Dems Face Shutout in Ohio
(NY Times) – With a wounded candidate at the top of their ticket, Democrats in Ohio have been forced to adopt a Plan B as they seek to avoid a disastrous shutout in elections for governor and other statewide offices.
“Voting from the bottom to the top: That is the way we need to roll this year,” said Nina Turner, a candidate for secretary of state.
Translation: Ignore the contest for governor and concentrate on the down-ballot races for the five other statewide offices, where Democrats are challenging Republican incumbents.
Ms. Turner, a fiery state senator from Cleveland cited as a name to watch by MSNBC, was rallying party loyalists at Blind Bob’s, a bar in downtown Dayton. It was the kickoff of a tour by Democratic candidates across the length and breadth of Ohio, whose much bled-over terrain in presidential races is belied by solid Republican control of state government.
Democrats here and nationally had high hopes of ousting Gov. John Kasich, whose job approval was below 50 percent among voters in Quinnipiac University polls taken early this year. But that was before the challenger, Ed FitzGerald, suffered self-inflicted wounds and his campaign all but imploded. With donors fleeing, top aides to Mr. FitzGerald quit last month as it became clear there was not enough money for a hard-fought race.
Now, Ohio Democrats are worried about the fallout if their supporters, disillusioned by the FitzGerald troubles, sit on their hands in November. Democrats had hoped a rousing fight in 2014 would energize the party’s grass roots and carry into the presidential contest in 2016 — an answer to the Republicans’ choice of Cleveland as the site of their national convention.
“This is the last thing you want, to be limping into an election at the top of the ticket,” said Joe Schiavoni, the minority leader of the State Senate, where Democrats would like to cut into Republicans’ big edge in the Legislature.
Jerry Austin, a longtime Democratic consultant in Ohio, predicted a postelection housecleaning of the state Democratic Party, which had cleared the field for Mr. FitzGerald to run.
“The No. 1 thing for Democrats after this election is O.K., what will we do to be in shape to win Ohio for a presidential candidate in 2016?” he said.
Mr. FitzGerald’s troubles began in midsummer with the revelation that the police had found him two years earlier parked in a car at 4:30 a.m. with a woman who was not his wife. He denied anything inappropriate. But days later another shoe dropped: Mr. FitzGerald, a former F.B.I. agent elected in 2010 as executive of Cuyahoga County, had driven for years without a valid license.
John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, called the absence of a license “an issue easy to understand for voters but hard to explain for candidates.”
Mr. FitzGerald is soldiering on, though without money for television ads and in the face of double-digit polling leads by Mr. Kasich.
“We feel confident in our prospects because Ed’s personal missteps pale in comparison to the impact that Governor Kasich’s recent failures have had on Ohioans,” said Lauren Hitt, a FitzGerald campaign spokeswoman.
The governor, often mentioned as a Republican presidential hopeful, says little these days about that prospect, but will no doubt attract a flood of attention if he wins a commanding re-election in his swing state.
In February, he was seen as vulnerable with only a five-point lead in the Quinnipiac University poll, an advantage that was within the poll’s margin of sampling error. His support of an anti-union law in 2011 was torpedoed by voters in a referendum, and his tax cuts that lowered state aid to municipalities drew bipartisan rebuke. Last year, his image softened whenhe embraced Medicaid expansion, criticizing the hardheartedness of some Republicans.
Mr. Kasich added insult to Mr. FitzGerald’s injury recently by refusing to debate him, the first time in decades Ohio’s opponents for governor are not meeting as equals on a stage. After “the other side imploded,” said a spokeswoman for the Kasich campaign, Connie Wehrkamp, “we decided it was better to move on.”
Just five weeks before Election Day, Ohio Democrats have descended into recriminations, with many angry and frustrated that the state party did not do a better job vetting the little-known Mr. FitzGerald, handing him the nomination without a primary that could have aired his past. “It was incredibly foolish; Ed had never really been tested,” said Greg Haas, a Democratic operative in Columbus.
The party chairman, Chris Redfern, pointed a finger at Mr. FitzGerald himself. “I’ve never met a former F.B.I. agent who doesn’t have a driver’s license,” he said. “It’s akin to saying, ‘Damn, I should have my umbrella’ after it rains.”
Mr. Redfern, a State House member, said no other major Democrats stepped up to run in a primary. As for vetting Mr. FitzGerald, he blamed an outside group that the campaign hired to research the candidate’s vulnerabilities. Mr. Redfern said he would not hire the company “to clean out my bird cage.”
An across-the-board loss by Democrats in November would mean that heading into 2016 Republicans would control the agenda in the Legislature, and its priorities dominate news media coverage. It would also mean Democrats have a shallow bench for future races for governor if its rising stars, including Ms. Turner and Connie Pillich, an Air Force veteran running for state treasurer, are deprived of understudy roles in statewide offices.
“From cycle to cycle you try to keep your base energized,” said Mark R. Weaver, a Republican consultant in Columbus. “The Democrats won’t be able to do that. They’ll have to spend even more resources to re-engage their base come 2016.”
Many Democrats denied that they would be at a disadvantage in the next presidential cycle. They pointed to the bounce-back of activists after a Republican wave four years ago, when Democratic volunteers staffed more than 150 field offices in President Obama’s re-election race, a surge that played a decisive role in turning out the vote that gave the state to the president.
“There is no connection between one election and the next,” said Mr. Haas, a former Democratic chairman of Franklin County, which includes Columbus, the state capital. “Volunteers can walk away from the trenches and go to the South of France for a year or two and then come back to the trench.”
This year, though, the worry is that too many of those canvassers and phone-bankers will be disengaged.
At the bar in Dayton, Ms. Pillich urged a group of the city’s experienced Democratic activists to fight for every vote, reminding them she won re-election to the State House in 2010 by just five votes. She raced into the crowd and offered high fives while calling out, “Who’ll get me five votes over here?”
Robert Lynch, a retired construction worker, said he planned to volunteer as a canvasser as he had in the past two presidential elections. He worried about voter apathy without a marquee candidate leading the ticket. “In ’08, that was an easy one,” he said. “In ’12, it was even easier, everyone would listen to you. Now it’s back to ‘Nobody like Obama is running and I’m not really concerned.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/us/fumbled-bid-for-governor-imperils-ohio-democrats.html?_r=0
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