COLUMBUS, Ohio — All year, as the two presidential candidates vied for the battleground state of Ohio and its crucial 18 electoral votes, Democratic boots on the ground battled Republican ads on the air. On Tuesday, the boots won.
President Obama’s hard-fought victory in the Buckeye State on Tuesday night — unofficial returns showed he won by about 107,000 votes, with some ballots still left to count — was a vindication of a campaign strategy that relied heavily on an extensive, battle-tested field operation to get voters to the polls, Ohio political analysts said.
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Yep - those students can cover alot of ground.
Beck said Obama’s effort resembled the the 2004 effort of George W. Bush — another incumbent president who ground out a victory in the Buckeye State on the shoulders of a get-out-the-vote drive whose strength was not fully apparent until the dust settled. I lived and voted in Ohio in 2004. The Bush victory there was clearly tied to Issue 1: the amendment, which passed, to the state constitution limiting marriage to only one man and one woman. It was clearly (1) anti-equality and (2) an attempt to galvanize the Republican 'base' and get people who would vote for Bush to the polls. In fact, Republicans afterwards were gleeful about their strategy (I heard this personally from Republican politicians and organizers), admitting that they used equality cynically to get the president reelected. The response to that action is seen in both the founding of Equality Ohio and Equality Toledo (I had a small hand in the latter) and in this year's much more liberal results.