans and Democrats
combined (in Ohio, voters don’t register with a party but are assigned
an affiliation based on the primary in which they vote; everyone who
doesn’t vote is considered unaffiliated). But in 2004, unaffiliated
voters split 52/47 for Bush–the same margin by which he won the
county overall. Even if they split the same way next week, breaking
slightly for McCain, that huge Democratic increase means Obama would
win Hamilton by 13 points.