Swing state Ohio too close to call

The State of Ohio is a tightly contested “battleground” that can go either way at the US presidential election today – as always.

With Florida done and dusted after intense campaigning there and other swing states they targeted, Donald Trump and Joe Biden hoped to win Ohio in their last-minute blitzes at battleground states. Ohio, one of 50 US states, is situated on east north central region of the country’s midwest.

It is indeed a difficult state to win as nobody could predict with certainty that it would go to a particular political party due to small electoral victory margin.

Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a mere 49.0% to 47.8%, a 1.2% difference, in 2016 and after winning other vital wing states, was ushered into the White House on 20 January, 2017.

It’s believed the tight voting margins at the state are due to people switching sides at every election due to disgruntlement over economic challenges such as job losses.

Despite deep pockets of wealthy people, the working class, in particular, suffered severely and some went destitute when the state was hit by economic meltdown resulting from deindustrialisation.

This used to be a backyard playground for the Democrats until some voters felt let down by the party over the deindustrialisation. This, mixed with boycott of election by many Democrats who opposed Clinton’s candidacy in 2016.

At the beginning of his administration in 2017, Trump promised to bring jobs to Ohio and urged people not to sell their houses.

But according to Joe Cimperman, president of Cleveland Global which deals with immigrants, those jobs did not come back and Trump’s promise to reopen the closed General Motors local plant did not materialise. But it is the only state that warmly welcomed immigrants.

Both Ohio Republican governor, Mike DeWine and the Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson, who is Democrat, had an open-door policy towards immigrants.

“The mayor and the governor keep on saying ‘we need immigrants’. I think the notion that blacks are hated by whites in Ohio is generalisation,” Cimperman said.

The governor’s pro-immigrants stance contradicted the Republican party stringent border control policy and Trump’s regular anti-immigration public pronouncements.

As if this was not enough, DeWine on Sunday said he would follow the “very good guidelines” of White House coronavirus task members Dr Deborah Birx and Dr Anthony Fauci, whose views are not liked by Trump.

Further, DeWine is an advocate of wearing a mask. Trump, who planned to erect a wall on the Mexican border, adopted an antiscientific approach to Covid-19, including rejecting a mask.

Ohio is among the top 10 with the highest number of immigrants of various nationality backgrounds – from Asian (especially Indians), Africa and South and Latin America who live happily together.

It has a particularly large populations of Somalis and Congolese. Cleveland resident Elizabeth Cusma said immigrants were attracted to Ohio because of the low cost of living and affordable education.

The population of the state is decreasing and immigrants are known to sustain it and many had helped to create jobs in America. “We need immigrants, they create jobs,” Cusma said.

According to Cimperman, while Trump was the mouthpiece of anti-immigration in the US, this was more than Trump and it pre-dated his administration.

He said this fuelled xenophobia and racism that already existed in US society. Even when the president campaigned in Ohio, he was careful to do it in areas he knew were populated by xenophobic and racist elements.

Otherwise, if he campaigned in liberal places such as the centre of Cleveland, he would be greeted with protests.

“Trump would go to white areas he knew were anti-immigrants. These problems were there, Trump just made them worse,” Cimperman said.

He said Ohio had its own fair share of racism and police brutality, including instances of shooting and suffocation of African-Americans over the years.

“There is discrepancy in how policing is conducted for whites and for blacks. But racism permeates every facet of American life because it’s a matter that was never addressed,” he said.

However, Cimperman, while agitated that African-Americans were on the receiving end of police brutality, doubted there was hatred of blacks by whites because those communities lived side by side in Ohio.

He was adamant that the fact that the state had a white state governor and a black mayor in Cleveland and several public health facilities were led by immigrants were testimony to the progressiveness of the state.

From the people that The Citizen spoke to in Ohio, it became clear that nobody was certain about the winner between Trump and Biden. Even Cimperman merely cited the fact that many voters in the state hated Republican policies.

They were against Trump’s policy to separate children from their parents under border control laws.

To Trump’s credit, according to another resident, Jenika Gonzalez, there were immigrants who supported and voted for Trump because of his economic policies. But still, if Trump were to be reelected, Ohio voters feared that the immigration situation would deteriorate.

Cusma said should Trump return to the White House, immigration numbers in Ohio would drop, the border control situation would worsen and the international student population would drop because many students wouldn’t return.

Gonzalez cited the xenophobia against people of Chinese decent for which he blamed Trump’s statements that Covid-19 was a Chinese disease.

“If Trump returned, our refugee population will be affected. There is a lot of xenophobia in the country because of the president’s rhetoric that fuels it,” said Gonzalez.

Political journalist Eric Naki.

Eric Naki is The Citizen’s political editor and our man currently covering the 2020 US presidential election as part of a seminar organised by the East-West Centre, based in Honolulu, Hawaii, US. He is the only South African in a cohort of 12 foreign journalists attending the seminar virtually.

– ericn@citizen.co.za

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