Carrie Dann NBC/National Journal Reporter

WASHINGTON - In the early morning hours of November 3^rd, 2004, Democrats looked on in disbelief as Ohio’s twenty electoral votes clanged into George W. Bush’s column, effectively ending John Kerry’s run for the presidency.

Today, under the early summer skies of the Buckeye State, supporters of Democrat Barack Obama are building a strategy designed to ensure that it doesn’t happen again in 2008.

To do so, Obama’s team has the benefit of two different playbooks from past statewide campaigns. On the one hand, they can pore over John Kerry’s 2004 plan to swell urban turnout to unprecedented levels; on the other, they can trace the county-by-county vote totals of the state’s popular Democats – like Governor Ted Strickland and freshman senator Sherrod Brown – who courted the support of Ohioans in rural and exurban areas.

The maps couldn’t be more different.

Records from the 2006 landslide that swept Appalachia native son Ted Strickland into the governor’s office show the upside-down pentagon of the Buckeye state awash in dark blue. Strickland carried all but sixteen of Ohio’s 88 counties, drawing heavy support from the state’s sparsely populated southeastern swath.

But where Strickland’s map – and to a lesser extent, Senator Sherrod Brown’s 2006 victory – shows a continuous blanket of Democratic support across the state, Kerry’s strongholds were small, highly concentrated urban patches against the red fabric of rural Ohio.

Not enough this time?
Two years ago, Strickland and Brown enjoyed broad success in an election cycle marked by scandal-ridden state Republican officials and unprecedented disapproval of the national status quo. Despite the uniqueness of the election year, the two candidates’ appeal to exurban and rural voters was not totally unique to 2006.

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One-time Akron congressman Sherrod Brown’s winning county-by-county chart, for example, was almost a mirror image of the one constructed by Bill Clinton in 1996 – the last time a Democratic presidential candidate won the state. Clinton, whose down-South populist appeal helped him eek out an Ohio win by less than 2 points in 1992, deepened his support in rural regions four years later. Senator Brown’s map in 2006 was even bluer.

But since Clinton’s reelection in the mid 1990s, Democratic presidential candidates have allowed red patches to bleed back into the picture, losing mid-population swing counties – even those comfortably won by Clinton – by double digits.

Reliance on urban communities nearly succeeded – twice. In 2004, John Kerry lost the state by less than 120,000 votes despite winning only sixteen Ohio counties; only one of those had a population under 50,000, Bush’s margin of victory there in 2000 was comparable to his wins in Missouri and Tennessee, Al Gore’s home state. 

But Democrats in the state say that, this year, that model just won’t cut it.

David Wilhelm, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager and an Ohio native now serving as an informal advisor to the Obama campaign, says that only those candidates who can harness the state’s diversity can be successful.

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“The main thing to understand about Ohio is that it is a patchwork,” he says of the state’s wide assortment of economic, historical, and cultural pockets. “No one patch is big enough. In order to succeed, you need to be willing and able and capable to determine to campaign in each patch.”

Wilhelm believes that Obama has to expand beyond past presidential candidates’ reliance on the state’s three most populous counties – those home to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati – where Kerry garnered over 30% of his total votes. “You can’t squeeze more votes out of those three counties than John Kerry did,” he says. "Barack Obama has got to make up the difference elsewhere.”

Local Democrats say that the Kerry campaign’s mistake was failing to invest time physically campaigning in swing counties. “They really didn’t work this area as hard as you have to work it,” says Steve Madru, the Democratic Party chairman in Ross County, where Kerry lost by 10 points but Brown and Strickland both won by double digits. "You can’t just get on TV and say ‘I’m going to help rural America’ and then not show up. You have to physically be here.”

A matter of message
The maps make it look easy. If you show up, so to speak, the voters will come.

But aides to Brown, Clinton, and Kerry’s campaigns note that the failure of the Massachusetts senator to resonate with Ohio’s swing voters may have had less to do with presence than message.  Despite a heavy focus on large cities, Kerry did visit some non-traditional areas of the state for Democratic candidates, emulating Clinton’s well-remembered bus tour and engineering a camo-clad goose hunt photo-op with Strickland twelve days before the election.

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But with the worst of the state’s economic woes yet to hit exurban counties, Kerry’s less localized and more gloomy message did not hit home there. “Ohio has sort of a stubborn optimism. They want to hear hope,” says Greg Haas, a longtime consultant to Ohio Democrats who served as Clinton’s state coordinator in 1992. “The Kerry campaign was anti-Bush. The Bill Clinton campaign was pro-hope.”

So, say observers, were Brown and Strickland, who successfully championed Average Joes and touted economic populism with cross-party appeal. Their victories might provide Obama with the quickest means to cut through the diverse patches of Ohio’s voting blocs. Now, in comparison to 2004, Ohio’s political scene is crowded with more Democratic state and local elected officials to serve as surrogates for the Illinois senator. 

In particular, Governor Strickland, whose early endorsement of Hillary Clinton is widely credited with facilitating her success in the state’s primary, can provide skeptical independents with a reason to reconsider someone viewed as an outsider.

“There is no more important validator in the state of Ohio,” says Wilhelm of Strickland’s recent thumbs-up to the newly minted nominee. (Another indication that Team Obama holds the Strickland map close to the vest: the campaign’s communications director, Issac Baker, and state director Aaron Pickrell, both served as aides to the governor during his 2006 campaign.)

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