Phil Mazi voted for Richard Nixon and Barack Obama — twice.
The North Canton fire alarm salesman doesn’t care much to punch the party ticket. For more than 50 years he’s always voted for the candidate he liked most.
But on Tuesday, he decided to support a candidate he dislikes to stop one he likes even less.
“I’m good with either of the Democrats so I decided to vote against Donald Drumpf,” Mazi said, using Trump’s estranged family name. “And so I voted for [John] Kasich, not that I like him.”
Mazi, 71, is among an untold number (perhaps 10s of thousands) of independent and Democratic voters in Ohio who asked for a Republican ballot at the polls on Tuesday.
Some, like Mazi, voted for Kasich to deprive Trump of Ohio’s 66 delegates and slow the billionaire’s runaway lead in the three-way race for the Republican nomination.
Others, including blue-collar Democrats from southeastern Ohio and the state’s struggling post-industrial cities, switched parties to support Trump, who is promising to renegotiate bad trade deals that have gutted the Rust Belt’s good-paying factory jobs.
Either way, the wacky dynamics of a contested presidential primary have turned swing state Ohio decidedly Republican — that includes Summit County, a bastion of liberalism that led Kasich to victory on Tuesday.
Seeing red
Tuesday’s primary has turned upside down decades of data on how Ohioans, who tend to split evenly between the two major parties, now identify politically.
Not only did Ohioans nearly topple the 20-year high voter turnout rate of 2008, the state’s independents and Democrats pulled so many Republican ballots that the state now skews conservative in a big way.
The 2008 record-high turnout was driven largely by Ohio Democrats who enthusiastically chose between then Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. More than 3.5 million Ohioans cast primary ballots that year — 67 percent of them voting for Clinton or Obama and, by making that partisan choice, self-identifying as Democrats.
On Tuesday, roughly 3.2 million Ohioans cast primary ballots. This time, with heightened interest in stopping or supporting Trump, 62 percent of voters requested Republican ballots, thus flipping the state’s political alignment.
On Monday, according to previous primary election voting, Summit County had 18,389 registered Republicans and 34,442 Democrats. By Tuesday 69,388 Democratic and 80,375 Republican ballots were cast.
They’ll be back
The surge in conservatism, at least on paper, hasn’t unnerved Democrats.
David Pepper, chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, figured the party-switching phenomenon is a one-time occurrence. Democrats who helped Kasich defeat Trump Tuesday will return to their liberal leanings by the general election this fall.
Pepper said that the fact that so many independents and Democrats were willing to defeat Trump is a sure sign of how handily more moderate voters will reject the billionaire in the general election.
“We have no doubt they’ll be with us in the fall against Trump,” Pepper said, assuming Trump is the Republican nominee.
But some Democrats-turned-Republican are seriously considering Kasich.
A Coventry man, who in his 60s, works part time at a department store and wished to remain anonymous because of an upcoming job interview. He said he went back to college to get an accounting degree after selling his manufacturing business.
He understands why Trump, who lost Ohio, did so well in its poorest communities especially in Appalachian Ohio and the Mahoning Valley, where once plentiful and high-paying factory jobs have disappeared.
Trump’s message should make sense to a man whose livelihood has been disrupted by globalization and international trade.
“It does, but I don’t believe him. I don’t hear any specifics on what he would do,” said the man, who voted for Al Gore and Barack Obama but switched parties Tuesday to help shape the Republican ticket in case Bernie Sanders, his favorite, loses to Clinton.
“I voted for Kasich because I thought he presented a more presidential appearance and demeanor. And I definitely didn’t want Donald Trump,” said the man, who added that he would vote for Kasich over Clinton this fall.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug.