First, with many, we note that it's early. Election season starts on Labor Day, but for statewide contests, most voters don't give elections a thought until nearly Halloween.
Second, Strickland can lay claim to be modestly more moderate than the norm for his party. That has made him an acceptable alternative to Ohio's country-club Republicans, considerable in power if not in numbers, who accept the notion that Blackwell is a wing nut.
Third, Blackwell has been the object of an enormous campaign of slanderous disinformation since before 2004. For the Ds, this campaign has served the broad objective to foster the impression that they lose elections because of Republican violation of voters' rights and the specific objective to undermine the perception of a genuinely electable African-American of the GOP. But for voters only mildly engaged, the vague impression that Blackwell is untrustworthy is enough to evoke a response for his apparently scandal-free opponent with decent name recognition.
Fourth, Blackwell suffers from guilt by association with the corrupt country-club establishment of the Ohio Republican Party. This is odd, of course, because Blackwell has been leader of the conservative insurgency within the Ohio GOP, but such nuances aren't reflected in early polls.
Fifth, we suspect that most polling persists in overestimating the likelihood that Ds will actually cast ballots while underestimating that Rs will. This has been the pattern in the last several electoral cycles, as pollsters continue to struggle with the changing demographics of the American electorate.
Sixth, like all Rs, Blackwell suffers from the electorate's fatigue with the party in power. Since no party can create the utopia for which voters long, any party that holds power long enough will be tossed out in favor of any alternative.
Now what do these factors add up to? Essentially, an imperative that the Blackwell campaign get busy as soon as the AFL-CIO picnic ends on September 4. And here's what they should get busy with:
- Blackwell's story as a poor child of the ghetto who has achieved influence and power with a distinguished record of public service.
- The issues, or rather the issue, which for Ohio is the lousy business environment created by high taxes and costs of government and an economy dependent on manufacturing instead of knowledge.
Both of these are powerful weapons in the Blackwell arsenal. The first is something that Strickland cannot duplicate and that will blunt any but the most egregious and outrageous of political attack ads. It will have traction with sensitive independents who fancy that they vote on character and competency instead of ideology, and it will persuade some African-American voters to consider the party that abandoned them in 1968.
But the second is really powerful. Strickland owes too much to labor interests to campaign on lower taxes and an more positive business environment. AFSCME, the NEA and the AFT won't allow the former, and industrial unions, married to the zero-sum notion of economics, won't allow the latter. With a campaign focused in that direction, Blackwell loosens Strickland's hold on independents and calls all but the most die-hard country-clubbers back to the Republican fold. That campaign theme will also confront voters with the real stakes of a throw-the-bums-out spasm, as it paints Strickland--accurately in the SWNID view--as the candidate of the stagnating status quo in Ohio.
The latest Rasmussen shows an 11-point gap. That means that Blackwell needs to move about one voter out of twenty. We think it's entirely possible. If the campaign is run right, we'll say that it's likely.
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