Surprise! Ohio is the most competitive state in the country when it comes to political party identification.

Gallup recently released the results from their daily tracking polls from January to December 2013. Surveys are conducted daily, which include 1,000 respondents. By the end of the year, 178,527 adults across the country had been surveyed, and 6,337 of them were Ohioans.

Obviously a lot can be derived from such a large sample size. On party identification, as I’ve already mentioned, Ohio is not only the most competitive but almost completely neutral. Gallup has a metric they call “Democratic advantage,” which is the difference between the percentage of state residents identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic and the percentage identifying as Republicans or leaning Republican (a positive score means lean Democrat, a negative means lean Republican). Ohio’s Democratic advantage rating is 0.4%, putting it at the top of the list of most competitive. North Carolina (-0.6%) is on Ohio’s right, and Wisconsin is to Ohio’s left (1.0%). The nation as a whole has a rating of 5.1%.

While Ohio may lean ever so slightly towards the Democrats, there are a lot more Ohioans that consider themselves to be conservative (37.9%) than liberal (19.9%). That creates what Gallup calls an 18% “conservative advantage.” To put that in perspective, Ohio is more conservative than the nation (14.6%), but still ranks 26th of the 50 states. Again, right in the middle.

So in a nutshell, Ohio is slightly more Democratic than Republican, but much more conservative than liberal. In both cases, right in the middle relative to other states. The old saying still rings true – as goes Ohio…so goes the nation.

There are also several other interesting metrics covered by Gallup that go beyond politics. For instance, did you know that Ohio ranks #12 in states with the highest percentage of residents who consider themselves “moderately religious?” Or did you know that Ohio is #5 among states with the lowest percentage of government workers? Take a look for yourself.