The big story from Ohio is not about Donald Trump’s power

Naturally, the outcome of last week’s Ohio GOP Senate primary elicited plenty of hot takes run through the interpretive prism of Trump. 

“Score one for Donald Trump,” wrote Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg, noting that winner J.D. Vance lagged in the polls until Trump endorsed him. 

Over at the New York Times, Sarah Longwell declared, “J.D. Vance’s come-from-behind victory in the Ohio Republican primary was the first test of Donald Trump’s influence in the 2022 election cycle as well as the future of the Republican Party. Spoiler alert: He’s influential.” 

And these two writers, mind you, are no fans of the former president. Both have written critically about him numerous times.  

They are not wrong on a particular point. Vance was lagging in the polls behind Josh Mandel and neck and neck with Matt Dolan and Mike Gibbons — despite hefty financial support from billionaire Peter Thiel. Then the Man from Mar-a-Lago put his chips on Vance a couple of weeks before the election, and J.D. subsequently surged to victory. 

Trump no doubt is delighted. Vance has more than shown himself willing to prostrate himself before The Donald. Additionally, Trump, like most people in politics, loves to claim credit for making good things happen. So, he is presumably more than happy when media people interpret everything through the framework of Trump. 

Yet, valuable as Trump’s endorsement was, its potency should not be overstated. Vance won a mere 32.2 percent of the votes cast for GOP candidates. That means nearly 68 percent of Ohio’s GOP voters chose a candidate other than the one Trump preferred. Had Mike Gibbons dropped out and endorsed Matt Dolan, Vance might have lost. Also noteworthy is that Vance’s chief opponent, Mandel, was a twice-failed candidate for Senate who turned off voters with his toxic tweets and often unserious behavior. 

And it is anything but clear how much benefit Trump’s endorsement will provide in November’s general election. Vance’s total vote count of 340,991 also was lower than the 355,764 votes garnered by Tim Ryan, the Democrat he will face in November’s general election.  

Moreover, any Trump effect on Vance’s success will be difficult to parse. Politically, the Buckeye State rarely has been a one-party state. Ohio has split its two Senate offices between Republicans and Democrats since 2007, when Democrat Sherrod Brown succeeded Republican Mike DeWine. The tendency of Ohio voters to be willing to elect Democrats or Republicans to the Senate goes back to the 1850s when they selected Benjamin Wade and George Pugh. With Brown still in office, then, history would suggest Vance will win. 

But if we can get past the “Ohio as Trump referendum” framework, we can see a bigger story in the May 3 election in Ohio. That story is the primary problem. 

Put bluntly, primaries increasingly are shabby ways to choose competent legislators. Being a lawmaker is a serious job. You are supposed to uphold the U.S. Constitution, represent the interests of all your diverse constituents regardless of party, enact policies to benefit the nation, and oversee the executive branch. And to do this you have to bargain with other legislators who come from around the nation. 

Yet primaries are ill-structured to attract and elect such candidates. Andrew Hall, a professor at Stanford, conducted a deep dive into the data and found that despite the average American voter’s preference for moderate candidates, the general elections tend to give them one or two extremists to pick among. 

This is due to two reasons: Very few people vote in primaries and those who do vote tend to be very ideological, so they support intensely ideological candidates. Primaries, it is worth mentioning, also tend to attract candidates who are willing to endure their indignities. The aspirant for office must put himself in hock to extreme primary voters and uber-rich donors with hobby horse policy demands, all while enduring the slanders of political hatchet men paid by dark money.   

Which is why moderates and level-headed people in Congress are growing increasingly few and the chambers are being swamped by radicals and reactionaries who behave like reality television stars.  

Which brings us back to Ohio. The state has more than 7.9 million registered voters. Some 77 percent of Ohio voters are independents — people who did not register with either the Democratic or Republican parties. 

The state uses a semi-open primary, meaning that any voter can cast a ballot in either the Democratic or Republican primaries. 

“I’ll give you an example,” explains Secretary of State Frank LaRose. “My Mom is a Democrat but I think that she’s going to request a Republican ballot so she can vote for me, and that’s something I’m proud of her doing.” Independents also may participate — unlike in some states, such as New York, where they are barred from voting in primaries.   

With a very exciting GOP race, a close one to replace an important and effective senator (Rob Portman), we might expect to see voters turn out in droves, right? That did not happen. Only 1.7 million voters (21 percent) participated in the Senate primaries.  

Altogether, Tim Ryan and J.D. Vance — one of whom will be the next senator from Ohio — got the support of a mere 8 percent of registered voters. Talk about a lack of enthusiasm for what was being offered. This was no fluke. Low turnout in Ohio’s primary elections, and America’s generally, is the norm. In off years like this one, it is even lower. 

H.L. Mencken once sneered that “[d]emocracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Yet looking at Ohio’s Senate primaries, can anyone say that the voters are getting the candidates they want? 

Kevin R. Kosar (@kevinrkosar) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the coeditor of “Congress Overwhelmed: Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform” (University of Chicago Press, 2020).