The Dayton Tea Party & Local Political Culture

The Dayton Tea Party! A protest against the stimulus package specfically and big government in general. One has to be impressed with the organizers. They have put together a good speakers list of various folks and also have this pretty good poster out, too, on their website:



The timing of their ralley is smart, too, as it's after work, so the average Joe can attend.

What's even more impressive is that they have over 5,000 RSVPs for possible attendees! If they even get a quarter of that number to actually attend this would be largest political demonstration in Dayton within recent memory (not counting partisan political rallies for specific candidates).

Perhaps this widespread grassroots support is yet another illustration of the basic conservative political culture in the region.

Obama & Regional Political Culture

It's difficult, without fairly detailed surveys, to measure this. Perhaps one way are the readers comments at the Dayton Daily News website. Recent ones have pointed out declining subscriptions may have something to do with the DDNs' liberal/Democratic op-ed positions as much as to online news sources. One notes alternative (and comparatively conservative) Cincinnati Enquirer has moved into the market, readily available in suburban locations here.

Another way is to look at the margin of victory in the past presidential election. As we know Obama usually won urban counties, that is counties with central cities and most of the suburbs. So let's see how this looks for Dayton (Montgomery County) and nearby urban counties in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky:

As one can see Dayton gave Obama his third lowest margin of victory. McCain actually won Allen County, which is Fort Wayne and suburbs. And Obama squeaked by in Lexington/Fayette County.

Whats interesting is that Cincinnati and Louisville were more favorable to Obama, Louisville by over 5 percentage points over Dayton. But one can see a sort of Ohio Valley trend here, with Dayton more akin to the lower margins of Cincy, Lexington, and Louisville (and Fort Wayne, which is more the midwest factory town).

What's interesting is how different this spread was compared to Toledo, which one would think is comparable to Dayton in some ways.

What about Greene County?

One thing that should be noted is that due to the peculiarities of geography, Dayton is not at the center of its' county the way, say, Indianapolis and Columbus are. Instead it is closer to the eastern county line.

So fairly large suburban areas of Beavercreek, Fairborn (and Sugarcreek Twp a bit, too) are not being counted. If these suburbs were actually within Montgomery County the point spread migh actually drop to the Lexington range, or even Fort Waynes', with McCain winning here.

Dayton vs Ohio

This very telling graph shows how Dayton had the weakest Obama support in the state for urban counties, the big seven urban counties of the state:




Which indicates that Obama is not that popular here, and, of all urban areas in the state, Dayton would be the one where a grass-roots opposition to his policies would arise.

More Tea Party Blogging from Daytonology.

Since a theme of the Tea Party is oppposition to big goverment, the next few posts will look at big government in the Dayton metro area, measuring this in various ways using some readily available data.