Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Ohio: The Bellwether State of Presidents with Dr. Lauren Pinkston

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

In this episode, Sharon sits down with Dr. Lauren Pinkston, Executive Director for Kindred Exchange, to share some good old-fashioned Ohio facts. Join the duo as they discuss why Ohio has long been dubbed “The Bellwether State” and why that title may be in jeopardy. What exactly is a “bellwether” and why do political pundits claim it has been unrung? Ohio has a fascinating geographical settlement history that has shaped the way the state’s demographics have participated in national politics. Sharon tells Lauren how this is evolving, and why Ohio voted for Trump in 2020 but the nation voted for Biden. Of course, there’s no shortage of presidential facts in this episode, as Ohio has produced eight presidents and six first ladies! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my friends. Thank you for being here today. I'm chatting with my friend Lauren Pinkston and we are diving into the incredibly interesting history of the state of Ohio and what makes Ohio the best predictor of presidential election outcomes for decades. I have so many brain tingles for you, so let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Lauren, I'm thrilled that you're here. I'm chatting today with my friend Lauren Pinkston. Lauren, tell everybody just like a teeny little snippet about what you do, and I want to talk more about your work towards the end of the episode, but just give everybody a little taste of what it is that you do. Sure. My background is in education and then I studied international development and now I teach as a professor in a college of business. So nothing really connected, but it is all woven into kind of my life story of

living abroad and working in the developing world. So now I'm back in the U S and trying to figure out how to not be weird and not, not bow to people that I meet in the grocery store, but that's in a nutshell, outside of being a mom of three kids and one on the way and a wife to a Michigan fan. That is, that is what I do. I want to talk more about some of the work you do with international development and other things towards the end of this conversation, but I have a fun story I want to share with you today. I am on the edge of my seat. It's not every day you get to be a guest on your favorite podcast. Well, this is a story about the state of Ohio and why would give me Ohio after I just told you my husband's

a Michigan fan. That's right. That's right. This is designed to provoke marital angst. That was my goal. How can I make Lauren's husband angry? husband angry. I've already succeeded. I said the word Ohio. Yes. Okay. Have you heard this phrase that Ohio is a bellwether state when it comes to elections? No. Okay. For me. All right. So first of all, you're a college educated lady. I have a few degrees. I have a couple of degrees. Do you know about the origin of the word bellwether and what bellwether means? I've told you before you are my sensei and I love to be around people smarter than me. So I don't, I don't.

Don't worry. No problem. I'm an Enneagram eight and I'm already swallowing my pride. Okay. So a bellwether it's spelled B-E-L-L-W-E-T-H-E-R. It's not weather like rain weather. So a bellwether is an indicator or a prediction or something that is used as like a harbinger of something to come, right? Okay. So we look to a bellwether as something that might predict something. Like people use bellwethers when it comes to the stock market. So we know, for example, that when certain things happen in the world,

the stock market goes down, right? Like those things are bellwethers of the stock market. Ohio for decades has been the state to predict essentially who will win the presidential election. Until 2020, right? Until 2020. I did know that. Yes. 2020 was an aberration, but it is fascinating that for literally decades and decades and decades, Ohio has been the state like as Ohio goes, so goes the election. And so I want to talk a little bit about why that has been and what makes Ohio a unique state and why it was really noteworthy that Ohio didn't predict the 2020 election. I've been wanting to know why. So yes, this is great. So first of all, I was like, what does the word bellwether actually mean? Like, where does that come from? It's a weird word, right? Like it's a weird word. Where does that word come from? Well, I did some research and the word comes from middle English and it was originally used to refer

to the practice of placing a bell around the neck of a castrated ram and a castrated ram was known as a weather. And so the belled weather, the ram who had a bell around its neck, the belled weather would lead a flock of sheep. The other sheep would follow this ram around. And so then the shepherd could determine the location of his animals by listening for the sound of the bell around the weather's neck when the flock of sheep was out of sight. And so over time, this shepherding practice, animal husbandry practice of putting a bell around the neck of a weather started to refer to other things. It started to say, people started to use it in the context

