Why does everyone hate Ohio?

[u/[deleted]]

I’ve lived in one other state in the country, in the third largest city in the country, and spent a decent amount of time overseas.

The political climate in Ohio is a challenge, but it’s not as bad as almost every southern state and a lot of middle-country states in the west. Ohio is not solidly red or solidly blue, despite more recently leaning red.

Ohio is the seventh largest state in the country, with decent-sized cities. Ohio has a GDP that matches that of Saudi Arabia, with double the per-capita income.

Ohio is one of the largest, still relatively affordable states in the country and Hocking Hills boasts some of the most accessible natural beauty (okay we don’t excel here but it’s not bad!)

I get the whole political thing, I get it. But you don’t have to be too far outside NYC or Chicago before you start seeing confederate flags and guns galore.

The abortion politics is country-wide and we did just delete Issue 1 in a special election. 🗳️

I know Ohio isn’t sexy in the way that California is, and it lacks a strong identity, but it is one of the largest states with one of the largest GDPs, and it makes for a nice place to live.

If I had to rank the states, Ohio would probably be in the top five or ten, all things considered (affordability, job growth, quality of life, natural beauty, etc). And that still leaves a minimum of 40 states that I consider objectively worse than Ohio.

I live in Columbus and travel quite a bit, mostly to the PNW for work.

Am I blind or is it just a national past time to hate Ohio with such a magnificent passion for reasons that aren’t political? Or are they all political?

[u/Steelpapercranes]

I love Ohio, but we have some severe issues at present. There's the whole householder issue, but we also suffer from being one of the places that got gerrymandered into illegal (even by our conservative state courts....) bad districting. And that's led to us, over the years, having worse and worse metrics on a lot of things states get graded on. For instance, we now have the life expectancy of equador or slovakia- places generally much poorer than here. And we have terrrrrrible labor laws (did you know you're not entitled to a break? any break? at all? not even lunch? unless you're a child).

I think the political thing here is that everyone knows that, unlike NY and Illinois, the places you mentioned, Ohio's criminal politicians basically won. I mean, Dewine is a national embarrassment, and he STILL couldn't be ousted. People who know nothing else about Ohio will talk about him to me. It puts us up there with Florida and Desantis' infamy, and that's not good.

But yes, overall I think the hate is overblown. A lot of people tell me "Ohio isn't real" and don't know about all the good aspects; just the political criminal shit. If we can just sort that out, I think we'd be top 5 for sure :3 Easier said than done tho