Well, the Ohio Senate filing deadline passed and all kinds of wackiness ensued. Jennifer Brunner declared her candidacy months ago, filed and got down to reaching out to voters. Now, all of a sudden, she has three primary opponents!
The whole story is actually quite funny:
It seems one of the Mary-come-latelies used to work for Lee Fisher, the only real challenge to Brunner in this primary:
One of the women, Traci "TJ" Johnson of Hilliard, previously worked for Brunner's chief competitor, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher.
Fisher's campaign adamantly denied any involvement in Johnson's candidacy amid speculation he encouraged it to dilute Ohio's crucial female vote.
Johnson was joined in Thursday filings by Charlena Renee Bradley of Lyndhurst, an apparent newcomer to state-level politics. Johnson has previously run for the Ohio House.
...Johnson, 45, served seven years at the Ohio attorney general's office, most of it while Fisher held the position from 1991 to 1995. They had a relationship of trust, according to personnel records reviewed by the AP.
While I'm not endorsing any conspiracy theories here, it is true that having another woman on the primary ballot could lose Brunner those few points to put Portman ahead. As the article points out, she has been speaking of being Ohio's first woman Senator at campaign speeches and such. So this is essentially a double whammy: diluting the vote while co-opting her message.
This is where we come in. We are not going to let any such thing happen. We are going to phonebank for Jennifer Brunner and reach out to all Ohio voters, men and women, and remind them who has already been out there fighting for Ohio, before it was the, apparently, cool thing to do. We are going to donate to the campaign for Jennifer Brunner. We are going to do whatever we can to get Jennifer elected Senator for Ohio!
As things are right now, Lee Fisher leads Brunner in fundraising. The good news, though, is that Brunner remains competitive in the polls despite this. That speaks volumes. Brunner's a fighter for sure; once we get her through the primary, she'll be fine against Bush's budget man, Portman. So let's get her through the primary:
"You have to have resources," Brunner said last week. "You don’t have to have the same amount of resources that consultants tell you (that) you have to have."
...David Dettman, Brunner’s campaign manager, has described her as a "female Paul Wellstone," a reference to the Minnesota Democrat who rocked national politics with a low-budget upset in a 1990 U.S. Senate race against incumbent U.S. Sen. Rudy Boschwitz. Wellstone was outspent nearly 5-1, but got his message across touring the state in a converted school bus.
Brunner said she is relying on a strong grass-roots effort to offset her disadvantage in campaign cash, a disadvantage that could make it hard for her to do any TV advertising before the May 4 primary.
May 4th, everybody; we've got 2.5 months to show Ohio what we already know:
Jennifer Brunner = better dems
Please spread the word with all the Ohioans you know. If you yourself are in Ohio, please pretty please with cherries on top write letters to the editor. And I hope the rest of us will take an hour or two to phonebank for Brunner or make a small donation to give her campaign a boost to pushback on this latest development. I can see the headline now: "Announcement of two new primary candidates spurs Brunner support."
Let's do this!