The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

John Kerry needs to win Ohio if he has any hope of winning this election. The entire election is going to hinge on this state, in my humble opinion. Even assuming Dubya wins Florida, Kerry winning Ohio gives him a huge boost on his way to winning the electoral college. On the other hand, if he loses Ohio then he has absolutely no hope barring a miracle in Florida, Pennsylvania, AND Iowa.

In the past I've said that I don't like Ohio because I haven't met any cool people from there. That's not true any more, but when I had less world experience truly all the people I met from Ohio were very odd to me. On the surface they seemed to share a lot of the ideals I hold, and then out of nowhere they would come out with some ultra conservative, or religious, or otherwise seemingly dissonant view. If I know off the bat that you hold different ideals, then at least you make sense to me and I can respect you.

Many people from Ohio are just that fickle in my (again limited) experience. I think Ohio has an identity crisis. They have a few really big cities in Cleveland, Cincinatti, and even Columbus to a certain extent, and people from big cities tend to be more liberal. At the same time, though, there seems to be a traditional Midwestern viewpoint that comes out of the rest of Ohioans. I don't know anything about the geography or history of Ohio, so I won't go speculating, but all of this just makes Ohio sort of confusingly fascinating.