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Fearless predictions ahead. Proceed at your own risk
By Steve Hoffman
Beacon Journal editorial writer
Published on Thursday, Oct 30, 2008
After Election Day, everyone will be a political genius, confidently asserting they saw it all coming, whatever it turns out to be. With less than a week to go before votes are counted, here are my fearless predictions:
• Barack Obama will win Ohio by 5 percentage points, the state's 20 electoral votes proving important but not decisive to his Electoral College majority. The Ohio win will be better than George W. Bush's win over Al Gore in 2000 (by 4 percentage points) but not quite as large as Bill Clinton's victory over Bob Dole in 1996 (by 6 percentage points.)
The margin will be sufficient to stop legal challenges from the McCain campaign, despite an obsession by Ohio Republicans about voter fraud. As J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's former secretary of state, would say, the Ohio presidential results will be ''outside the margin of litigation.''
The win for Obama will mark the beginning of the end of Bush adviser Karl Rove's strategy of splitting the electorate, with Republicans eking out narrow but sustainable victories by expanding, and then holding, their base. Divisions in Ohio will remain, but the lines will get blurrier, with more room in the middle for compromise.
• As usual, few U.S. House seats will change hands. Almost all the action in congressional races in Ohio will be concentrated in contests for open seats, among them the 16th U.S. House District in Northeast Ohio, where Republican Ralph Regula is retiring.
There, John Boccieri, a state senator from Alliance, will be carried to victory, a Democratic tide washing over Republican Kirk Schuring, a state senator from Jackson Township. Once in office, Democrat Boccieri will struggle to find his footing after conducting a shallow and misleading campaign.
• The Ohio House, now Republican (53 to 46), will have a Democratic majority in January, but a slim one. That will help Democrat Ted Strickland as the Ohio governor confronts a difficult stretch before re-election in 2010. Strickland will face increasing pressure to cut the budget, while crafting a promised plan to reform school funding.
The Senate, Republican since the 1984 elections, will remain so, but the current 21-12 margin will tighten.
• Voters will narrowly defeat Issue 6, a proposed constitutional amendment to establish a casino-gambling monopoly at a single site, near Wilmington. But the rejection, marking the fourth try by gambling interests in 18 years, will not put the issue to rest. Ironically, major spending on television ads against Issue 6 by a rival casino operator, excluded under the issue's language, will contribute to the defeat. That provides a signal that interest in cracking the gambling market in Ohio remains strong.
Ohioans will vote ''yes'' on another high-profile statewide issue, Issue 5, to keep a new payday lending law that dramatically lowers annual interest rates to 28 percent from 391 percent. That will come despite an amazingly deceptive advertising campaign that attempts to frame a ''no'' vote as preserving jobs, with no reference at all to payday lending or the industry's outrageous interest rates.
• In Summit County races, Republicans will have a difficult time except in judicial races, which are technically nonpartisan. An internal fight for leadership didn't help matters for local Republicans. Then the economy tanked. Alex Arshinkoff, the local GOP chairman, will face a substantial rebuilding effort.
• Issue 8 on the Akron municipal ballot, Mayor Don Plusquellic's scholarship plan, will fall victim to a fog of misleading criticism. But the Akron Scholarship Plan will be back, modified on at least two key fronts: a requirement that scholarship recipients pay the equivalent of the city's income tax for as long as 30 years if they live and work outside the city will be dropped. Scholarship opportunities will be expanded to other public universities instead of being limited to the University of Akron and trade and technical schools within the city.
An alternative financing mechanism will be considered, but the scholarship plan won't proceed based solely on private donations. There isn't enough private money in town.
• Local tax issues, especially school levies, will have an especially hard time as taxpayers face a tight squeeze on their own budgets. Local government leaders will be forced to think about consolidating, at least to the point of sharing services, if not outright merger.
Voters will be forced to rethink the real value of having so many overlapping units of local government. Columbus and Washington will not provide any bailouts.
Hoffman is a Beacon Journal editorial writer. He can be reached at 330-996-3740 or e-mailed at slhoffman@thebeaconjournal.com.
After Election Day, everyone will be a political genius, confidently asserting they saw it all coming, whatever it turns out to be. With less than a week to go before votes are counted, here are my fearless predictions:
Get the full article here.
Comments
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Posted 09:15 AM, 11/01/2008
Pretty much sums up why I canceled my subscription to the ABJ. No supporting socialist nonsense with my hard earned money any longer.
Posted 03:42 PM, 11/02/2008
Uh, "Jon", WHAT are you talking about? What in this column endorses any particular outcome (with the possible exception of Issues 5 and 8)? Criticism of campaign tactics is the primary focus on Issue 5, while Issue 8 does seem to get an endorsement from Mr. Hoffman.
Other than that, this column simply reports on what's likely to happen on Tuesday (these were presented as "fearless predictions, after all!).