Ohio Historical    Election Results

Welcome to this Ohio Election statistics website.
For the past 25 years I have collected these statistics.
This site is a culmination of that work. I hope you find it useful.
Contact me by email at [email protected].
This website will be continually updated.

NEW FEATURE:
New interactive maps for President and Governor are now under the maps tab above. You can click on any one of Ohio’s 88 counties and get results for that year. Presidential maps are from 1856 through 2012 (This is the period of our current two party system). Governor’s maps are from 1958 through 2014 (this is since Ohio switched to four year terms for Governor).



Dan Balz, who has covered the last nine presidential campaigns for the Washington Post, said Dawson's site "provides a model" for what should be attempted in other states.


"What Mike has done is a huge favor to everyone who follows politics and wants authoritative information about one of the most important states in the country," said Balz. "Ohio always seems to be ground zero in presidential campaigns and now there is an easy way to see its political history in great depth."


A tour of the site will provide the viewer with a treasure trove of interesting data.

Cleveland Plain Dealer - May 18, 2014

"The numbers would indicate that the Columbus media market is the likely battleground for the state in 2012, so it's no surprise that Romney is here and Obama is opening his national campaign for president in this market," Dawson said.


The 19-county Columbus media market favored GOP nominees in five of the last six presidential elections, but Obama did 12.8 percentage points better in the market than the Democratic nominee in the previous five presidential races combined, the highest differential of any media market in Ohio.


"Winning the Columbus media market is critical to Obama's chances of carrying the state," Dawson said.

Columbus Dispatch - April 27, 2012

Obama didn’t just clean up in Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is located, but throughout the 17-county Cleveland media market in 2008. According to statistics compiled by elections expert Mike Dawson, Obama collected more than 1.1 million votes in the region, more than doubling his vote total from any other media market in a state he won by 4.6 percentage points. He defeated U.S. Sen. John McCain by more than 16.5 percentage points in the area; in the five elections preceding Obama’s 2008 triumph, the Democratic candidate won the Cleveland media market by an average of 10 percentage points.

Columbus Dispatch - October 15, 2012

Mike Dawson, an Ohio GOP strategist, notes that six of the top 10 counties in which Mr. Romney outperformed George W. Bush's vote count in 2004 were all in southeastern Ohio, where Mr. Romney's pro-coal message resonated. "But eight of the 10 counties where Romney did worse than Bush were all in the northwest of the state-auto country," Mr. Dawson said, adding that those counties are far more populated than the coal area of the state. "Clearly the auto issue was very significant."

Wall Street Journal - November 11, 2012

"Both candidates have to pay the most attention to northeastern Ohio because that's where 38 percent of the state's vote is," said Mike Dawson, an election statistics expert and Voinovich's press secretary. "The key for a Republican victory is to do as well as you can in northeast Ohio and then get your victory by winning central, southwestern and western Ohio."

Columbus Dispatch - November 3, 2013

An analysis of the voting patterns by Republican Mike Dawson, an Ohio election statistics expert, found that 17 of the 20 counties where Obama saw the biggest percentage increases in raw vote totals over 2004 were GOP counties. In the heavily Democratic Cleveland suburbs of Cuyahoga County, for example, he got 9,919 more votes than Kerry. In heavily Republican Delaware County, north of Columbus, he lost to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and won just 36,653 votes, but that was still 9,605 more than Kerry.

Washington Post - October 27, 2012

Dig a little deeper and the case promoted by the 100,000-vote crowd gets even flimsier. The proof can be found in the voluminous election statistics kept by Mike Dawson, a Columbus-based consultant whose work has been cited by The Plain Dealer, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Columbus Dispatch.


... "You cannot point to a single statistic that supports the claim there were 100,000 more African-American votes for Obama in 2012 than in 2008," said Dawson, a Republican. "People who think that happened are kidding themselves."

Cleveland Plain Dealer - March 9, 2013

But Franklin County and central Ohio were bright spots for Obama and proved for a second consecutive presidential election to be Ohio's new battleground, according to an analysis by Mike Dawson, a Columbus-based elections statistics expert whose work has been cited by The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other news organizations.

Columbus Dispatch - December 9, 2012

And in 2008, the Columbus media market finally flipped. Obama won it by 2.8 percent. Those and other comprehensive election statistics were compiled by Mike Dawson, who served as a top aide to former Gov. George Voinovich and later Sen. Mike DeWine. Dawson said it will be almost impossible for Romney to win Ohio unless he reverses that 2008 result from central Ohio.


Dawson is a Republican. But two prominent Democrats don't dispute that view. Former Columbus Dispatch Associate Publisher Mike Curtin, soon to be a Democratic state representative from the city's west side, called central Ohio a kind of "large-scale focus group," adding that political evidence demonstrates "no area of the state is more important than central Ohio." And Herb Asher, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State, said the Columbus media market has "more swing voters than other parts of the state" and "huge numbers of young voters not tied to political parties."

Cleveland Plain Dealer - July 21, 2012