Hillary lies about Ohio election history

It has become part of political mythology that you cannot win the presidency without carrying Ohio. (Actually John Kennedy pulled off this feat in 1960, winning the general election even though he lost Ohio by 273,000 votes.) But can you win the presidency without winning your party's Ohio primary? History suggests that Hillary Clinton is wrong on this point.

The New York senator made the "No person has ever won the White House" claim in an interview with an Ohio TV station while waiting for the results to arrive. She qualified the claim later in the evening, in her victory speech, when she added the words "in recent history."

Let's take a quick look at the history of the Ohio primary.

The Facts

Ohio held its first primary in 1912. On the Democratic side, Ohio governor Judson Harmon beat out New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson went on to win the presidency that year, disproving the Hillary Clinton theory of Ohio politics a century before she came up with it.

Flash forward to May 1932. Favorite son George White wins the Democratic Ohio primary with the expectation that he would support former Secretary of War Newton Baker, but Franklin D. Roosevelt goes on to become president.

"Ohio historian (and Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist) Thomas Suddes also pointed me to the May 1952 Ohio primary when the GOP at-large delegates were all pledged to Ohio Senator Robert Taft. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who eventually won the presidency, was not on the ballot.

In 1960, the Ohio Democratic primary was won by favorite son Gov. Michael DiSalle, who eventually pledged his delegates to John Kennedy after a good deal of arm-twisting from the Kennedy brothers. Favorite sons also won the 1964 and 1968 primary elections in Ohio, on both sides of the political divide.

In 1968, for example, Governor James A. Rhodes controlled all 58 delegates to the GOP convention, withholding his votes until it became apparent that Richard Nixon would win the nomination. Rhodes later achieved a notoriety of sorts by ordering state troopers to suppress anti-war protests at Kent State in 1970.

More recently, Ohio primary voters have gone with the eventual winner of the presidential race. But according to Andrew Cayton, a professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Oh., this factoid is fairly meaningless. In recent years, Ohio has typically held its primaries late in the election season, by which time a winner has already emerged.

Clinton "has taken a little bit of a liberty here," agreed Herb Asher, a professor of political science at Ohio State University. "Maybe what she meant to say was as far back as she can remember." "

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