of predicting things. You could listen for the sound of the bell and predict where your flock was. And then they use the phrase bellwether to mean predictions of other things. So I mentioned the stock market and now we use bellwether in relationship to politics and predicting elections as well. So I just thought that was super interesting that it has this agricultural term and here we are using it in modern English now in relationship to your husband's least favorite state of Ohio. Ohio has developed this reputation of being the most important state to watch when it comes to presidential elections. Sometimes people will hear it referred to as a battleground state, or you'll hear it referred to as a swing state,

right? And that's because it does not fall predictably to one side of the spectrum or the other. But it's not like California that is reliably a blue state or Alabama that's reliably a red state. Ohio swings back and forth. So for the last 14 straight elections, Ohio has predicted the presidency. And as we mentioned, it didn't in 2020, but it has only deviated by about two points from the national average. And it is very, very in line with this microcosm of what the country is thinking. So I found this quote really interesting. This is from some historians that wrote a book called Ohio, a history of the Buckeye state. They said more than any other state, Ohio's population became a microcosm of the whole country due to migration patterns in the early statehood period. Here are two things that I learned when I was researching this. First of all, I'm sure as a college professor, you've heard of Case Western Reserve University, right? Yes. Yes. Like it was a group of people from Connecticut who formed this sort of like, who bought a lot of land in Ohio and referred to it as

the Western Reserve. And even today, that section of Ohio that is 3 million acres of Northeastern Ohio that was purchased, colonized by people from Connecticut, to this day, that section of Ohio votes very much like the state of Connecticut. Hundreds of years later. Isn't that fascinating that hundreds of years later, they still vote like Connecticut votes. That is, I mean, the family roots run deep. But it's right. So this would have been like the Western border of the US

before Manifest Destiny, before all the westward expansion stuff. Exactly. That's exactly right. So this was, Ohio was originally part of the Northwest territory, you know, that happened in the 1800s, but this Western reserve was actually purchased by people from Connecticut in the 1700s. So then when you have colonists from Connecticut, you have that same demographic group moving in part to this Western reserve of Ohio,

and then they have children, they have children, they have children, their descendants, you tend to take on many of the same belief systems as your family of origin. Also, just little side note, Case Western Reserve, the university was founded in part by a man named Leonard Case, who was a philanthropist who saw the boom of Ohio in the early 1800s, like 1830s. He saw how important the Ohio cities are, its geographic location on the Great Lakes. And he really wanted to invest in a top notch university in that region. And so it was called Case Western Reserve. Eventually, you know, it started out as like a polytechnic university. It joined forces with

other more liberal art schools. Now it's a very prestigious college, but Western Reserve is an actual geographic term in Ohio. And Case is the last name of Leonard Case. Wow. Is that interesting? Yes, I love it. I love history. Oh, so do I. There's also another important region in Ohio that makes it interesting. And this is part of why Ohio has been able to predict presidential elections is because it is not dominated by one group. It's not dominated by one industry and it's not dominated by one religious organization. It has demographically diverse group of people that live there. So there's another region in Southern Ohio called the Virginia Military District that was over 4 million acres of land that used to belong to the state of Virginia. And instead of paying Revolutionary War veterans in cash, the state of Virginia gave them plots of land in Ohio. So you had a lot of, again, the demographically similar people to

who were living in Virginia, then move to that region. So it just speaks to that diversity of viewpoint and diversity of family lineage. When you have one state that now has a big chunk of people who were from Connecticut and a big chunk of people who were from Virginia now all living in what became a state in 1803. Okay. So statehood was 1803 and they suddenly have to learn how to get along and be united in one state. And to this day, what was part of the Virginia Military District still has very, very demographically similar voting patterns to the American South. Hundreds of years later, these are revolutionary war veterans who are still impacting the politics of a region. I just find that super fascinating that what we do today has a potential to impact people

hundreds of years later. Right. And how connected we are to so many generations before us when we think that we are our own people and our worldview is the right way and how, how much we are affected by the people who formed our culture and our way of life. A hundred percent. And we don't realize it. We don't realize it. We don't realize how much we're being impacted by the people who came before us and how shaped we are by our geography.

Yes. I, that is so. Yes. Geopolitics is so fascinating. I just find it really, really fascinating. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests.

And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Going back to why Ohio predicts the presidency. Okay.

