'Poisoned' Environment For GOP Puts State In Democratic Hands

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'Poisoned' Environment For GOP Puts State In Democratic Hands

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 9, 2006; A43

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 8 -- The day dawned cloudy, but the political skies over Ohio shone bright blue Wednesday for Democrats after they all but swept state races and defeated two-term Sen. Mike DeWine (R), picking up a House seat along the way.

At the top of the ticket, social conservative J. Kenneth Blackwell fared worse than any GOP candidate for governor since 1912.

The Republican defeat in a state that carried President Bush to victory just two years ago was a product of a toxic political environment and a pair of disciplined Democratic campaigns by Rep. Ted Strickland, who was elected governor, and Rep. Sherrod Brown, who beat DeWine.

Strickland and Brown made an unlikely couple. A Methodist minister and former prison psychologist, Strickland was raised on a dirt road called Duck Run in Appalachia, the only one of nine siblings to graduate from college. Brown, an outspoken liberal, is a doctor's son from Mansfield, educated at Yale and first elected to the legislature at age 21.

But together they made a pitch to Ohio's middle class and to voters weary of GOP claims of a monopoly on competence and morality. The Iraq war played strongly for Democrats, as did the economic numbers that showed a loss of 200,000 jobs and the Republican scandals that forced Rep. Bob Ney's resignation and the teary apology of Gov. Bob Taft, fined for accepting secret gifts.

"It was one of those years where the message, the politics and the policy all merged," said Steve Ricchetti, a Democratic strategist who backed Brown. Added Eric Rademacher, head of the Ohio Poll at the University of Cincinnati, "This was a poisoned political environment for Republican candidates."

Voters did not need to look far for signposts. A headline at the top of the Columbus Dispatch last week announced, "Noe took millions, partner testifies." Noe is GOP fundraiser Thomas W. Noe, who persuaded the state to allow him to invest $50 million in rare coins, a scheme widely seen as zany.

"Things just kept going in the right way," said Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, who gave Rep. Deborah Pryce, a member of the Republican House leadership, a big scare, falling short in one of the state's close races.

Blackwell's candidacy imploded as he attacked Strickland and courted national social conservatives. Turnout among Christian conservatives, important to Bush's victory in 2004, was not enough to carry the GOP ticket.

DeWine suffered by running a botched national defense ad whose producers used an image of the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, and added black smoke to make it more dramatic.

"What that did was it slowed our momentum. It took us off our message for a few days," DeWine said over chili in Cincinnati last week. He called the campaign season a perfect storm, the worst since Watergate. "There are just some things you can't control. You try to overcome them. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. There's a limit."

DeWine and his strategists believed they could win by painting Brown as beyond the mainstream and untrustworthy on national security. Although DeWine is a conservative on social issues and primarily backs Bush, he earned a reputation as a low-key pragmatist, sometimes willing to bend.

Early on, however, Brown hammered DeWine as a long-serving Republican beholden to big business, unquestioning on Iraq and unable to deliver for the little guy. In an election-eve interview, Brown said he focused on offering a "clear, bright contrast," determined to show that a liberal could win in a big swing state -- and not by running toward the center.

Brown, as he often told campaign crowds, voted against the Iraq war and the Patriot Act; DeWine voted for them. He opposed the NAFTA and CAFTA free trade agreements; DeWine supported them. He favored universal health care and embryonic stem cell research; DeWine opposed them.

"We were not going to muddle it," Brown said. "The Democratic candidate is fighting for the middle class. It brought a large number of independents and Republicans to our side who have the same dreams and the same concerns. I think that's why the negative ads didn't work."

Brown won by 450,000 votes, Strickland by 900,000.

A former GOP operative who admires DeWine said the incumbent failed to develop a consistent message and responded unevenly to Brown's disciplined criticism. Near the end of the campaign, DeWine loudly assailed Brown for failing to punish a staff member who sold an undercover officer 1 ? ounces of marijuana more than 20 years ago.

DeWine defended his approach: "You have to define the differences. You can't let the other guy shoot at you and not shoot back."

A Democrat had not won the governor's office since 1990 or a Senate seat since John Glenn in 1992. But as Jeb Levington, 30, a self-employed roofer and single father, set out to vote Tuesday, he said Strickland and Brown are "a lot more in tune and interested in people like me."

When the returns came in, jubilant Democrats gathered to cheer. Brown took the stage in Cleveland amid flurries of confetti and chords from Aaron Copland's "Fanfare to the Common Man."

"Today in Ohio, in the middle of America, the middle class won," a smiling Brown said, announcing that one battle was over and another just begun. "And because of progressive principles and mainstream progressive values, as Ohio goes in '06, so goes the nation in '08."