May 2018 Ohio Primary Election Results (Statewide Races)

The state of Ohio has unofficial election results from today’s primaries up at vote.ohio.gov.  With 90% of precincts reporting, though the final vote totals may vary slightly, these are basically how the elections turned out—with margins like these, these outcomes will not change:

After all the hopes on the Democratic side that Kucinich might pull off an upset, Cordray won with a comfortable 60%, despite the crowded field (his five opponents combined got less than 40%).

On the Republican side, after all the acrimonious and misleading negative ads (it’s nice to have friends in high places) and jockeying to position themselves as principled conservatives, DeWine won with a similarly comfortable 60%; it wasn’t even close.

This may also mean that despite predictions that one or both sides would emerge from this “bruising” primary campaign significantly “damaged”, both nominees can proceed to the general-election campaign almost as if the primaries had never happened, which I think is encouraging:  As a general rule, there’s no reason not to have the debate about the ideas and issues and try to get the best nominee you can—you don’t have to fear that your good-faith efforts to get a better nominee will torpedo your party’s chances of winning the larger battle in November.

(I do wish the negative ads were a little less dishonest.)

In the much less watched but still contested race for the Republican nomination for state treasurer, Robert Sprague similarly defeated Sandra O’Brien with more than 57% of the vote.

The race for the U. S. Senate was a little closer, but Jim Renacci still beat Mike Gibbons 47 to 32%, while their four other nominal competitors (including a write-in candidate) split the remaining 21%.  (The state’s Web site notes that write-in candidates’ totals will not be known until sometime after election night—unlike the rest of the ballots, they have to be read and counted manually—but you can do the math and see that this candidate will get at most 5% or so.)

You notice that in the primary for governor, Republican voters outnumbered Democratic voters by some 25%, despite the fact that there were six candidates on the Democratic side, an ideologically charged contest between mainstream politician Richard Cordray and aging pacifist Dennis Kucinich, national media attention, and this photo in the Washington Post.  One wonders whether this has any implications for the respective nominees’ chances in November…