So one of the other reasons Ohio has been so great at predicting presidential elections is this sort of gradual organic expansion of Ohio. It did not have this massive population boom of places where you had gold was being discovered. You know what I mean? It was the, the growth of Ohio was much more organic. People who came to Ohio tended to stay in Ohio. They didn't just like quickly move to Colorado, see if they could strike it rich and then take off. So other States had much more widely varying, like huge swings in their population of who is living here. And Ohio has tended to have more slow, steady growth over time. That is more organic than some other, than some other places. So like the industrial revolution, I mean, is this growing? It's a big industry. I just drove through Dayton last weekend, actually. So

it's like big industry cities, thinking factories and things. Yeah, exactly. Large industrial regions mixed with a healthy number of rural regions. Okay. And there are a lot of states that don't have that. Even Minnesota is, even though we have a large population center in the twin cities, the rest of the state is extremely rural. So it, Ohio has a much larger mixture of big cities, medium cities, rural areas than many other states do. That's so interesting. Isn't that so interesting? Ohio has a huge variety of industries too.

It has energy companies, insurers, banks, manufacturing, retailers. It has a large nonprofit sector. It has lots of universities. It has hospitals, big research clinics. So all of these things make for a mixture of blue collar workers, farmers, people that work in private industry, the medical field, all these things help make Ohio demographically diverse enough that it doesn't reliably swing one way or the other. And as Ohio goes, so goes the rest of the nation most of the time. Interesting. And again, because there is that diversity of skills and beliefs and backgrounds, it speaks to that idea that people

who settle in Ohio tend to remain there because they can find a community that is similar to them. You're not perpetually an outsider because if you are a metal worker, there's people in Ohio that are, that do the same, right? If you're a physician, you have other great medical colleagues there. You tend to find community, which is very important for humans. Turns out humans are like that. And so they tend to stay. So let me tell you why researchers think Ohio did not predict the 2020 election accurately. So Joe Biden won the election, but Donald Trump won Ohio, right? One of the reasons is the changing demographics of Ohio. All states will have changing demographics. That's just the way it goes, but Ohio is tending to get older. So this

is a quote from Suzanne Kunkel, who is the executive director of the Scripps Gerontology Center. She says, Ohio has had some mostly net out migration. So we're losing people who are leaving the state for better job prospects, but then people who are staying tend to be getting older. Again, people who settled there tend to stay there. It now has the sixth oldest population in the United States. Okay. So it has also lost an electoral vote. And now in 2024, it's losing another electoral vote. Wow. One of the things that is interesting about electoral votes that I think a lot of people don't understand is that you can gain population and lose an electoral vote. All states who lost an electoral vote in the most recent redistricting have gained population, but they're losing an

electoral vote. And that's because there's a formula to determine how many electoral votes each state will get. And so I'm really like, I'm trying to make that make sense in my head. You're right. Yes. So for example, we only have a set number of electoral votes, right? The number of electoral votes is that like 538 electoral votes corresponds to the number of people in Congress. And so we would need to change the number of representatives in the house in order to have a different number of electoral votes available. And we haven't done that in decades, decades, decades, decades. So if we ever added more representatives, then the number of electoral votes would change. You can actually look up the formula. There's a whole mathematical process determining how many each state will get. And it's done in rounds where

it's like, okay, this state meets the criteria. They're going to get another one. Now we're going to go back through the states, see how many people get a second person. Okay, great. So some states stick with one, then we're going to go through another round and see how many states get three and four. And it just keeps going up and up depending on the actual trends of how the country as a whole has settled. So just because Ohio's population has increased slightly, it doesn't mean that they get more. They're actually getting less. Wow. Because others are getting even more. Yes, that's right. So because Ohio's population is aging, its demographic trends are moving towards being more white and its demographic trends are B are moving towards being less educated than the

nation as a whole. So this is not to say, Oh, people from Ohio are not well-educated or anything like that. This is just like a shifting demographic trend. And a majority of those older voters in the state of Ohio supported Trump. 56% of them voted for Donald Trump. So when you have that larger number of older voters and they tend to strongly support one candidate. That is how Trump won the election in Ohio, but didn't win the presidency as a whole. And one Republican strategist, Mark Weaver said, the bellwether has been on wrong. Oh, Ohio, like most States changes over time and those changes have political impacts. So it will be very interesting to see in 2024 what happens with Ohio. I have to give you a couple other little Ohio fun facts related to presidents because Ohio and Virginia like to fight about which state is actually the mother of presidents.

