Snapshots of the vote
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Election 2004 analysis
• President Bush’s official Ohio margin over Sen. John Kerry: 118,601 votes (2,859,768 to 2,741,167), or 2.1 percent (50.8 to 48.7). Bush won by 46,418 fewer votes than in 2000.
• Ohio’s 11,366 precincts had 7,972,826 registered voters. 5,722,443 ballots were cast, a statewide turnout of 71.8 percent.
• As in other parts of the country, rapidly growing areas backed Bush. Of the 89 Ohio precincts that grew by at least 500 voters over 2000, Bush won 74 (83 percent), including 19 of the top 20. In those high-growth precincts, Bush picked up 33,240 more votes than in 2000. Kerry got 21,609 more than Vice President Al Gore did four years earlier in those areas, so Bush padded his margin by 11,631.
• High-turnout areas are typically Republican, and that proved to be true in 2004. Of the 1,959 precincts in which at least 80 percent of registered voters cast a ballot, Bush won 1,544 (78.8 percent). In all, he won 61 percent of the vote to Kerry’s 38 percent in those precincts, where Bush’s margin grew by 50,843 votes compared with 2000.
• Top turnout in the state: Put-in-Bay Precinct 2, with 100 percent. Bush prevailed, 7-4.
• Surprisingly, Ohio’s one-sided precincts almost exclusively favored Kerry. The Democrat won 100 percent of the vote in five. Four were small, but one was a Cincinnati precinct in which he took all 76 presidential votes. Kerry won at least 90 percent of the vote in a whopping 586 precincts — one of 20 statewide. In contrast, Bush got less than 94 percent in his top precinct (aside from one area with only four presidential voters). And the president won at least 90 percent in just seven precincts.
• In the 1,740 predominantly Kerry precincts — those in which he got at least 70 percent of the vote — turnout was 57.7 percent, 8.2 points higher than four years earlier. In the 1,306 predominantly Bush precincts, turnout was 78 percent, 6.1 points higher than in 2000.
• Although urban areas traditionally back Democrats, Kerry especially won the favor of big-city voters. He got almost a quarter of his statewide vote from Ohio’s six largest cities alone, where he rolled up a 356,415-vote advantage over Bush — 120,881 more than the lead Gore got there in 2000. Kerry got a higher percentage than Gore in every one of Ohio’s 35 largest cities.
• Kerry did better than Gore in all of Columbus’ biggest suburbs except Dublin, where Bush increased his victory margin by 315 votes over 2000. While Bush still won four other major ’burbs, Kerry narrowed the margin in Upper Arlington (by 2,154 votes), Reynoldsburg (1,275), Gahanna (756) and Westerville (615).
• Only two Ohio counties changed sides from 2000: Clark went Republican, going from a 324-vote Gore squeaker to a 1,406-vote Bush victory; while Stark went Democratic, from Bush by 2,845 to Kerry by 3,122.
• Southwestern Ohio’s Batavia Township, home of the only American soldier listed as captured in Iraq, Keith ‘‘Matt" Maupin, added more than 3,000 votes to Bush’s margin from 2000. Bush, who frequently referred to Maupin on his Ohio campaign visits, won the township east of Cincinnati with 70.5 percent of the vote.