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COLUMBUS, Ohio (CGE) - With ten Super Tuesday primaries less than a month away, foreigners are coming to the state. No, not the ones Ohio Gov. John Kasich always jokes about coming from Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Michigan to take Buckeye jobs, but the four Republican candidates who will battle each other in Ohio's March 6 primary to see which one goes up against President Barack Obama in the fall.
In Rasmussen Reports’ first Election 2012 look at the key battleground state of Ohio, released Thursday, President Obama is running slightly ahead of Mitt Romney and dead even with Rick Santorum.
The new telephone survey of 500 Likely Voters in Ohio, conducted on February 8, finds Obama earning 45 percent to Romney’s 41 percent. Ten percent (10%) like some other candidate in the race, and four percent (4%) remain undecided, it said.
On March 6, Buckeye GOPers will select from Mr. Romney, a candidate the media has dubbed the eventual winner, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, a candidate voters in four states so far has made their number one pick, former Georgia Congressman and U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has one win, in South Carolina, to his credit and Ron Paul, a Texas Congressman who has yet to win a race.
Gingrich campaigned two days this week in Ohio. Santorum and Romney are scheduled to be at Republican Lincoln Day fundraisers in Northeast Ohio next week. Ron Paul, reports say, has not come to or announced plans to come to Ohio.
Nationally, Romney is at 34 percent, Gingrich 27 percent, Santorum 18 percent, Paul 11 percent.
In a potential Election 2012 matchup, President Obama attracts 48 percent of the vote and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney 42 percent, according to Rasmussen.
Winning Ohio wins the White House
President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic ticket who beat the ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin four years ago by 51-48, would clearly love to put Ohio in his win column again this year. Scenarios exist for him to win without Ohio, but winning it gives him a straighter road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than the detour he would otherwise have to take.
Republicans, who thought when they swept all statewide offices just two years ago that Ohio would be ripe for their candidate this year, may find new hurdles to surmount now that economic and job numbers are on the mend, which naturally work to the President's advantage.
But the news Thursday that the 4-week moving average of jobless claims is at the lowest level since May 2008, which was reflected in the weekly employment numbers - down 15,000 from the previous week to 358,000 this week - takes some of the ring out of the bell that Obama is crashing the economy and only a Republican can put it back.
In 1960, Richard Nixon won Ohio but John Kennedy won the White House. To win the White House, a candidate needs to win a battleground state like Ohio, which even after the 2010 Census reduced its Electoral College votes from 20 to 18, still represents a big win.
Normally, the party that controls the offices of governor and secretary of state can better maneuver an election outcome its way than the party that doesn't control those offices. Republilcans again control these offices, but based on the dive Ohio's go-go CEO Gov. Kasich has taken in the polls, based on many factors but the most prominent one being the drubbing he took last year on a bill he backed that attacked unions that voters rejected, he likely won't be the firewall he said he would be to a second term for Obama when he ran in 2010.
A former Congressman, Wall Street banker with Lehman Brothers and Fox TV host, Kasich's brash and confrontive style is clearly wearing thin with Ohioans, who in another recent poll show he one of if not the most unpopular governors in the nation. Ohio media widely panned as rambling and unfocused his scatter-shot State of the State speech Tuesday that ran over 13,000 words and lasted for about 80 minutes.
Rasmussen Reports says its margin of sampling error is +/- 4.5 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.
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