Depending on how you want to measure things, it's either Ohio or Virginia. So each state, Ohio and Virginia has had either seven or eight presidents come from it. And there's one president that was born in Virginia, but then moved to Ohio and was elected while living in Ohio. And Ohio likes to claim William Henry Harrison as their own. And Virginia's like, but he was born here. He's ours. So again, depending on how you want to count things, these are the presidents that came from Ohio. count things. These are the presidents that came from Ohio. So Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Taft, and Warren Harding.

Isn't that interesting? Again, it speaks to this idea that people who move there tend to stay there. And it also speaks to the idea that they were- You should move to another state before you run for president, that they're a microcosm of the country as a whole. So I also think it's interesting that four of the eight or four of the seven presidents from Ohio died in office. So for example, I did an episode called president of the month that talks about Harrison, who was only in office for a super, super short time. He died very shortly after taking office. James Garfield was assassinated in office. He was shot. He was shot at a railway station in Washington, DC and died 79 days later as a result of what would absolutely be defined today as medical malpractice. 100% shot.

He, he absolutely could have recovered if he had had access to modern medical treatment. The fact that he lives 79 days speaks to that, right? You know, like, right, right, right. Right. Like 79 days in the 1880s, he definitely could have recovered in 2021, but he had, you know, a bullet wound that doctors were kind of obsessed with probing. They were obsessed with like sticking their fingers in there to see like what they could feel. And they absolutely introduced massive amounts of infection. He ended up dying. So like sepsis. Yes. He died from sepsis. And by the way, his physicians, um, were not disciples of European physicians who were beginning to promote this idea of hand hygiene of like, there's bad stuff on your hands that you should wash off before you stick your fingers in a bullet wounds. They were not proponents of that theory yet. Like that had not didn't have a

stranglehold on medicine today. Um, and so they spent so much time subjecting poor James Garfield to terrible medical treatments that he died 79 days after being shot. William McKinley died 20 years later, was assassinated 20 years later at the Temple of Music, which was like a fair exhibit in Buffalo, New York. He was assassinated in office. Warren Harding, who is one of the presidents that I find so interesting. I will definitely be doing an episode on Warren Harding in the future because I, he's one of those people that you're like, are you kidding me? That's my reaction to Warren Harding all the time. Are you kidding me? I won't go into all the reasons that I will say that about him, but he was,

my goodness, he was president during prohibition and he was having like alcohol stoked parties at the white house while it was illegal to drink alcohol. You make us all feel better that this isn't the worst it's ever been i mean you always make us feel better he's out there having parties he had mistresses that he would sneak into the white house and have encounters with in closets in the white house romantic while his wife was upstairs you know what I mean just things where you're like are you kidding me that's that's my reaction to almost everything I learned about Warren Harding his entire campaign slogan was a return to normalcy but like what does that mean

what does that mean Warren Harding that mean? Warren Harding? What was your normal that you want to keep? That's right. Define normal. You know, like he didn't actually have any real goals for his presidency. He didn't really have any, like, here are the things that I will for sure be accomplishing. And then of course, after he, he died in office while he was on a tour in San Francisco and, you know, a couple of years into his presidency. And then after he died, it came out, you know, like tons of corruption. Wow.

Not related to the alcohol or the women. Oh, good. Okay. Separate, separate. Yeah. We all knew about those. They were in the open. Okay. Separate, separate. Yeah. We all knew about those. Okay. Oh, good times. Good times. Uh, yeah. Yes. I also, um, have to tell you just about the first ladies that are from, that were from Ohio because there were a bunch of those too. So Lucy Webb Hayes, Rutherford B. Hayes' wife was from Ohio. Lucretia Garfield was from Ohio. Caroline Harrison was from Ohio. Ida McKinley,

