I’ll give ya voter enthusiasm.
- Neither John Kasich or Ted Strickland were in contested primaries.
- Democrats had a U.S. Senate primary versus two statewide officeholders.
- Republicans had a State Auditor primary versus a County Prosecutor and a State Representative.
Democrats should have carried the day.
Instead…
- Kasich took 114,758 more votes than Strickland [Kasich: 735,711 Strickland: 670,953]
- Kasich took more votes than any other statewide candidate. Strickland came in fifth.
- 52,634 Democrats voted in the Senate primary who did not vote for Ted Strickland.
- Kasich was the top vote-getter in almost four times the number of counties as Strickland [Kasich: 70 counties, Strickland: 18 counties]
- Among statewide candidates, Kasich was the top vote-getter in 68 counties [Strickland won 17, Portman won three]
- Kasich took more votes than Strickland in 10 of the 14 counties that Strickland represented from 1992-1994 and from 1995-2002, and in six of the 13 counties that Ted Strickland represented from 2002-2006.
And how about total votes?
Now, before you look at this remember that Democrats had every reason to be more enthusiastic about voting in a primary than Republicans.
Well lookie there…
Goodness.
(By the way, interesting to see DeWine as the #2 vote getter among GOP primary voters. Maybe it’s an indication that the supposed anti-DeWine rage has subsided among dedicated Republican voters in Ohio?)
And it wasn’t just Ohioans that noticed this stuff…check out the National Journal…
Just 663K OH voters cast ballots in the competitive primary between LG Lee Fisher (D) and Sec/State Jennifer Brunner (D). That number is lower than the 872K voters who turned out in ’06, when neither Gov. Ted Strickland (D) nor Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) faced serious primary opponents.
[…]
By contrast, GOP turnout was up almost across the board….728K voters cast ballots for a GOP Sec/State nominee in Ohio, the highest-ranking statewide election with a primary; in ’06, just 444K voters cast ballots in that race.
There’s a wave a comin…
