“O-H-I-O” the crowd chanted Monday evening as Ohio Gov. John Kasich strode up to a group of retirees in Indian Land, South Carolina.
In the sweltering heat along the northern border of the state, the governor may have just found his secret weapon for a 2016 win: The large numbers of Ohioans who have moved to the Palmetto State.
Though he hasn’t yet announced a decision whether he will run for president, the event certainly looked like that of a presidential hopeful: talk of strengthening the economy, methods to defeat ISIS (Kasich supports boots on the ground if that’s what it takes), and other messages of optimism for this country. But what particularly stood out during the hour-long event were all the Buckeye ties.
Nate Leupp, the vice chairman of the Greenville Republican Party and a Buckeye himself who’s been living in South Carolina for eleven years, says Ohioans are allover the state.
“It’s not uncommon at all to be driving down the road and see an Ohio State sticker on cars. You can see someone in Home Depot wearing an Ohio State shirt and if you call out ‘OH’ they’ll respond ‘IO,'” he told CNN.
For Greenville, the largest city in the upstate, he describes the draw for Ohioans is its “northern city feel. It has all of the amenities of a big city without the negatives like traffic.”
One native Ohioan sees the auto industry as a connection between the two states.
“A lot of the car industry here in South Carolina connects to Akron, Ohio,” points out Trisha Constantine, a personal trainer living in Greenville for six years who originally heralds from Canton, Ohio. She’s right: South Carolina boasts BMV and Michelin manufacturing facilities, and last month secured a major auto expansion coup when Volvo announced its first U.S. car plant will be in the Palmetto State.
And the state also hosts scores of Buckeye retirees who populate the state’s Lowcountry coastal towns, though the northern transplant strategy didn’t work too well for former New York mayor Rudy Giuiliani who had hoped Empire State retirees would buoy him in Florida during his 2008 bid. He eventually went on to take third and dropped out of the race shortly thereafter.
The vocal Ohio support heard on Monday is no guarantee that Kasich is actually breaking through in the polls. Winthrop University, who conducts one of the most respected presidential primary polls in the state, didn’t include Kasich in their most recent survey from April.
Though the group gathered to see Kasich Monday mostly consisted of retirees, Leupp says the Ohio transplants that he knows are younger individuals “in the dozens” and he does admit that they are relatively conservative, another angle that Kasich would no doubt make the most of.
The phenomenon of Ohioans moving to South Carolina is so real that a particularly peeved group has taken to the Internet to express annoyance. “There’s actually a website called gobacktoOhio.com,” Constantine said, but adding that it doesn’t really bother her. “Maybe it’s because I live upstate, but there are a lot of people from Greenville who didn’t grow up here. There’s a European base and people from the Midwest.”
Constantine fell in love with South Carolina as a kid when she spent summers and spring break at Hilton Head Island, a common destination for Rust Belt families looking for a cheap beach destination that’s roughly three hours closer to Ohio than Florida.
CNN asked the governor if he felt that the large Ohioan population in South Carolina would be an advantage in the early primary state.
“I never thought about that, but certainly in this meeting I did. We’ll take advantage of Ohioans that want to help, but beyond that it’s just block and tackle, get out and tell people who you are and I seem to be getting a pretty good response. So we’ll see, the proof will be in the pudding.”
For now, Kasich’s absorbing as much attention as he can get. There were even Ohio political ties sprinkled in the crowd that Kasich addressed.
“I’m Mary Taylor’s aunt,” said an older woman after patiently raising her hand during the Q&A. Taylor is the lieutenant governor who currently serves under Kasich. Anticipating the introduction, he said, “I called her today and she said you were coming. Well come on up here and get a hug. We’ll send her a picture.”
Before he left, Kasich told the crowd that his next destination was Michigan. Practically on-cue, the crowd booed. Some rivalries will never die.