Helen Taft, and Florence Harding. They were all from Ohio too. I just think it's so interesting that so many people came from Ohio, especially you can, you can understand Virginia more, right? Cause Virginia is a call original colony. It's one of the largest states. It's one of them at the time, one of the most wealthy States. So it makes complete sense. But then Ohio is a little bit more like interesting. Like all of you came from Ohio. I really did not know that before today I knew about Virginia I didn't know about Ohio yeah but I'm gonna have to say I'm gonna have to say that they must have because we claim James K. Polk here in Tennessee and he was not born here

historians can duke it out about whether it's where you were elected from or where you were born. Right. Yes. Oh, Ohio. What an interesting, what an interesting place. And I'm sorry about your husband's rivalry. No, we're, we're, we're very happy. I mean, we're going, we're going to the national playoff. So it's a good year to talk about it. It's a good year to talk about Ohio. That's right. Oh, well, I would love to hear more about the work that you do. Cause I think it is absolutely worth discussing and I really think listeners need to hear about it. Tell us more about it. Sure. I really shifted professional goals right out of college. I actually taught fourth grade for a little while and loved that, but decided that I knew that we were moving overseas. I had always wanted to work internationally and I didn't want to screw it up. I had seen Western work done in the developing world where

we were just trying to create many versions of ourselves everywhere. And this was, I mean, obviously post-colonialism, but colonialism has changed forms. So what would it look like for us to go into a country that was still in the developing world and leave less of a splash, right? So entering that culture authentically and creatively and just receiving that culture to learn from it as well. So I went back to grad school at Clemson to learn more about international development and ended up finally studying human trafficking patterns in the region. So I studied Thailand specifically and nonprofit organizations there. And so today I am still researching different types of phenomena around human trafficking

specifically and how we can be better employers of survivors of trauma and abuse and what kind of workplace policies we can put in place to create a better livelihood for those who are exiting out of traumatic situations. So that's the bulk of my research now. And I, yeah, I love teaching. I teach business ethics. So how can the private sector be a better place for those of us who all want a good job to actually live and work and bring money home to support our families, to be a thriving society. not an expert at all in international human trafficking. I know that it's heartbreaking, but I have not dedicated years of my life to studying it and working within the developing world like you have. You are one of the people that I absolutely refer people to in that space. And I especially love how your goal when you are sharing information or working overseas is like you were saying, this is not about holding ourselves up as like, listen, we figured out all the things.

And so you should now just emulate all the things we're doing because we figured out all the things. Right. Right. I love to tell my students it bursts the bubble of most Americans, but we are not even on the top 10 of hardly any human development indices that have been studied by the UN or any of these development organizations. So we're like, there are 15, 16 other countries that are doing things better than us. So we, we would do well to maybe study some other countries ourselves.

Yes. Well, I have reviewed some of the highlights that you have saved on your Instagram profile about trafficking in the developing world. Like I have watched those multiple times, other people, and I just found them extremely informative. And it's not just about like, well, human trafficking is bad and we shouldn't do it anymore. That is obviously true. But talking about some of the actual causes behind it and what kinds of things are helpful and not hurtful, because sometimes outside action can harm communities if it's not done in an appropriate way. Right. Yeah, that's true. And so the raids that we see on videos and movies, the busting up of brothels, that's great for Hollywood.

It's terrible for practical action most of us don't realize in our cultural context in the United States is that there are deeper values in countries around the world where the ability to make money and share resources back to your family is important. There's a phrase in Thai called Boon Koon, and it really means paying back your mother's breast milk. And for girls, that is, that is the ultimate responsibility as to, for the rest of your life, you pay back your parents for the life that you were given. And we're not going to change a cultural value like that by trying to come in and claim rescue and protection for everyone. So I found that survivors especially

need to have a voice and need to have a say in the way that they are being protected, which is not always the case that we take when we're working cross-culturally. That's such a good point. If it was as easy as just like, we're going to change a cultural value, we would have eliminated racism a long time ago. There's a lot of things that we could have, if we had the ability to just be like, cross that off the list of bad ideas. If that was an actual ability that humans or Americans had, the world would be a very different place. It's in some ways an arrogance to think that we can just come in, put a stamp on things

and say, like, we fixed it. We fixed that value, that underlying value system. Right. You can make a lot of money. You can make millions of dollars selling a great documentary or movie about it, but that doesn't mean that it's true or good. Interesting. Such a good point. Tell people where they can find you because I really think they need to check out your profile and your work on this topic. Well, thank you, Sharon. I'm on Instagram. Mostly My handle is at upwardly

dependent and it's been that for a while. It's kind of become, I don't want to be married to my handle, but that's it. That's been what it is. So upwardly dependent on Instagram. That's where I am almost always. So thank you. Thank you for doing this. This was really fun. Yeah. I love learning from you. And I feel like I was just furiously taking notes like I was in your classroom. So thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor.

Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review, or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind-blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.