[yongin]

What happened in OH is reflective of what happened in the whole country. The backlash against the GOP. Thanks to Taft and Bush, plenty of decent conservatives were shot down at the polls. The fact that Portman and Kaisch are competitive means the GOP isn’t dead yet.

Kaisch and Portman winning in 2010 could signify the possibly of defeating Obama in 2012. In many respects, Strickland is like Obama. Strickland campaigned as a candidate for change. He bashed Taft and promised to make OH better. Although he didn’t say how he would do it. The outcome of the OH Governor race could give a clue of how 2012 might turn out.

[LS]

With one big exception: to my knowledge, Strickland never had the youth vote locked up. Blackwell, also, was not supported by the state GOP as they thought he was a lost cause. Part of that was bias against a conservative, part was polling that became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many house races (Steve Chabot's for ex.) were pretty close and had anyone but Obama been running, we would have won two or three of those.