The once-reliably Republican stronghold of Delaware County has slowly been shifting more Democratic in recent years.
Delaware was one of only five counties in Ohio to vote for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, Kyle Kondik, a nonpartisan election analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics who is originally from Ohio, said in an interview with The Dispatch.
Republican margins of victory in Delaware County have been shrinking in recent decades while many other counties in Ohio have shifted to deep red Republican strongholds, Kondik said.
In fact, Delaware County saw the strongest Democratic-leaning shift in presidential vote margin between 2000 and 2024 than any other county in Ohio – from a 35-point Republican win for George
Bush in 2000 to a seven-point lead for Donald Trump in 2024, according to election data analyzed by The Dispatch.
Could Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown, a former longtime U.S. Senator seeking another chance, both Democrats, win Delaware County in November?
Kondik said there’s a chance: If either candidate wins statewide, they would most likely also win Delaware County.
Democrats have been doing better in wealthier, more-educated suburbs in recent years and Delaware County – especially the rapidly growing southern part – is no exception, Kondik said.
The majority of registered voters in Delaware County – about two thirds – are unaffiliated, according to data from the Delaware County Board of Elections. Registered Republicans still outnumber registered Democrats, but the amount of active voters in the local Democratic party has been growing at a faster rate than active Republicans.
In November 2012, 10,034 registered Democrats, 21,484 registered Republicans and 27,630 people registered as unaffiliated voted in the election. In November 2024, 20,355 Democrats, 34,235 Republicans and 73,743 unaffiliated people voted in that election.
The Delaware County GOP declined to comment for this story.
Peg Watkins, chair of the Delaware County Democrats, said in an interview that although the local Republican party has had a “monopoly” on county offices for decades, people in the county GOP are more moderate and not as extreme as President Donald Trump and some other Republicans. For example, Trump had weak support there in the 2016 presidential primary.
Watkins, who has been her party's chair since 2018, said that Trump’s first election to the White House in 2016 inspired more local Democrats to get involved in the party, and the amount of people on the central committee doubled between 2016 and 2018, from approximately 50 to 100.
“We did not think that Americans would support [Trump], and then when they did, it woke a lot of people up who said we need to pay attention and work and see what we can do to stop this menace and to make our country, our state better than this,” Watkins said.
Watkins said she is “cautiously optimistic” about the outcome in November, but Democrat volunteers are continuing to knock on doors and mobilizing to encourage voter turnout.
At the annual Little Brown Jug horse race at the Delaware County Fair in September, Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy told The Dispatch that people in Delaware County are also looking for affordability and tax relief, which is part of his campaign platform.
The political shift in Delaware County coincides with rapid growth and diversification – but what hasn’t changed within the past few decades is that Delaware remains one of the wealthiest counties in the Buckeye State.
Within Delaware County, the change has been most visible in rapidly growing areas in the southern part of the county.
While some of the northernmost (and still predominantly rural) townships and villages did get more strongly Republican between 2000 and 2024, Oxford Township most especially, overall support for the Republican presidential candidate in the county has shrunk in the majority of places.
Al Gore didn’t win the majority of votes in any of the places in Delaware County in 2000, but in 2024, Kamala Harris won within five areas of the county: The parts of Columbus and Westerville that extend northward, as well as the Village of Shawnee Hills, Orange Township and the City of Powell.
Anna Lynn Winfrey is a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. She can be reached at awinfrey@dispatch.com.
Ohio Statehouse Bureau Reporter Jessie Balmert contributed reporting.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Is Delaware County turning blue? How the Ohio stronghold is shifting
