In today’s Washington Post, Paul Farhi gives new life to Howard Fineman’s flawed logic about “bellwether” counties.
Farhi travels to the same Canton, Ohio factory operated by the Timken Company that Fineman visited last month. President Bush went to Timken to tout his tax cuts last year, but since then the company has announced that it’s likely to close its Canton plants, which manufacture roller bearings, and move about 1,200 jobs overseas. All this seems to have made the political press think it’s found the key to the election — one factory in Ohio.
Echoing Fineman, Farhi writes:
But the potential political ripples are even more powerful. Timken sits in the heart of a city that sits in the heart of Stark County, one of three critical “swing” counties in a state that President Bush must win to defeat his Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.). Stark went for Bush in the 2000 election, but just barely — by 2,845 votes, or 1.9 percentage points.
If Timken’s announcement translates into broad voter disaffection locally, nurtured by grass-roots union organizers, it would be very bad news for Bush. No Republican has ever made it to the White House without winning Ohio. “They call us the bellwether county in the bellwether state,” says Stan Jasionowski, president of United Steelworkers Local 1123, which represents Timken’s hourly employees. “Whichever way Stark County goes, Ohio goes.”
First, Farhi repeats the conventional wisdom that Ohio is “a state that President Bush must win to defeat his Democratic rival.” Really? Polls suggest that it’s very possible Bush could lose Ohio, but win, say, Pennsylvania, and hold on to all the other states he won in 2000. That would be enough to win the election. Reporters might think twice before making those blanket “Bush must win Ohio” declarations.
More important, Farhi, like Fineman before him, mistakes correlation for causation. As we have explained before: Stark County may indeed, historically, be a “bellwether” county. But if a particular event in Stark County (the Timken closings) means the county ends up going against the president, that doesn’t tell us anything about how the rest of the state will vote. In fact, it means that this year, Stark County isn’t likely to be as good an indicator of state-wide totals as in previous years.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: This type of thinking is a direct result of the press corps’ obsession with “battleground states” — reduced now to a “battleground county” and, finally, to a “battleground factory.” That obsession encourages reporters to inflate the political significance of certain real-world events out of all proportion. Again and again.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.