Cincinnati Enquirer: Ken Melman says not so fast Mike DeWine can still win.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

http://frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/gov/2006/10/mehlman-sort-of-says-gop-still-backing.asp

[JSojourner]

I hate to say it, but Melman is correct.  Mike DeWine is vulnerable.  But he's no Rick Santorum.  Interestingly, Sherrod Brown's success may hinge on how large Ted Strickland's turnout is.  Strickland has religious Democrats, including some Evangelicals, excited about voting Democrat for a change.  The question is, will those voters, while enthusiastically pulling the lever for the Reverend Strickland, hold their noses and vote for Brown?  Or will the cross over and vote for DeWine, who has some pretty deep religious connections of his own with fundamentalist Cedarville University?

My family, all Ohioans -- all Republicans -- and all Evangelicals, are voting for Strickland.  And DeWine.  <sigh>

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Mike DeWine can still win especially since the Univ of Akron showed a closer race than most other polls.

[Deano963]

Strickland has religious Democrats, including some Evangelicals, excited about voting Democrat for a change.  The question is, will those voters, while enthusiastically pulling the lever for the Reverend Strickland, hold their noses and vote for Brown?  Or will the cross over and vote for DeWine, who has some pretty deep religious connections of his own with fundamentalist Cedarville University?

Hold their noses and vote for Brown? Brown is far more religious than Dewine is. Dewine has longstanding problems with his party's evangelical base, not the least of which is his continual flip-flopping on the gay marriage amendment(he has recently had yet another "election-year conversion" on this issue). Dewine does not excite his base like Brown excites his - the Christian evangelical wing does not trust Dewine, they regard him as a John McCain. Evangelicals will turn out in large numbers to vote for their hero, Ken Blackwell. The question is whether they will hold their noses and vote for Dewine or not. Even if they do, it likely will not be enough to save Dewine this year.

The voting power of the religious right fundamentalists is vastly overhyped in Ohio - as evidenced by the fact that Blackwell has not gotten above 40% in a single poll since April, and he excites the fundies more than any Ohio candidate ever has.

Mike DeWine can still win especially since the Univ of Akron showed a closer race than most other polls.

LOL. I sincerely hope you did not take the U. of Akron poll seriously. That poll was absolute trash and was way off compared to every other poll released on this race. You obviously didn't read the NY Times piece on Dewine yesterday in which it said the GOP's own internals showed Brown with large leads. The only good Uni poll in Ohio is U. of Cincinatti.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

that Uni of Akron poll was absolutely horrid, even by uni poll standards.

[Virginian87]

You know Deano, a lot of people may regard you as a hack, but that argument above actually makes a lot of sense.  Good post, man.

[Rococo4]

of course they are not giving up the race........it is very very close here

[Deano963]

You know Deano, a lot of people may regard you as a hack, but that argument above actually makes a lot of sense.  Good post, man.

The kind of people who call me a hack are the very same ones who still predict to this very day that Rick Santorum, Conrad Burns and Kean Jr. will all win - with 100% certainty no less. They call me a hack b/c they can't handle the truth - but what do you expect from 15-year olds? They certainly don't constrain themselves with facts, that's for sure.

I have never once made a prediction that is so delusional and divorced from reality and so obviously a reflection of my partisan wishes. Sure, I may want for McCaskill, Ford and Menendez to win, but IMO those races are pure toss-ups right now (although NJ has recently moved somewhere between toss-up status and Lean Dem staus in my mind), and trying to handicap them either way is a waste of time more than anything else. I also very much back Jim Webb and have donated to his campaign, but I continue to predict that Allen will win (sigh) b/c I am a realist, not a hack.

I'll leave it up to you to decide who the real hacks are...

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Even if that Univ of Akron was not okay, it still says the race is close and even Rasmussen had it at a six pt race not a double digit race like the surveyusa poll showed.

[okstate]

Rothenberg, writing on Political Wire, says that the GOP has just bought 1 million dollars worth of ad time for DeWine in Ohio that will last the next two weeks. Doesn't sound like an "abandonment" to me, assuming that the report is true.

[RJ]

The Dayton Daily News endorses Mike Dewine in this race, or so the local news media on TV claims. They also endorsed Kerry