Ted-Heads, led by blogger Brian Hester (a former Strickland staff aide) are already celebrating a new poll by Rasmussen, of all things, that shows the gubernatorial race tightening slightly, with Republican John Kasich maintaining a 3 point lead: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/...
What the Ted-Heads aren't saying is that the poll released today has incumbent Strickland's voter preference actually dropping since Rasmussen's last poll in July. Strickland went from 43% to 42%, with a whopping 54% disapproval rating, which is not where an incumbent governor wants to be just three months before the election.
The principal change in numbers since July was a movement of 3 percentage points from John Kasich, who led in July by 5, to "someone else," a category that doubled its take from July to August, going from 3% to 6%.
In other words, the current movement is among voters who have already decided that they do not want Ted Strickland. Whether those voters will stay with third-party candidates or come back to Kasich is really the only question. Strickland, who's been stuck below 43% for a very long time, has no real prospect of winning.
That Kasich experienced some minor defection in late July is no real surprise, for he had a couple really bad weeks. His running mate, Mary Taylor made a terrible gaffe when, in trying to highlight how bad the Ohio economy has gotten, she admitted that as a tax consultant, she has recently advised Ohio corporate clients to consider a move to Florida.
Hoping that the GOP ticket will continue with such blunders is a hope beyond hope. Taylor is already under the full Palin-program reeducation treatment. It certainly will not be the case that on the morning post-election, analysts will be saying that voters flocked to Toxic Ted because of a Mary Taylor gaffe.
And don't dare doubt that Mr. Strickland really is a toxic candidate. He may break all sorts of fundraising records for Democrats (Kasich is still outpacing him), but Strickland can never undo the string of outright lies he continues to foist on the Ohio public -- from saying that he opposes gambling on moral grounds (then becoming the state's leading casino advocate), to claiming that development projects are a go when he knows full well that the backers have pulled out. (He's done the latter twice in regard to big projects in south-central Ohio -- first with touted nuclear projects at the Piketon federal site, and then with a ballyhooed Russian steel mill for Scioto County, recently announced as canceled.)
Once the voters distrust every word from a politician's mouth, as they do now with Ted, no amount of glitzy advertising can undo the damage.
It's not unfortunate that voters will give Strickland the boot in November, for it simply has to happen. And if some quirk of fate or Diebold engineering somehow hands reelection to Strickland, it would only eliminate any chance that Obama has of carrying Ohio in 2012. Obama needs for Mr. Strickland to be a bad and fading memory.
The unfortunate thing is that Strickland has made every effort to spread his infection. Building on a bad idea from the 2008 campaign, when Strickland persuaded the Obama campaign to merge its state operations with the Ohio Democratic Party, Strickland has now, by ukase, forced all of the statewide and congressional Democratic candidates to merge into one "coordinated campaign."
In other words the captain is insisting that all crew members go down with the ship, even if the voters are all safely escaped. There will be no way for congressional Ohio Dems to avoid Ted Strickland's poison embrace on the fall stump, and no opportunity for any funded candidate to run away from the ODP poison label.
This is a matter of national importance, since five of Ohio's ten congressional Democrats are on the endangered list, more than in any other state (Pennsylvania is second with four). Unless some finagling can free these candidates from Ted's "coordinated campaign," expect all five to lose in November. The cronies that Strickland hand-picked for Secretary of State and Attorney General are goners, too, despite how much they may be "good people." 2010 is the year when voters will punish the Ohio Democratic machine.
Now you might ask why Rasmussen is the only pollster polling the major races in Ohio, since early June. I'm afraid I should confess some role in that. In previous diaries, I exposed a major methodological flaw in Quinnipiac polling, a flaw that was consistently giving Strickland a commanding lead in rural Ohio, including the northwest region, which is one of the most heavily Republican areas of the state.
Unfortunately, the DKOS/R2000 Ohio polls -- if the Kos allegations are true as I believe they are -- appear to have been cribbed from the flawed Quinnipiac numbers, for they revealed the same impossible pattern. It's like copying off the student at the next desk, when that kid routinely flunks.
Quinnipiac responded by first pulling the regional crosstabs from its published data, making it impossible to finger the continuing pro-Strickland bias. But apparently more powerful voices than mine spoke out, and Quinnipiac put its frequent Ohio polling operation on hold. R2000 is, of course, out of the game.
Simultaneously, the University of Cincinnati/Ohio Poll has been beset by internal problems and the cancellation of subsriber newspapers, which I can't help wondering if caused by political pressure, or worse.
That leaves Democrat-leaning PPP, which was closely tracking Rasmussen's numbers when both were actively polling. In fact, PPP had Strickland's approval numbers as even lower than Rasmussen.
DailyKOS has just contracted with PPP to conduct horserace polling, replacing R2000. Hopefully, that means we will soon see a rival back in the Ohio polling game, but one I'll wager shows that Rasmussen's numbers in this state have been accurate all along. In 2006, Rasmussen actually overestimated Strickland's margin of victory by two points.
If you're left wondering what to do in Ohio this year, my advice is this: Free the Ohio Democratic candidates from Strickland's embrace of death.
UPDATE: On Tuesday, August 10, Reuters/IPSOS published a poll showing Kasich ahead by 9 points, 48-39. See my blogroll for my diary on that poll.
That effectively rebuts all the comments below claiming that the Rasmussen polls are somehow illegitimate or that Strickland is somehow gaining, like by magic. It turns out that Rasmussen has been OVERestimating Strickland support, as it did in the 2006 election.
It's fascinating that the commenters so derisive of the Rasmussen numbers have shut up and said nothing after the Reuters/IPSOS poll.
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